Kanye West Teams up with Takashi Murakami

Kanye West has teamed up with Japanese artist/designer Takashi Murakami. Both the song and the video are pretty cutesy but definitely worth a watch.

Slinkachu at Cosh Gallery Soho London

A new exhibition to launch in London this week - "Ground Zero: Little People in the City" by Slinkachu under the tagline "Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves". I would try to explain the results of his work, but the blurb from the gallery does a great job:

"Slinkachu has taken street art to a new scale,
painstakingly hand-painting tiny characters that live
in a world that’s too small for us to always notice
beneath our feet. His street installations are
constructed in all sorts of public spaces, the portrayal
of little lives that mirror our own. Working in miniature
opens up the city landscapes in unexpected ways
and this is explored in Ground Zero where he literally
brings you down to a new level.
Ground Zero is both street art installations and
photography. The two go hand in hand with the
subsequent photograph uncovering his hidden
world. The show depicts the little fears and anxieties
of city life and the general feeling of being alone or
insignificant in a large city. While the scenes reflect
the loneliness and melancholy of urban life there is
always an underlying sense of humour and feeling of
empathy"

Playing the Building

Monkey - Journey to the West - The Album

Following on from the success of the Monkey: Journey to the West opera in Covent Garden, Damon Albarn has released the score from the opera on CD today. On first listen, it's like nothing I've heard before.

There are touches of Gorillaz style sound effects throughout the score and the occasional mandarin vocalist. Having not seen the opera, I can only imagine how impressive the visuals would have been when coupled with the music. As with Gorillaz albums, the Monkey album also contains some fantastic artwork by Jamie Hewlett, some of which is shown above.

You can also by a limited edition Vinyl Boxset of the album which contains a 68 page illustrated booklet of the production and a large Jamie Hewlett art poster.

Adidas Olympic Gold Ads - For once the Beijing Smog helps

Adidas produced these gold themed ads prior to the Olympics. Beijing in the background looks like it is being smothered in a spring sandstorm. But it's interesting that one company has tried to use the photographic effect created by the city's smog to create an atmospheric visual advert which proves to be quite striking.

A Little Bit of Beijing

Images courtesy of Dan Eckstein.

Dan Eckstein has gone on a photographic journey of China, covering 10,000km in eight weeks and creating a document of China as it is from the high rises of Beijing to the Tibetan Plateau and the Yangzi river. In Beijing, Eckstein visited the 798 space art district, aburgeoning arts district in the northwest of Beijing. For a number of years, Beijing based artists and designers have made this area their home and the work being produced there is at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art. The studios and galleries are housed in old munitions and metals factories which in themselves are quite striking spaces.

Dan's Picture China photoblog can be seen here

The digital building Beijing:

The Ogilvy 8

Here's an interesting new blog that has been set up by Ogilvy in China. The premise is that the Beijing Olympics will be the first major worldwide sporting event to take place in the Web 2.0 era. 8 Ogilvy employees will contribute to the blog over the course of the games, four writing in Chinese, four writing in English.

In the first post, Kaiser Kuo points out that the 2008 Olympic Games are taking place "in the age of Internet, video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging". In a country where approximately 110 million people blog and 253 million are online, this could have quite big impact.

The site can be found here