East West Bank Art Terrace
The East West Bank Art Terrace is an outdoor platform for contemporary art featuring thought-provoking works by both emerging and world-renowned artists.
Ala Ebtekar, Luminous Ground
For Luminous Ground (2018/2020), commissioned by the Asian Art Museum, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, active San Francisco and Tehran) imprinted handmade clay tiles with a vast image of the cosmos. Luminous Ground suggests a contemporary nod to the polychrome tiles used in traditional Persian architecture to represent the heavens. Instead of abstract geometric shapes, Ebtekar’s tiles display a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, giving us a glimpse not just of the far-off heavens, but back billions of years into the history of the universe.
Kongkee, Taotie
Taotie (2022), a neon sculpture by Kongkee (b. 1977, active Hong Kong and Vancouver), was a much-photographed crowd favorite in the artist’s 2022 Warring States Cyberpunk exhibition. The work’s title refers to aphorisms warning against vanity, pride, and other follies; such pictographic messages were often inscribed on the faces of ancient Chinese bronze vessels. Rendered in electric pink neon, Kongkee’s sculpture reimagines these motifs at a dramatic scale and updates them to include contemporary references, illuminating their continued relevance in the age of social media.
Pinaree Sanpitak, Breast Stupa Topiary
Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s (b. 1961) Breast Stupa Topiary (2013/2019) explores the morphology of the stupa — the Buddhist commemorative monument that, like Buddhism itself, has taken different forms throughout Asia and around the world. Sanpitak uses curvilinear lines executed in the industrial material of polished stainless steel to define the space of the stupa as a form that also echoes the female breast. The breast is a signature recurring theme in her work and a means of investigating the human body’s “tangible and intangible context.” For her, the coexistence of body and soul is well expressed in the Thai concept of rang-gai, in which the body is a compound of the physical and the spiritual.
Press:
East West Bank Art Terrace in SF Chronicle
