For our first project in Shanghai, Special Special presents Cyber Garden to inaugurate the pop-up space adjacent to the gift shop on the main floor of the new Museum of Art Pudong. Inspired by nostalgia for early millennial internet café culture, Special Special activates the museum with a 2540 sq ft (236 sq meter) installation that features collaborations with artists from around the world. Cyber Garden invites viewers to wonder at the generative fusion between the natural and the synthetic by traversing an immersive experience comprising eight digital art projects, including a virtual reality installation by Sebastian Masuda, and a retail shop that allows visitors to purchase accessible art editions for the everyday. 

The pop-up is outfitted with Special Special’s custom furniture designs, which combines pastoral nature and cyberpunk, incorporating bonsai, cacti, and lily pad botanical varieties shaped from acrylic. The installation invites us to ponder how gardening metaphors can nurture different understandings of the history of the World Wide Web. Cyber Garden conceptualizes the internet as a sprawling garden of many paths, where files need “pruning” and “weeding”, and ideas need to be “cultivated”. Nestled amongst floral outgrowth, the collaborative technologies on view encapsulate Special Special’s dream of an internet café overgrown with simulated nature—a forking, multilayered repository for different creative nodes to come together.

The central fixture includes modular stations that invite viewers to sit and engage with seven digital projects. The installation builds upon Special Special’s ongoing “Show and Tell” program, a series of monthly digital exhibitions delivered straight to subscribers’ inboxes that began in 2019. For the first time, visitors will be able sit down and experience the projects in an ambient, immersive environment.

Featured digital projects include Max Bittker’s Sandspiel, a falling sand game that welcomes viewers to layer fire, water, fungus, and seeds together to compose an unpredictable tableau; Laurel Schwulst’s Flight Simulator, a relaxing app that pays poetic tribute to Airplane Mode, a new work featuring an in-flight entertainment system curated by the artist; and Recessed by Heidi Latsky and Maya Man, a dance-driven, browser-based experience that magnifies the isolation felt over the pandemic through an intimate arrangement of movement on screen. 

Also on view is artist duo ZZYW’s open game system ThingThingThing, in which 3D avatars created during workshops co-exist, interact, and evolve in a collective worldbuilding process, and Will Doenlen’s Hot Air, a calendar app that releases the rigid structure of a productive life into a more natural way of being. Then there is Lullatone & Jono Brandel’s Typatone, a text-to-music editor. In Liu Chang’s Random Walker - Encounter, an interactive video installation, two screens are placed back-to-back in the cyber café. On each screen, flickering, morphing imagery of what is filmed on the other side gradually appears, creating unexpected encounters and reflections on socially-constructed boundaries.

Cyber Garden includes the world premiere of Sense Share Bear, a VR piece by Sebastian Masuda, the Japanese artist known for his whimsical reinvention of kawaii culture. The large-scale VR installation invites visitors to virtually create a colorful installation with their hands, and to haptically interact with a lonely toy bear in the physical setup. 

Cyber Garden also features a retail shop, which completes the simulation of Special Special’s hybrid New York art space. Viewers will be able to peruse Special Special’s playful art editions in Shanghai for the first time, including Cardan Grille bookmark, Small Medium Big Ideas Notebook Set, and Tubers, a series of felt planters produced in collaboration with artist Benjamin Langford from the previous year’s exhibition in New York. Additional products will also debut at MAP—cyber-inspired accessories, lifestyle items, and even a Collector’s Toolkit in collaboration with Avant Arte—accoutrements for art collectors, internet café aficionados, and everyone in between. 

All new products launched at MAP will be also available for purchase on Special Special’s WeChat store and specialspecial.com.

Cyber Garden is on view at Museum of Art Pudong, No. 2777, Binjiang Avenue, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China, through November 1, 2021. 

Special Special is pleased to present Special Special Shopping Network, a series of programming that takes inspiration from the culture of televised home shopping networks like QVC and Youtube unboxing videos to present product demonstrations, unscripted talk shows, and experimental performances through the medium of video.

