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.
