SOCIÉTÉ

Sean Raspet is a 38-year-old conceptual artist in Detroit who used to work with hair gel. These days, his material of choice is even more unconventional. He has literally stripped his practice down to the molecular level, as he considers the role of art in an age dominated by global capitalism, environmental concerns and quantum leaps in technology.LINEBREAKHis first Hong Kong solo exhibition is called “New Molecules and Stem Cell Retinoid Screen”, a literal description of the two works he has brought to Empty Gallery’s minimally lit space. Read more on South China Morning Post.LINEBREAK

Read in French in La Gaîté Lyrique Magazine.LINEBREAK

Raspet is an artist; flavor and fragrance chemist; and cofounder of the algae-based food company nonfood. He did not primarily train as a scientist, but developed a visceral interest in chemicals, and in the chemistry and materiality underlying the built environment and the economy at large, as a result of looking into the material conditions of our present times. Read more on Mousse Magazine. LINEBREAK

“Kaspar Müller: Allegiance & Oblivion” is on view at Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Netherlands, through Sunday, June 30. The survey, curated by Roos Gortzak, brings together work made over the past decade and is the Swiss artist’s first institutional show in the Netherlands. See more on ARTNEWS.LINEBREAK

Contemporary works still dominate, though, and Jetzer highlights the youngest artist in his show, Bunny Rogers (born 1990), who brings a new series of 15 computer-generated self-portraits that explore the ambivalent reactions to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre incorporating the artist’s discovery of a teenage subculture that obsesses about the shooters (Société gallery). Read more on Financial Times.LINEBREAK

At first, it seemed like purely a provocative stunt: At Frieze New York in 2016, the gallery Société had a solo booth by the artist Sean Raspet consisting of fridges filled with Soylent, which the dealers were giving out for free. But as is often the case with Société, there was more than met the eye. Raspet was hired by Soylent to create a new flavor that would be “abstract” in the way that his edible and smellable work usually is—making the meal replacement drink both the medium and message for the artist. Gallery founder Daniel Wichelhaus has built one of Berlin’s most exciting art spaces by pushing his artists to expand their platforms. Read more on Artsy.LINEBREAK

Société’s Unlimited presentation is dedicated to an installation by Cultured 2017 Young Artist Bunny Rogers, “Self-portrait as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc.” For years, the artist has made work about the 1999 Columbine shooting. Here, she continues that series with 15 self-portraits that combine her own presence with that of Joan of Arc. Read more on Cultured.LINEBREAK

Berlin-based Société Gallery has chosen to focus its presentation on works that explore the impact of digital life on society. Bunny Rogers’s Neopets, sculptures of digital animal companions, asks us to consider the divide between real life and cyber life. Read more on AD.LINEBREAK

Mit der US-Künstlerin Trisha Baga wird ein gefragter Millennial präsentiert. Die New Yorkerin steuert zur Schau Keramiken in Form eines Toasters oder eines Mikroskops, Ölfarben auf Wackelbildern und ein 3D-Video bei. Read more in German on der Standard.LINEBREAK

There was “Electromagnetic Brainology” by Lu Yang, a dizzying installation of godlike animated figures and “Expected Departure,” by Leung Mee Ping, featuring X-rays of dozens of airline sick bags the artist had collected over years of travel. (…) Read more on The New York Times.LINEBREAK

Lu Yang‘s disorientating and fantastical visions at Société‘s booth also drew crowds who seemed more intent on new discoveries than the standard blue chip material that this year’s fair calendar has supplied the already crowded art world circuit since the start of the year. Read more on Artvisor.LINEBREAK

Société presents a series of works that question the semiotics and cultural symbolism of contemporary objects in the exhibition Why Always Me? by Swiss artist Kaspar Müller. Müller investigates the tropes and myths that define modern culture with a display of motifs that range from kitsch to highly stylised. Read more on Sleek.LINEBREAK

Bunny Rogers’s practice depicts the impossibility of pure innocence. It concerns topics ranging from school shootings to the agency of nonhuman animals, the sexualization of children, and the romanticization of dying young. This essay traces the persistence of these themes through her expansive body of work, focusing on her deployment of cute objects as both material and metaphor. Read the full essay by Emily Watlington on Mousse Magazine.LINEBREAK

As with the sculptural elements of Roger’ exhibition, the smell of the Régime collaboration evokes moist unearthing; used to mark a space, it is the cool, muted dredges of a satin slipper run amuck on a zombie’s muddied twinkle toes. Read full interview on Fragrantica’s website.LINEBREAK

Im Sektor für Entdeckungen jüngerer Positionen präsentiert Wichelhaus die 1984 in Schanghai geborene Multimediakünstlerin Lu Yang mit der halluzinogen-parodistischen Inszenierung „Cyber Altar“ aus einer Fünf-Kanal-Videoarbeit und vier Leuchtkästen. Read in German on Der Tagesspiegel.LINEBREAK

Dazzling electric blazes, Manga dream girls, rainbow iridescent walls and forms closing in from every direction—step into Shanghai artist Lu Yang’s illusion cube and enter a dimension of her own making. Read more on Cultured.LINEBREAK

If you’re yearning for sensory overload, head directly to Société’s solo presentation of the young Chinese artist Lu Yang. For the fair, Lu created four films (all 2019) featuring four different characters—half-robots, half-gods—which play on elevated screens, while lightboxes in the same style hang on the walls. Read more on Artsy.LINEBREAK

“I feel like I have a soul now,” Bunny Rogers said on the phone from Frankfurt, days after the opening of her exhibition Pectus Excavatum at the Museum für Moderne Kunst. Following her 2017 Whitney solo exhibition Brig Und Ladder, which served to complete a trilogy of installations about the Columbine High School massacre, the American-born artist retreated into a year-long hermitage. Read more on Interview.LINEBREAK