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seldon yuan

bio

Seldon Yuan is a poet and artist living and working in New York City. As an artist, Seldon's work has been shown at the Detroit Museum of New Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the International Center of Photography in New York, in addition to various galleries and spaces through out New York.

As a poet he has read and performed his work in person and on radio in New Jersey, New York City, Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

statement

The 6 prints depict each borough of New York City and all the boroughs together. What could nonchalantly be called maps are in fact not maps, but instead are drawings - literally created line by line - idealized as an atlas, i.e. nonfunctional as a way finding system. They are pure abstractions of New York City. Ignoring the land mass, the prints focus on what truly embodies and defines New York, which are its streets. Like a heart, it is these veins and arteries that fire the machines of New York. It is the streets that herd people, that are the conduits that carry people, that are the one common space that each person traverses despite class or ethnicity.

These pieces also describe New York's past. They are an illustration of the evolution of urban development and planning in New York. How the grid was laid and then broken. How urban and suburban exist. How certain neighborhoods are laid open and straightforward and others hidden and winding.

Yet the pieces also redefine our sense of space. On a microcosmic level it is like an M.C. Escher drawing, a moebius strip where the hand draws the hand that draws the hand but instead it is the viewer on the street on the map on the street on the map. On a macrocosmic level the pieces remove us from our space and understanding of New York. As an abstraction with no named streets it allows us to see a whole form. It allows us to see past the familiar areas to see the parts unconsidered, where roads narrow and meander. Rendering the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar, unknown, and ignored a curiosity, the pieces inspire exploration.

The artist book is the next evolution of the maps where the development of the urbanism in New York City is identified by area and years of major development by Europeans into what constitutes today's New York.