35 Claver Place

Oil on linen, 2005, 52x38 inches

PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Alexa Favata, Associate Director
favata@arts.usf.edu
Tel: 813-974-4133

Exhibition: Dragon Veins
January 13 through March 11

Symposium: January 13, 10:00am-Noon
Phyllis Marshall Center, Room 270; Free, limited seating.

Idiosyncratic Hybrids: Traditional East Asian Art and Contemporary Painting
Artists Frances Barth, David Brody, Emily Cheng, Zhang Hongtu, and special guest Lilly Wei; curators Elisabeth Condon, Mernet Larsen and respondents Paula Lee and Daphne Rosenzweig.

Opening Reception/Meet the artists: January 13, 7:00-9:00pm. Music provided by otolathe.

Dragon Veins: The USF Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Dragon Veins, an exhibition that surveys a variety of ways in which traditional Asian art informs contemporary painting, from January 13 through March 11.

In traditional Chinese art, dragon veins are the invisible threads or connectives which hold a painting together. As an exhibition title, it offers a metaphor for the underlying connections, sometimes visible, sometimes less so, between Asian traditions and various contemporary painting practices. The featured artists idiosyncratically mine such traditions as kazari, bunraku, ukiyo-e, Buddhism, Chinese clouds and literati theory, intermixing them with Modernist conceptualism, geological maps, hip-hop and pop culture, body awareness, and California landscape. Infusing painting, science, political and cultural discourses with the signs, symbols, and structures of East Asian artistic traditions, the artists, Asian and non-Asian, adapt the differentiated past within an inclusive, hybrid present.

The twelve-featured artists are Frances Barth, David Brody, iona rozeal brown, Emily Cheng, Elisabeth Condon, Chie Fueki, Yun-Fei Ji, Susanne Kuhn, Mernet Larsen, Sang Nam Lee, Takashi Murakami and Zhang Hongtu. The exhibition also includes a new wall painting by David Brody, commissioned by USFCAM.

A 64-page color catalogue (ISBN 1-879293-21-8) with essay by Lilly Wei will be available January 13, 2006.

Dragon Veins was organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum | Institute for Research in Art. Guest curated by Mernet Larsen and Elisabeth Condon. Sponsored by: Central Florida Eurocars. The USFCAM is recognized by the State of Florida as a major cultural institution and received funding though the Florida Department of State, Florida Arts Council and the Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council and is accredited by the American Association of Museums. The exhibition is made possible by members and corporate sponsors of the Institute for Research in Art.

Visual images available upon request; please contact Don Fuller, USFCAM New Media Curator

For more information please call 813-974-4133 during business hours or visit our website at www.usfcam.usf.edu