MIA MARTIN WRITES – A Japanese artist has pleaded not guilty to obscenity charges for allegedly selling 3D images of her vagina. Megumi Igarashi, 43, doesn’t deny she distributed the material, but in the trial that got underway this week insisted it’s not obscene. Instead, Igarashi, aka Rokudenashiko (“good for…
MIA MARTIN WRITES – ArtReview’s “Most Powerful Artist in the World,” Ai Weiwei was at one point hand-selected by the Chinese government to design the Beijing Olympics Bird’s Nest Stadium. Now, Weiwei has been thrown in jail by his own government and currently has his passport confiscated. The Chinese government…
MIA MARTIN WRITES – When I first met Eriko Lee Katayama last spring she was a classmate of mine in Professor Plate’s Introduction to Media and Politics of Asia. At the time, I was unaware of the details that make her a one-of-a-kind competitor for this year’s Miss Asia USA…
MIA MARTIN WRITES – A picture is worth a thousand words. For modern Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, those thousand words represented two major political issues: poverty and inequality.
