Bridge

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The Chicago-based Bridge Art Fair, formerly called Nova, came to New York for the first time this year. Fifty-seven international galleries set up shop in Chelsea's block-long Waterfront building (previously home to the Tunnel nightclub). Sixty percent of the invited galleries came from Asia, marking the first of Bridge's "Focus" series and capitalizing on the wave of Asian art in auctions, fairs, biennials, and museum and gallery exhibitions.

Ark Galerie (Jakarta) showed large, politically themed embroideries, paintings and sculptures of human/monster/robot hybrids by Eko Nugroho. At Gallery Terra (Tokyo), Haruko Gensho's mixed-medium portrait of a young girl had a chain connecting a flower in the girl's hair to a doorknob on the other side of the wall, with four sparkly glass crystals scattered on the floor. A huge painting by Zhong Biao--at nearly 10 by 13 feet, it is Zhong's largest single-canvas work to date--dominated ChinaSquare's booth (New York and Beijing). Titled The Sky of Us--8, it depicts an oversize man sleeping on a couch, his bare feet pushed into the foreground; to his left, a group of tourists walks past a framed black-and-white painting of a cloudy sky. Singapore's iPreciation showed Cheung Yee's bronze sculpture based on fortune-telling tortoise shells, and large, gloomy paintings of rain-blurred city streets by Ye Jian Qing.

Zurich's Kashya Hildebrand showed Jeffrey Aaronson's "Maybe It's You" series. He hung large-scale photos of people who had posted personals on Craigslist and provided headphones with recordings of them reading their ads--one woman wants to be spoiled, a man promises to be the decision maker and to pay for dinner, another woman sadly explains how "different it is for nice ladies on here." Hugo Lugo, at Alfredo Ginocchio Arte Internacional (Mexico City), approaches loneliness differently. Two large canvases, painted to look like sheets of notebook paper, show solitary men in forests--one bangs cymbals while looking up at birds scattered in the trees, while the other sits on a suitcase with his chin in his hands, an airplane nose-diving in front of him.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning