Pinpin Co, a Chinese artist raised in Japan, creates intricately detailed and somewhat disturbing skin drawings. Using just a 0.38mm gel ink pen, Pinpin spends about 5 hours on each subject, understanding them as human beings and creating an ephemeral artwork that often captures physical or mental scars that the subject possesses. “It often becomes a therapeutic process,” she says in an interview, describing how the relationship between her subjects can take on that of doctor and patient. It’s now wonder that her drawings often take on a grotesqueness that resembles blood veins.
Pinpin also divulges into how her art can be a healing process for herself too. She recently decided to draw on her father, who she had lived apart from her whole life. “Coming in contact with a stranger’s skin and a family member’s skin are two completely different experiences,” she says. During the span of 1 month, Pinpin commuted to Aomori to visit her father, slowly re-establishing a relationship, which resulted in what is perhaps one of her most compelling images.
Pinpin’s Ink on Skin series is on display at BankART Studio NYK in Yokohama from July 6 – July 26, 2012.
ROBERT LONGO b. 1953 Untitled (Men in Cities), 1984
charcoal, graphite and ink on paper
49 1/2 x 37 3/4 in. (125.7 x 95.9 cm)
Signed and dated “Robert Longo 84” lower right.
Estimate $100,000-150,000
“Isolated in the white blankness of their uniform background, Longo’s drawings of urban men display a formal beauty that disguises their unsettling content. The descriptions of men and women are ambiguous — we will never learn whether it a dance of joy or the gestures of infantile grief; whether it is the spinning fall of the victim or of the assassin, which Longo has singled out to be locked into visual performance…In his earlier work, Longo used to derive his images from movie stills, but at present, he creates his own sources. He photographs his friends in countless poses, carefully screens the images for their dynamic content, and then enlarges those he selects into drawings, Clad in the black armor of formal business suits, Longo’s figures become anonymous as people. They become personifications of universal feelings and anxieties, pathetic in their dehumanization, objects in the hands of their creator.”
– C. Kotik, Figures, Forms and Expressions, Albright/CEPA, 1981
© Art Projects International
Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International, New York
