mel chin

  • Unauthorized Collaboration

    Unauthorized Collaboration

    Unauthorized Collaborations

    Mel Chin with Unknown Artists

    2012 – ongoing

    A series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment

    These collages use formal portrait paintings discarded by their previous owners and found by Chin on eBay or in antique stores. Chin alters and reconfigures the original artist’s compositions to create surreal amalgams which contain subtle commentaries on class distinction, spousal abuse, sexual desire, and psychological disposition. As Chin says, these paintings have “lost their original family, been surgically altered, and brought into a new family of contemporary art.”

    Unauthorized Collaboration: Compleat Composure

    2013

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment.

    43 ½ x 33 ¼ inches (framed)

    With the world collapsing around her, she keeps it all under her thumb.

    Unauthorized Collaboration: Dominance and Affection

    2012

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment.

    44 1/2 x 37 ½ x 4 inches each (framed)

    Two 19th century portraits, with hands transposed, tell another story.


    Unauthorized Collaboration: Newton: Lawmaker

    2018

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment.

    35 x 30 inches (framed)

    A portrait of Sir Isaac Newton illustrates the laws of optics, gravity, and the third law of motion.


    Unauthorized Collaboration: She’s Beyond Him

    2018

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment. 37 x 32 ½ inches (framed)

    A pair of portraits are combined to suggest the psychological drama between a couple.


    Unauthorized Collaboration: The Other a.k.a Bad Romance

    2013

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

     

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment.

    2 works 23 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches each (framed)

    Three paintings are combined to suggest a romantic narrative.

    Unauthorized Collaboration: The Remorseful Physician

    2012

    One of a series of altered found paintings.

    oil on canvas, various support materials, PVA, wood, pigment.

    30 ½ x 24 ½ inches (framed)

    A figure folds down, out of the picture plane, and prompts a new narrative.

     

     

     

     

  • Unmoored

    Unmoored

    Unmoored

    2018

    Digital app for a mixed reality experience

    Exhibited in Times Square, NYC, from July 11th to September 5th, 2018

    Unmoored Movie

    Unmoored explores a potential future of melting ice caps and rising oceans filling Times Square. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft, Unmoored allows guests to explore a submerged Times Square in mixed reality, to use their mobile phones to access an augmented reality experience.

    Guests who look up in Times Square experience an incoming flotilla of boats of all kinds, making their way around existing buildings into the square — eventually creating a nautical traffic jam above. Boat age in the air; occasionally bumping into each other while waves break the silence of a surreal floating canopy of hulls. Apparitions appear, based on living species of plankton, and seem to seek connection to the human audience.

    Collaborators:

    Artist: Mel Chin

    Producer: Microsoft / Listen

    App Developer: Zengalt

    Digital Asset creation:

    Krista Albert, Justin Coo, Joe Gamble, Dallas Moore

    Some models were created by Marine Microalgae Research Associates LLC, using National Science Foundation funding (Biological Oceanography program grant OCE-1155663 awarded to Jeffrey W. Krause), and are therefore in the Public Domain.

    Sound:

    Kurt Feldman, Listen

    Scientific Research:

    Jeanette Yen, Dave Haffner

    Mel Chin Studio liaison and support:

    Amanda Wiles, Audrey Zhuoer Liu, Dallas Moore

    UNC Asheville digital asset prototypes:

    Forest Gamble, Zach Farber, Mario Zigante, Maddie Pesce, Sam Burke, Klesa Colgrove, Wes Stroupe

    Special thanks to Stanislav Bulavin of Zengalt and Sarah Ibrahim and Steve Milton of Listen

  • Gate of the New Gods

    Gate of the New Gods

    2018
    steel, polypropylene rope, basketball nets, basketballs, paint
    dimensions variable

    Basketball star LeBron James’ Los Angeles home was the target of a hate crime when the “N-word” was spray-painted across his front gate in May 2017.

    In Gate of the New Gods, an exact scale replication of the gate is combined with a colossal hand made vine of twisted rope, steel tendrils, and basketballs as grapes and leaves made of regulation white hoop netting.  It is a variable installation with the basketball-grape vine configured to any individual site.

    Gate of the New Gods acknowledges the impact of sports celebrities in American culture and the quasi god-like quality of LeBron James especially his public stance in the face of persistent racism. Responding to the attack on his home, LeBron James commented,

    “No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is tough. We got a long way to go for us as a society and for us as African Americans until we feel equal in America.”

    Chin would like this work to be considered a “kneel-down” to James, a triumphant arch of elements of LeBron’s sport above a gateway closed in defiant resistance to the challenges of equality.

    The gate is replicated in exact material and scale as the gate attacked in Los Angeles. As a permanent sentinel of steel, it is a work of art to be protected, never to be defaced again.

  • Wake

    2018

    Wood, steel, fiberglass, electronic and mechanical components, paint

    24H x 34W x 60L feet

    Exhibited in Times Square from July 11th to September 5th, 2018.

    Co-presented by Times Square Arts, No Longer Empty, Queens Museum

    Fabricated in partnership with University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA).

    Wake is a large-scale installation that evokes the hull of a ship crossed with the skeletal remains of a marine mammal. Parts of a shipwreck, modeled on the USS Nightingale, a nineteenth-century clipper ship, rise up from the plaza like the bleached bones of a massive beast. A 21-foot-tall carved sculpture of Jenny Lind, an opera star known as the “Swedish Nightingale,”  accurately derived from a figurehead of the singer that was once mounted on the prow of the Nightingale, leads the wreckage. Subtle animatronic motions allow her to slowly breathe and scan the sky.

    The physical construction of Wake took place at UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio and was an interdisciplinary collaboration between students, faculty, staff and community artists all under the direction of Mel Chin Studio.

    The artwork calls forth both the city’s triumphs and the complicated layers of its past. New York City has become a center of trade, commerce, finance, entertainment, and tourism, but also has a complex history that includes the shipping (by the USS Nightingale, among others) of guns and slaves that augmented this burgeoning city’s economy. The expanding past economies were a prologue to our current environmental dilemma. Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer from the same era, became the first American superstar when she toured the United States under the guidance of P.T. Barnum.

    The physical presence of Wake serves as an entry point into Unmoored (link to unmoored), an ambitious twenty-first-century mixed-reality public art project that is interactive for all ages and backgrounds.

    With Wake and Unmoored, Chin hopes to spark deeper personal investigations through digital devices and provoke enlightened stewardship of human actions in relation to global warming realities.