Composite of Matthew McKelway and Xin Wang

Pace Live

Art (History) and Technology

teamLab Walkthrough with Professor Matthew McKelway and Curatorial Director Xin Wang

Wednesday, Aug 7
6:30 – 8:30 PM EDT
510 West 25th Street
New York

EVENT DETAILS

Art (History) and Technology: teamLab Walkthrough with Professor Matthew McKelway and Curatorial Director Xin Wang
Wednesday, Aug 7
6:30 – 8:30 PM EDT
510 West 25th Street
New York

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From anime masterpieces by Studio Ghibli to viral video games such as Animal Crossing, references to Japanese art history often loom large yet go under recognized by the wider public.

The same can be said for teamLab—the international and interdisciplinary art collective primarily known for multi-sensorial installations that cohere art, science, technology, and the natural world—which often cites the Rinpa School’s lyrical approach to depictions of nature, genres of golden screens with cloud-shrouded cityscapes, and the work of 18th century “eccentric” artist Itō Jakuchū as inspirations for its digital spectacles. The collective’s foundational approach to engineering digital space foregrounds continuity and multiple vantage points—the “ultrasubjective space”—and is rooted in pre-modern Japanese art’s spatial logic.

To coincide with teamLab’s ongoing exhibition of its digital artwork The World of Irreversible Change at our New York gallery, Pace Live will present a walkthrough of the show with Matthew Philip McKelway—the Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University—who will be in conversation with Pace’s Curatorial Director Xin Wang. This event will center on the cultural and aesthetic nuances of Japanese art history that can be abundantly traced in teamLab’s iridescent screens.

The 30-minute walkthrough will be followed by a summer reception with light refreshments and sake.

Past

teamLab

The World of Irreversible Change

May 10 – Aug 8, 2024

New York

Matthew McKelway

Matthew McKelway is the Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University, specializing in the history of Japanese painting. His studies initially focused on urban representation in screen paintings of Kyoto (rakuchūrakugai zu) and the development of genre painting in early modern Japan, but have extended to Kano school painting, Rimpa, and individualist painters in eighteenth-century Kyoto. Some of these interests have converged in his essays on fan paintings, a subject of ongoing research. In his publications he has sought to understand Japanese paintings according to the physical and cultural contexts of their creators in order to discover the motivations, whether political, personal, literary, or philosophical, that drove them to make pictures in particular ways. He has been a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, University of Heidelberg, Seijō University, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2017 he was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. He also serves as the Director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art at Columbia University.

Xin Wang

Xin Wang is a New York-based art historian and Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery. Currently finishing a PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and received the Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant in 2021. Publications such as “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” have been widely circulated, translated and taught in university curriculums. An appointed faculty at Yale University’s MFA program in Photography since 2021, she served as the curator of the 4th art and technology themed biennial program—titled “To Your Eternity”—at Beijing’s Today Art Museum in fall 2023. Her upcoming publications include “Machine Envy” in the book Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic and NYU Shanghai), and “Dance as Socialist World-Building” in Afterall Journal (issue 57).