Prepare for a spectrum of awkward self-promotion, tacky displays, and low-definition commodity fetish, all at Special Special and artist’s studios turned makeshift sets. Special Special has transformed into a TV studio, complete with microphones, lights, and an artificial backdrop, to produce programming for our technologically-dependent times. All products are available for sale in-store and online at specialspecial.com.

Special Special founder Wen-You Cai will host guests including: Yi Xin Tong, Use Value, Aria McManus, and Lu Zhang. Tune into Special Special’s IGTV or Youtube channel to watch each episode in the series.

Special Special is pleased to present Late Summer, Benjamin Langford’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Langford transforms the space with large-scale, illusionistic sculptures that bloom and drape across the walls, including vines, leaves, and fauna in various stages of growth. The artist photographs found plants in high resolution, prints them on canvas, then hand-cuts and reassembles them into soft sculptures. The finished works invite viewers to examine their odd shapes, realistic textures, and minute details otherwise easily dismissed.

As with each exhibition, Special Special has also worked with the artist to produce a functional art edition. For Late Summer, the gallery collaborated with Langford to create felt planters entitled “Tubers”. The planters come in two varieties—either turnips or sunchokes—each available in editions of 200. Often taking form as enlarged, edible structures beneath the soil surface, tubers function as storage organs for nutrients in some plant species. The hyperreality of the planters, which look like tuberous roots, distorts the perception of the real plants living inside them to play with the boundaries between the container and contained.

Exhibition has been extended through August 31, 2020. Open by appointment!

Special Special is pleased to announce Artists’ Tools, a group exhibition showcasing the innovative devices created by artists to aid in their creative practice or in daily life. Custom, handcrafted, repurposed, or created through assemblage, these tools can be considered artworks in their own right. Artists’ Tools features contributions from 32 artists working in a variety of mediums across fields of art, design, and technology. Featured tools include a string necklace that serves as a measurement device, a self-driving gallery pedestal, and a teapot that doubles as an audio synthesizer. 

Special Special will also introduce a limited edition of works on paper in collaboration with James Chrzan. Created daily throughout the course of the exhibition, each site-specific drawing is produced by a hygrothermograph, recording changes in the temperature and humidity inside the gallery over a 24-hour period.   

For Artists’ Tools, the gallery space is transformed into a pegboard-clad and studio-inspired setting, serving as a backdrop for viewers to discover these imaginative, playful, and functional objects. 

As part of the group exhibition Tie Me Up! Lock Me Down! Special Special hosted a series of performances, “Tie Me Up! Cam Shows,” in collaboration with Wildman Clab. 

“Tie Me Up! Cam Shows” twists internet broadcast culture into an art form, playing with notions of spectatorship and voyeurism. The series consisted of several artist performances inspired by the themes in Tie Me Up! Lock Me Down!, including imagined psychic space, the composite nature of selfhood, and virtual/actual spectatorship. Special Special set up multiple cameras within the space, and the live streamed across Instagram and YouTube.

This was the fifth project in the poetry/performance series The Frontiers Conference, organized by Wildman Clab at Special Special.

Performances:

January 25, 2020

12:00 pm—ASMR Chinese Banquet Mukbang
The Special Special staff and friends consumed 100 dumplings as we celebrated the new year of the rat.

6:00–7:00 pm—Mia Kerin
Mia Kerin performed Number 1, a site-specific piece taking place in the world of Tie Me Up! Lock Me Down!, mediating on the art of being prepared. 

January 26, 2020

4:00–5:00 pm—Kristen Lee
Kristen Lee’s demonstrated shibari, a decorative knot-tying practice associated with erotic bondage. 

6:00–7:00 pm—Taj
Taj’s performance assessed relationships with past lovers while seeking solace in the pleasure found in loving oneself through movement and the luxuriousness of chocolate.

