Altered Space

This series of Chinese girl painting is from Vladimir Tretchikoff, he used the great contrast between green skin and red lips, in chinese culture, green and red are very popular and corny match, most of people regard it as very old-fashion and discordant color match. However, i think, in europeans' eyes, people consider green and red as a very strong and splendid color match, the painting on the right, it shows very strong passion and floating emotion like the fire in grass.

However, in Vladimire Tretchikoff painting, These Chinese girl looks beautiful and calm, they green skin make them 'dignified' and the red lips make them graceful and a little bit flighty. I think the artist quiet understand the culture of China, we don' like extreme  thing, i love the beauty which is 'middle' and 'moderatamente'. From these painting, i can see the combination between the western and Chinese. 

And from my opinion, 'color' is not  2-dimension, different colors can form different layers and 'space', for example, the darker the color is, the deeper layer it is, so in a painting, there is always some space which is formed by color. in these painting, the background of the girls is darker then the color of the girl, it makes the girl really stands out and quiet like the feeling for space of background which is deep and stately.

"Blue and white pottery covers a wide range of white pottery and porcelain decorated under the glaze with a blue pigment, generally cobalt oxide. The decoration is commonly applied by hand, originally by brush painting, but nowadays by stencilling or by transfer-printing, though other methods of application have also been used.

The plate shown in the illustration is decorated with the famous willow pattern and was made by Royal Stafford; a factory in the English county of Staffordshire. Such is the persistence of the willow pattern that it is difficult to date the piece shown with any precision; it is possibly quite recent but similar wares have been produced by English factories in huge numbers over long periods and are still being made today. The willow pattern, said to tell the sad story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, was an entirely European design, though one that was strongly influenced in style by design features borrowed from Chinese export porcelains of the 18th Century. The willow pattern was, in turn, copied by Chinese potters, but with the decoration hand painted rather than transfer-printed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_white_pottery

For altered spaces, i squeeze my hand to make different and altered space in my hand.

For these painting, the artist LeiLan used claborate-style painting to give smooth curves and harmonious color in Chinese style. So in these paintings, the artist choose very similar color between the skin and the background, to make the 'space' of the painting looks flat now, which is feature of Chinese painting. In traditional Chinese painting, we don't really shows the object in very 3D way, we would like to give the feeling and mien of the object in flat way. And also, the pale yellow color is very near to the color of our skin.

So in  this painting from Dali, i the 'space' form by these objects are always changing because we can recognise that there is no gravity in this painting, in that case, the stuff and space inside is unstable. And i quite like the contrast between the crowed beach (which has goose, women, books,the platform) and the very wide blue sea. What's more, he used some red on the women and goose body to stand them out from a dull tone color of environment and background.

In a work that was banned from exhibition in both Belgium and Poland, Czech artist David Cerny created an image of Saddam Hussein bound and suspended in formaldehyde. Beyond the actively political suppression of the work, because, as one Belgian mayor said, "that certain population groups would find the work too provocative," Cerny's piece raises questions of how history is perceived. Do we simply let the cultural narrative write itself? Do the victors always get the last word? Is the toppling of tyranny frozen in stasis? In terms of Saddam's narrative in the West, history appears to be the history of domination. He's preserved and yet still captive and in dialogue with the audience. The was piece was in direct response to the 1991 Damien Hirst work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.