mel chin

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Recolecciones

    Recolecciones


    1997-2006
    mixed media (34 projects, over 200 objects)
    Artworks inserted into and around the infrastructure of the entire library

    Download a pdf guide to Recolecciones.

    From City of San Jose Public Art website:

    “Recolecciones” is the Spanish word for “recollections” — as in “memories.” It also means “harvests” or “gatherings.” The Latin root “LECT-” from which “recolecciones” derives means both “to gather” and “to read”: the ancient Romans seem to have envisioned reading as a process of gathering up scattered bits of information (the letters of the alphabet) and combining them into meaningful sequences. Readers are thus gatherers, harvesters. The library is a place where people come together to recall and reformulate their common heritage, a place designed for “re-col-lection,” that is, etymologically, “reading or harvesting again together.” The library’s public art collection is primarily designed to support this function.

    As part of the City’s ongoing commitment to the arts, the San José Public Art Program commissioned Mel Chin to create an artwork integrated into the new Martin Luther King Jr. Library. The 33 artworks, sited throughout the library, are designed to pay homage to the Library’s book collections. These sculptural insertions are designed to provoke your interest and curiosity, encouraging exploration and circulation throughout the Library. All of the artworks are sited to surprise you and add to your sense of mystery and wonder. They are site-specific, their adjacency imbuing the piece with additional layers of meaning.

    The artworks vary from large and dramatic statements to intimate and subtle insertions that may require numerous visits to discover. The Recolecciones artworks include functional installations such as chairs, tables and shelves, as well as wall paneling, sculptural ceilings, curious light projections, and more traditional formal sculpture. Some of the concepts are invested with a sense of humor, while others are designed to encourage contemplation.

    Conceptual Acknowledgments:

    Lead Team: Mel Chin, Haun Saussy, Robert Batchelor, and James Millar

    Other contributors to the conceptualizations of the artworks include over 100 San Jose community members: San Jose City and University librarians; students of San Jose State University and Cooper Union School of Art.

    San Jose State University Team: Wendy Angel, Ed Clapp, Francesca Davis, Russell Fan, Carolyn Gerstman, Janet Kang, David Kempkin, Rachel Lazo, Sheila Malone, Masako Miki, Inna Razumova, Rob Spain, Scott Trimball, John Zimmerman, Minging Zhou

    Cooper Union School of Art Team: Amelia Bauer, Alejandro Cardenas, Robert de Saint Phalle, Jorge Elbrecht, Nina Gallant, Aimee Genell, Francis Kerrigan, Sam Kusack, Alexander Monachino, Sarah Morgan, Michael Vahrenwald, Allyson Vieira, Donald Tobias Wong

    Concept contribution for specific artworks: Alejandro Cardenas, Amelia Bauer, Mary Rubin, Barron Brown, Russell Fan, Robert de Saint Phalle, Biblioteca Latinoamericana Community

    For more information, visit the Recolecciones archive on the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library website.

    details:

    Beethoven’s Inner Ear

    Fiction/Fiction

    Tectonic Tables

    Sour Grapes

    Wise Cracks

    Golden Gate

    Skeptacle

    Self Help Mirror

    Reflecting Pools (above: 8th floor, below: 3rd floor)

  • Untitled History

    Untitled History


    2005
    Indiana limestone, Texas limestone
    size variable

    A Sculpture in five parts for the City of Corpus Christi on the grounds of the new Arena and Convention Center and the Art Museum of South Texas.

    The sculpture consists of five traditional outdoor pedestals, each supporting a fragment of a figurative statue, which collectively add up to a complete body. Mounted as remains, they evoke Greco-Roman sculpture fragments found throughout the museum world. Taken as a whole, they represent a composite body of Texas history.
            – A dog looks up to what would have been a statue, its vanished
              master, a Karankawa Indian. The feet remain.
            – A 16th Century Spanish gauntlet.
            – The dress of an Irish immigrant from the1820’s.
            – A torso fragment of an African American cowboy.
            – An oil field worker’s helmet from the 1930’s.








  • The Seven Wonders

    The Seven Wonders


    1998
    laser-cut stainless steel panels, steel, lighting elements, masonry
    Permanent installation, Sesquicentennial Park, Houston, TX

    Seven 70 ft. towers feature 1,050 illustrations of “Heroic Themes” by Houston children born in the year of the 150th Anniversary of the founding of the city. The backlit, laser-cut, stainless steel stencils act as lanterns, projecting youthful imagination into the night and echoing the surrounding skyline by day.

  • Landmind

    Landmind


    1995
    stone, stainless steel, sandblasted glass
    For the City of New York, School Construction Authority Long Island City High School, Queens, New York

    Linking geography with human scientific and cultural invention, the artist uses topographies, contours, elevations and scale relationships to transform this sculpture into a “mine” of meanings. This project starts at the main entrance of Long Island City High School, with two large, triangular, granite ramps flanking the doorway that topographically depict two specific places – an overhead view of the city blocks in New York City that surround and include the school, and the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. These pieces, suggestive of middens, present the archeological pasts of the two regions as “areas of invention.” The capitals of the entrance columns are clad in three stainless steel relief panels representing prehistoric icons and their modern technological counterparts, such as a flint stone and an electric filament, or a prehistoric female icon and a Muybridge image.

    The ceremonial staircase in the lobby has a series of cast stainless steel finials, each representing a specific mountain range, and the glass panels along the railing are etched with ornamental patterns referring to the cultures related to each mountain finial. Each step has a direct scale relationship to the selected mountain range, so that one passes various places and cultures, from the Appalachians to the Himalayas, while ascending or descending the staircase.

    The artist seeks to provoke the students’ sense of investigation and discovery. The artworks can stand on their own, as aesthetic forms evoking “poetic” readings, but they are also configured to encourage further research. Interested students can find a key in the library prepared by the artist that deciphers these varied landscapes and iconographies using historical references