For the opening forum of the year 2021, APS MUSEUM invited Studio Founder Daniel Statham to share his experience on large-scaled public art pieces as well as his previous collaboration with award-winning artists such as Anish Kapoor, Langlands & Bell, Marc Quinn, and many more.
Studio Founder Daniel Statham is pleasant to join APSMuseum’s 2021 opening forum, which focused primarily on artist Anish Kapoor, along with Ms. Karen Smith, art critic and curator, Executive Director of OCAT Xi’an, Curator-at-Large at SCOP; Mr. Lu Xun, Founder and Director of Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing; and Mr. David Tung, Director of Lisson Gallery, Shanghai.
Daniel began his talk with an example of how Kapoor’s public artwork served as his design inspiration. “I will take three works as instances to introduce how art gave me inspiration,” suggested Daniel, “The first one is a work by Anish Kapoor, TARANTANTARA. The work transformed the internal structure of the original building, thus changing our perception of the interior… People’s interaction is an essential part of this work as well.”
He then shared his personal experience of assisting Kapoor in the process of constructing the artist’s arguably most celebrated work, Cloud Gate. “Oftentimes, it takes a long time and extremely complex process for a concept to be realised into an actual piece. For example, the Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor was pre-assembled in Oakland, California. It was then transferred to Chicago and installed onsite. After months of polishing, it finally became the beautiful work that we see today.”
In the end, Daniel also presented the Studio’s latest project, Future Car Park in the CBD area of Hangzhou. He pointed out that “the architecture itself is an artwork, an artwork that blends in with the surrounding environment.”