Special Special is pleased to announce Tie Me Up! Lock Me Down!, a group exhibition curated by Banyi Huang and Kristen Lee. The show tells a story of love, heartbreak, and reconciliation. Inspired by the camp of anime, exaggerated narratives in East Asian soap operas, and the baroque, it is an exercise in melodrama.

Tie Me Up! Lock Me Down! features a selection of bodily adornments in the broader sense, including jewelry, garments, and a range of accessories by Angie YooJ Kim, Banyi Huang, Gesualda, Hong Hong Wu, Kristen Lee, Leila Jinnah, Pear Ware, shichuchi, and Use Value, as well as a video piece by Malt Disney.

Special Special transforms into the inner psychic space of an imagined, composite individual, inviting the viewer to be engulfed in unhinged emotions and extreme fantasies. Poised between indulgence and repression, explicit desires and hidden symbolism, she could be any one of us. Here, each wearable piece functions as a performative prop or role-play element, to guide our characters and offer our submission to the binds of love.

Wen-You Cai, founder and director of Special Special, opened her first solo photography exhibition along with a Special Special pop-up at MGM COTAI casino exhibition in October 2019. The exhibition was accompanied by a release of Rooster, Tiger, Sheep by Snake, a photo book featuring photography from the show. 

The photography exhibition is titled Rooster, Tiger, Sheep by Snake, named after the zodiac animals of Wen-You’s father (rooster), mother (tiger), and younger sister (sheep). The exhibition features a collection of 175 photographs, mostly on film, in black and white and color photographs, taken over the span of a decade through travel and jet-lag, at work, on vacation, and at home. The series features, in chronological order, the mundane and momentous occasions of her family, with her sister, Wenhao, as a marker of time as she grows up in the images. The series follows each distinct personality living between harmony and discord through moments of play, and occasional ennui, and investigates Wen-You’s spectrum of emotions (as snake) toward her intimately portrayed subjects.

Wen-You was born in 1989 in Tokyo, Japan, and has been based in New York City since 1995. She received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2012), and an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2016).

Special Special presents a playground-inspired retail pop-up at MGM featuring playful artworks and products that engage people of all ages to participate in an intimate shopping experience and to interact with several special curatorial projects. As a platform for creative dialogue, we have extended conversation from our New York based gallery across the world to Macau.

At MGM, the pop-up retail space acts as the Special Special home base for projects that extend throughout the entire resort; including an in-room experience inviting people to draw a room they love or to envision their ideal stay and to add the drawing to a collective installation in our retail space. Video pieces relating to this project and several more are displayed in the lobby of the casino and resort, engaging those beyond the pop-up shop and inviting them to visit our retail pop-up. Special Special’s presence features site-specific curatorial projects by Aria McManus, Lu Zhang, Sarah Verity, and Will Doenlen.

Special Special is pleased to announce CHKRA, the world’s first couture sound spa by sound artist Tsung. 

High-end luxury can be empowering, but it is too often exclusive and out of reach. CHRKA’s mission is to free the energy of luxury to all—making it accessible, inclusive, and waste-free—so that everyone can experience the ultimate retail therapy. 

Attendees are invited to relax and heal through the pure energies of seven hand-picked fashion icons (AXWG, ISMK, RKWN, LVTN, CHNL, YVLSL, BRBY). Sound therapies are known to heal by using specific frequencies to recharge the seven key Chakra points of the body, from Root to Crown. The frequencies of these sounds are believed to form the core of the Universe, based in an old tradition of healing sounds. 

Special Special and Tsung worked to adapt these healing concepts to the world of fashion—spending months capturing the unique signatures of each brand at their flagship—and then fine-tuning the field recordings to extract the essence of each and matching them to their native chakra point.  

Attendees at Special Special are invited to enter seven distinct sensory environments intended to resonate and align these seven Chakric points. The audio tracks and takeaway packets of the CHKRA energies will be available for purchase, so attendees may continue their therapeutic experiences at their leisure.

