Art is culture; Art is discovery

The open windows in a cozy cabin like a mirror, reflecting those art scenes… 

I was stuck in traffic, I was in the warmer climes, my toes sunk into the soft beach. 

Art has the unique ability to inspire, transform and connect us all. Artists create beauty, visualize dreams and give us new ways of thinking. The aesthetic sensibility and juxtaposition take me to return Miami Art Week 2024. This time around, I have a better understanding of art and life itself. 

Discovering rising artists creating boundary pushing works 

One of the highlight artworks to me at the New Art Dealers Alliance Fair (NADA) was London-based Annka Kultys Gallery’s presentation of Swedish conceptual artist Jonas Lund, who was selling work that didn’t even exist. Termed “Jonas Lund Token (JLT) Futures”, it builds on the Jonas Lund Token (JLT) project initiated in 2018 by the artist, which serves as a distributed and decentralized stewardship of his creative practice.

I looked closer to see his “Token Futures”, with each document indexing a unique agreement between artist and collector; details including the materials, dimensions, and uniqueness of the edition are clearly delineated. Its inspiration was from the artist, who as a new father, wants to spend more time with his baby and be a present dad. On the Future Contract expiry date, the Contract transforms into a physical Jonas Lund artwork, allowing you to invest in the artist’s career and take a risk on his rising value, while also giving him the opportunity to be present for his family. The conceptual works delicately balanced humor and seriousness in its exploration of the benefits and potential downsides of new advances.  

A visual adventure celebrating each part with the tiniest details captivating me was TD Bank curated sector Gisela Projects, featuring artist Marina Sader. At first glance, its juxtaposition appears in routine and pastime, as games to picnics and everyday life blends in a variety of ways; then the patterns, repetitions and visual logic are shown on plants that grow on playing cards and on small people that share space with colorful chess pieces on board games and fountain. 

Artist Marina Sader’s painting “Castle, 2023” incorporates the mysteries that inhabit the predictability of geometry. I could image every castle of cards must be knocked down at the end, then to evocate rebuilding, similar to balancing fragility and resilience in unpredictable forms.

Cultural translation and juxtaposition in artistic practices 

This is my second Basel. This year’s edition highlights fresh perspectives with new leadership and an influx of first-time exhibitors, shaping a deeper culture exchange through modern master and experimental contemporary pieces in innovative ways. Compared to last year, I was more obsessed with large-scale projects in the Meridians sector. 

My eyes were fixed in front of a tropical hand-embroidered tapestry of love, nature and identity – La Familia en el Alegre Verdor (2013-2019), beautifully intertwines magical realism with contemporary family values by Argentinian artists duo Chiachio & Giannone presented by Ruth Benzacar gallery. 

I immersed myself in the tapestry, observing each detail of it, from left to right, down to up, repeatedly, with a new perspective and sense. The artists bring the tapestry traditions of Europe but create something new inspired by the lush South American jungle, full of tropical creatures adorned with colorful necklaces and other human ornaments. At the same time, they bring family portrait wearable influenced by native culture to the center. It adds a degree of warmth, depth and connection with creativity, timeless and culture, inviting me to reflect on the harmony between humanity and nature. 

One standout moment occurred in the same space, a four-meter-high large white whirlpool of “Goya” crafted by American sculptor Alice Aycock, like an unannounced gust of wind, sharply juxtaposed by the nearly six-meter-tall stillness figure, clad in a jester’s blue diamond-patterned outfit, rests atop a pedestal, created by Paris-born, Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Anastasia Bay. 

This juxtaposition is shifting from the mobility to stillness, chaos to peace, echoing the myth and reality in the contemporary landscape. 

Another highlight of large-scale works was “Seeding”, a wooden sculpture about 6.5 feet long, painted in acrylic, by the Japanese artist Yuichi Hirako. A color-splashed smorgasbord of birds, plants, animals, and a few humanlike and treelike images sit aboard a boat, seemingly bound for somewhere. 

I discovered Hirako’s drawings and paintings feature figures with tree for heads that sprout deer antlers from its sides, the surroundings overgrown with plants, conveying the relationship between humans and nature, between ideas of the wild and the cultivated, of the rational and the non-rational, juxtaposed of art-historical and cultural references from both the West and East.

