Invisible Asia

Manfred Menz

January 9 - February 6, 2010

Selected Works

AndrewShire Gallery is pleased to present Invisible Asia, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Manfred Menz whose recent photographs of internationally known Asian sites and monuments carry the memory of critical events in world history.

The exhibition will consist of thirteen digital photographs representing regions in Asia where international struggles have been memorialized through monuments and landmarks. Menz traveled to Japan and Korea to photograph these places. But upon returning to his studio in Los Angeles, he then digitally erased the primary memorial object from each photograph, leaving mostly natural surroundings. This gesture salvages trees and plants in order to highlight the adjoining emptiness where structures once stood. It signals the turning points of social and political conflict in world history, then eradicates them, placing the viewer in a more tolerable landscape devoid of buildings and other cultural evidence.

Menz creates vital places where the vastness of nature questions one’s ability to fully absorb culture. Devoid of the objects that riddle our psyches and emotions with politics and religion—beliefs which highlight separation and alienation—the places Menz constructs bring forth a new spatial development that offers hope for survival and continuation. At the same time, they foster potential for new social environments that leave all practical, aesthetic, and philosophical decisions to the viewer.