Artist Biography

Tsung is the solo project name for John Chao. In his solo work, John has written for dance, film, and electronic performance. As a practicing Buddhist, his projects as Tsung have a particular focus on traditions of spiritual music. He has a background in classical, electronic, and experimental music. John is also part of the collective Misha, signed to Tomlab Records (The Books, Xiu Xiu). He is based in New York City.

Looking can be an activation of power, which gives meaning to forms and materials. Ceramics can be viewed as ordinary objects like the vessels in a domestic setting or abstractions of the human body. Concentrated looking at ceramics offers an opportunity to subvert or embody any number of gazes – Orientalist, male, Marxist, formalist, feminist, etc.

To celebrate the close of Illuminations, a solo show by Jenny Hata Blumenfield at Special Special, and in collaboration with Wildman Clab’s The Frontiers Conference, Blumenfield and Wildman Clab invite you to share your own gaze and interact with 10-15 “vessels” deemed as such by Blumenfield. Some sourced, some made, some broken, some whole. 

The Frontiers Conference is a continuous series of performances that joins and highlights artists on the fringe of various artistic movements. Organized by Wildman Clab as part of their year-long events residency at Special Special.

Special Special is pleased to announce Illuminations, a solo exhibition by Jenny Hata Blumenfield featuring a collection of ceramics and cyanotypes. Blumenfield calls upon recurring themes in her practice with references to traditional vessel forms and deconstruction of objects into planar surfaces to develop a new area of exploration—translating objects to images through cyanotype printing.

In Illuminations, Blumenfield continues to explore symbolism and manipulation of the recognizable formal language of ceramic vessels. By referencing, dissecting, layering, and repurposing classical ceramic forms, she reimagines vessels as hybrids, prioritizing sculptural and architectural qualities over specific functionality. References to historical ceramic works are distilled into surfaces, cross-cut profiles, and partial vessels, finished in a refined and simplistic manner with primary colored glaze.

Blumenfield’s ceramic sculptures accompany cyanotype prints and formulate a new series of miniature installations. These sculptures are also reproduced as flattened images through cyanotype printing, using their cast shadows to replicate their forms, where natural light translates three-dimensional form to two-dimensional image.

Blumenfield creates compositions for cyanotype prints by placing sculpted objects in space, where the resulting image combines qualities of light, time, and location. The print echoes the dimensionality of the source object or vessel by defining its edges and representing its depth through gradient hues of blue.

As the artist highlights specific elements of traditional ceramics in her sculptures, the cyanotype prints work similarly to deconstruct a three-dimensional vessel and re-contextualize it as a static image. The result of each print presents the source object (vessel), light (environment), and a momentary determination of its place in space and time (the artist’s hand).

An artist’s book, also titled Illuminations, is produced in collaboration with Special Special and released for the occasion of the exhibition as Special Special Edition No. 36. Printed in an edition of 100, the book features selected images of Blumenfield’s works, flattened to one color, and split across each spread by depicting the same image processed as positive and negative­—as two parts of a whole and as the presence and absence of light.

For the release of Yi Xin Tong’s NYC Fishing Journal from Gong Press at Special Special, artist and fisherman Yi Xin Tong will hold an informative and possibly useful workshop on fishing in NYC. Participants will learn about the various fish species traveling through the city, effective methods of meeting them, the advantages of fishing, and the inevitable disasters that arise. Gain hands-on experience making fishing rigs that you can take home. With air conditioning and cold drinks provided, this workshop is perfect for those who can’t make it to the beach on this hot summer day. 

This workshop is part of the poetry/performance series, The Frontiers Conference, organized by Wildman Clab at Special Special for their year long residency.

Yi Xin Tong is a nowhere-based artist and fisherman. He enthusiastically appropriates studio time for fishing, which brings him to urban peripheries where ruins fill in for buildings, social order becomes unstable, and wildness returns at a surprisingly fast clip. Fishing is an unusual exploration of the environment that leads to peculiar experiences. Casting in the scorching sun and engulfing fog along the shores, he searches for fish who feed with the ocean’s tides, at times disremembering what era it is.

