Pin Kong 2009

Curator: Arsen Savadov’s "Pin Kong," painted in 2009, really throws you into a swirling dreamscape, doesn’t it? Editor: It’s chaotic. A massive figure looming over a lit-up cityscape. The scale is unsettling, almost as if she’s some discarded doll found amongst skyscrapers, cheap props, and...wait, are those dolphins jumping through burning hoops? The material realities clash horribly with the intended visual. Curator: Exactly! Savadov often juxtaposes the surreal with the very real, almost as a challenge. This is oil paint, though applied with an almost childish whimsy, right? I think he is after this playful yet disturbing effect by making it feel handmade. I am wondering what you think it communicates in terms of labor? Is it the artist himself, perhaps as toying with a creation? Editor: He's certainly toying with tropes. He's almost playing with us. The layering is not particularly sophisticated or intricate. With all of those dolphins and the cityscape rendered with clear light sources, there is little left to chance. I get that it feels unsettling—that’s absolutely what it is designed to do through pure over-production and pastiche, but the magic feels... staged. Curator: But isn't there a magic to the staging itself? Think of the theatricality! She is an outsider amidst all of the artificial spectacle, lost within our own constructed dreams of progress and escape. I feel there’s a deep longing within her. What’s she gazing at out there, beyond the blinking skyline? Editor: It seems he wants to show how we've commodified even the natural world. These images almost mirror advertisements of a product. You point out the theatricality as spectacle, but if we follow that notion of theatricality—does this oil paint’s composition expose more deeply, for instance, the labor behind creating this supposedly spontaneous spectacle? Curator: Hmmm… it’s made me think about artifice in a totally fresh way. Maybe the real heart of the piece is recognizing the loneliness inherent in these manufactured paradises, even as we are compelled towards it and consume it, always yearning. Editor: Perhaps in considering the relationship between raw materiality, consumer spectacle and alienated subject, it invites to reflect on art itself as labor as a whole!