I was invited to a stunning painting of reflection on life’s journey – Pathways (2024), a masterful interplay of ink, paint, plaster and collaged posters sourced from the artist Jose Parla, who was raised between the mainland United States and Puerto Rico, evoking themes of immigration, adaptation through expressive gestures and abstract marks that resonate with historical and geographical narratives.

I caught a glimpse of his first solo museum exhibition “Homecoming” at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) too. I was transported to a diverse cultural world, to navigate the layered experiences in his bold and vulgar “rhythm”, connecting his Cuban-inspired records, of movement, freedom, hope, memories, in both old and new. 

I can’t take off my eyes from two still-life paintings of humble everyday objects in an American painter Wayne Thiebaud ‘s singular illustrative style – Hat and Tie, 1973 and Shopper, 2015/2020, his vibrant color, the piercing clarity of his light and the confidence of his brushstrokes, by way of his profound engagement with the history of art.

Obviously, his small objects sharply contrast with the grand gestures of Abstract Expressionism. It might be one reason that I am so obsessed with his humble objects among those pioneering artists. Now I spend time looking at his paintings again and they unfold like a motion picture, always inviting me to see his world ascend to a profound height. I think it is the essence of art and life. 

The sculpture Teresa Solar Abboud by artist and the gallery Travesia Cuatro is worth lingering. It is composed of slick, blade-like foam coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy and gray ceramic stump, reflecting fiction and materiality, appealing to a contemporary, fragmentary, and constantly moving subject. 

I also discovered some unfamiliar artists and their artworks at the fair, such as artist Alex Da Corte, Love is Radical, 2024 and Love is on the line, 2024 at booth Sadie Coles HQ London; Thoughts from the beach 2023 by artist Jeppe Hein (Fun fact: the sand in the pot was actually from Miami Beach) at Galleri Nicolai Wallner; On the shore ,2024 by Kelly Beeman at Perrotin Gallery, etc. 

Otherworldly and Delightful Designs 

Inside the fantastical world of the Haas Brothers, a Los Angeles-based creative duo led by twins Simon and Nikolai Haas, texture, color, and whimsy are fodder for objects that deftly blur the line between art and design, offering a deeply personal reflection on family. Each figure body is candy-colored glass and cartoonishly anthropomorphic, with bugged-out eyes on long stalks, eyelashes, lips, or a pair of breasts. It carries its own emotion: sleepy, libidinous, surprised etc. I always glimpse their ridiculous, hilarious, naughty, but heartfelt work, a testament to the artists’ inventive and whimsical inner visions and beyond. 

One of my admirable French designers and architects Charles Zana (AD100 2025)’s work “Chois Oak Two Lamp” displayed at Design Miami 2024 show, creating with an exclusive and modern mood that is a nod to classic French traditions. 

Designer Zana naturally uses his builder’s sense of scale and precise proportions in the furniture he designs and crafts. His unique and bespoke designs inherently evoke an aura of cultured sophistication and aesthete first, then the aesthete takes over with bold associations and elegant and fluidity lines, without being a prisoner to it. He imbues cultural objects with a sense of storytelling and animism within a space, he conveys a similar energy, whereby the resultant works can be seen as an homage. 

The edge of open-ended artistic experiment

An impressive solo exhibition was the rising Los Angeles-based painter Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths draws me in deeply, a free and energetic gestural style with rich texture and seriality and vivid colors integrated on canvas. She uses color almost like visual bait, my eyes traveled and got lost in her paintings, were drawn into the atmospheric spaces of her compositions before encountering a seemingly limitless number of associative openings, transforming between the macroscopic and the microscopic landscape. 

Art adventure continues… 

I discover it is beyond predicting. 

Sources of inspiration needn’t necessarily be the biggest names, but rather those which strike a chord on a personal level, whose aesthetic choices might open one’s eyes to new styles, colors, textures, structure, and even ways of displaying, or juxtaposing works of art and design from different periods. 

In essence, the intersection of culture, intellect, history, experience, and art became a blueprint for my entire way of life, my philosophy of collecting, and the basis for the way in which I understand and appreciate all areas of architecture and design, I believe, in terms of day to day life, the art of living well was an all-encompassing, far-reaching concept, extending far beyond inanimate spaces and objects, to art, education, manners and so forth.