Founded by Lu Zhang in 2017, Wildman Clab is a lab and club for researching and proving the existence of primitive individuals by providing activities and experiences. Wildman Clab currently resides in Special Special, organizing The Frontiers Conference (TFC) as their year-long residency. TFC is a series of experiences created in collaboration with pioneers at the frontiers of art, such as poets, musicians, and artists, in search of new forms of poetry readings and performances.

Special Special hosted a pop-up sale of Japanese Workman boots in shoes, featuring unisex hi-top, low-top, canvas, rubber, steel-toe, and slip-on footwear starting at $50.

Japanese construction workers’ shoes are known for their flexibility, durability, and barefoot-feeling comfort. Tokyo boasts an entire subculture dedicated to the clothing of their high-rise steel workers and construction tradesmen. Their free flowing pants and practical footwear have become fashionable among all construction trades. The pop-up sale celebrates the hard work and high style of these Japanese workers!

Lu Zhang, Tim Simonds, and Aaron Lehman perform a public reading of Peter Handke's play Kaspar (1967), collaboratively reconceived and read through a single translucent paper copy. Playing at reading. Excerpt from Kaspar: “They speak a text that is not theirs. They do not speak to make sense but to show that they are playing at speaking, and do so with great exertion of their voices even when they speak softly... He utters a single sentence over and over: I want to be a person like somebody else was once.”

The Frontiers Conference is a continuous series of performances that joins and highlights artists on the fringe of various artistic movements. Organized by Wildman Clab as part of their year-long events residency at Special Special.

For Talks to Me, Special Special hosts two editioned works by Tim Simonds: manna, a set of small rose leaf sculptures and Talks to Me, a scratch-game printed on a translucent paper. The two editions are presented amidst some trappings—a set of screens and guides. Talks to Me is made in collaboration with Seokhoon Choi, printed by Eric López, and released as Special Special Edition No. 31, part of a series of editioned works produced by an artist in partnership with Special Special.

Photo credits:
# 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 by Dario Lasagni
# 5, 9 by Wen-You Cai

The Frontiers Conference is a continuous series of performances that joins and highlights artists on the fringe movements. Organized by Wildman Clab,  as part of their yearlong events residency at Special Special.

Event 2019:02:10: I <3 U Always Forever is a performance by Robert Ouyang Rusli and Wo Chan including live music, audio recordings, and opportunities for audience participation and sharing on topics of time and memory as they relate to intimate relationships.

Love Hotel Rooms is a drawing workshop and installation that invites you to recall and recreate a room you once loved (or loved in). Sketch your memory on one of our room cards and add it to our ever-growing love hotel, and be a voyeur to the memories of others.

Stop by Special Special to participate in this unusual way to archive space, where the feelings felt and people loved are no longer present. What rooms are permanently etched in your mind? Is it a dorm room where you first laid eyes on the love of your life, or your childhood room from a house which has since been demolished?

This experience encourages sharing different perspectives (quite literally), and building new connections through old recollections. Drop by and find out who checks into the room next to yours. 

Sarah Elizabeth Verity is an art director and brand strategist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was raised in hotels.

Special Special presents Handle with Care, our 2018 holiday shop concept featuring a curated selection of art and living editions for your holiday gift giving. All delicately (and creatively) wrapped in our 2018 Special Special Edition Gift Wrap, the space has been transformed into a playful, dynamic guessing game of unusual shapes and functions. You will be sure to find something for the one that has almost everything!

In addition to our Special Special editions, we’ve curated a few of our favorite gifts from design brands such as Open Editions, Fredericks and Mae, and This That.

Special Special presents Fur East Far Tokyo, featuring Japanese artist Sebastian Masuda. Fake fur is a material often used by Masuda to prompt an awakening of the senses through layers of vivid color and soft textures. While initially simulating real fur through mimicry, faux fur has developed into something uniquely its own, incorporating colors and patterns that do not exist in nature. It is now accepted as something separate from its initial intention and has become real in its own right. As use of fake fur has progressively spread throughout the world, like the birth of a new culture, it is hard to determine where the old ends and the new begins. 

