Bazaar Art Jakarta 2015 will see the debut of artist Ashley Bickerton’s latest sculpture work. For the past two years, his Junk Anthropologies painting series depicting silver-coated Balinese women has been a major talking point in the South East Asian contemporary art scene. Bickerton, the prodigal son of New York’s East Village, focuses his subject matter primarily on global pop culture and sharp juxtapositions of Eastern and Western art aesthetics. Now, for the first time, one of his iconic Balinese women will be shown as a full life-sized aluminum sculpture titled Wahine-Pa’ina, intricately crafted by the artist with a team of local artisans at the Yogya Art Lab (YAL).
Bickerton is a unique presence in Contemporary Art today. There are very few Americans of his generation that are living out of America and contributing to the dialogue of geopolitics and aesthetic ideals. The sculpture figure is goddess-like, reminiscent of classical Western ideals however Wahine-Pa’ina accentuates the Polynesian aesthetic instead.
The artist idolizes the form and essence of the East Asian woman through his own artistic lens, where the perfected female body is simultaneously demure, aggressive and undeniably beautiful. The sculpture stands at over two meters, with a bold smile painted on her lips in the style of pop-art to entice viewers. This unique work is the response of the American artist from over twenty years of admiring the aesthetics of beauty written into the culture of the East, cleverly rendering his opinion on the state of global pop art and its western-dominated aesthetics: a perspective rarely seen elsewhere in the contemporary art world.
Wahine-Pa’ina will debut from 27 – 30 August 2015 at Bazaar Art Jakarta, which will be held at the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom in Pacific Place.