Masuda searched throughout Asia to select the best fake furs for wearable artwork, to design in his Tokyo studio and brought to New York. Inspired by a conversation with Special Special's Director Wen-You Cai, to make artworks more accessible to the public, Sebastian was motivated to release wearable art into the world, to continue the spread of Kawaii Culture.

The collaboration  between Special Special and Sebastian Masuda features shirts and bags designed by the artist, as well as workshops inviting the public to participate by utilizing collection of exhibited fake furs to create new editions of featured products.

Sebastian Masuda is an artist known for his role in expanding Harajuku Style and a key figure in developing the Kawaii Culture. In 1995, Masuda opened his iconic 6% Doki Doki store in Harajuku and has since gone on to open Kawaii Monster Cafe in Shibuya.

Easily contained in letters and sound, overflow is ‘language contraband’ guiding as it deceives. It escapes the conditions of its term by a commitment to movement and fluidity. Overflow’s eddying indeterminacy is a reminder that tools like language and the body regularly fail us. ‘Art won’t save us,’ either.

Overflow is a group show that will flood the gallery space with artworks and artist paraphernalia surveying the myriad ways we play in order to stay afloat. The show will conceptually revolve around a vessel, with artworks, tools, toys, merchandise, and design works spilling out of the receptacle and onto the walls, floors, and ceiling of the gallery space and storefront. By cruising forward, the artists in Overflow map alternative routes to navigate the high seas.

Dana Davenport, Leah Dixon, Sujung Chang, Ian Faden, Tallulah Hood, Khari Johnson-Ricks, and David Kirshoff stage playful interventions. E. Winslow Funaki, Bianca Kann, and Tristan Scow hi-jack the aesthetics and craft of ‘cuteness.’ Patrick Carlin Mohundro, David Chan, Luba Drozd, Jackson Hallberg, Emily Janowick, and Grace Linderholm document the quotidian. Ginssiyo Apara, Sam Cockrell, Umber Majeed, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Buzz Slutzky, and Ondine Viñao re-contextualize ephemera from days long past. 

Special Special invites New York based photographer Benjamin Langford to collaborate on a Special Special Edition Hawaiian shirt as well as a site-specific installation of his tantalizingly beautiful and surreal flower sculptures. In the artist’s own words, these photographic canvas sculptures “draw attention to photograph’s ability to convincingly create the illusion of space, texture, and material qualities.” The effects of trompe l’oeil allow the viewers to compare the qualities of photography to sculpture in terms of their differing dimensionality, fragility, and flexibility.

Special Special Edition No. 24, Hibiscus, is a Hawaiian Shirt collaboration with Benjamin Langford. This limited Edition of 50, with digital prints of hibiscus flowers can be subsequently dyed in a bath of hibiscus flower, allowing traces of the flower to envelop their printed representations.

Langford’s work pertains to contemporary representations of nature and the hyperreal. He uses technology as a tool to bring people closer with nature through increasingly vivid modes of representation, while distorting the human appreciation for nature in an unmediated state. Using large-scale digital prints on canvas to create large-scale illusionistic flowers that hang flaccidly off the wall or droop across the floor, the work brings seductive and hallucinogenic qualities of images to attention by reversing the way photographs are ordinarily perceived: not as windows to be looked through but simulacra that seemingly extends beyond their real dimensions.

Benjamin Langford (b. 1992, Connecticut) received a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. He grew up in London, and went to High School in Singapore and Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Zaha Hadid West 28th, PPOW, MX, and Project:Artspace. He has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar Korea, Bullett Magazine, Wallpaper, Dis Magazine, You-Do-You, and Editorial Magazine.

Hibiscus is part of SPF, our first group show transforming the living room storefront into a swimming pool. SPF is a metaphor of the Special Special logo, a blue oval that is the pool of water to be submerged for creative dialogues. A fluid arrangement of various artist projects evoking the spirit of a poolside retreat, offering New Yorkers a refuge from the sweltering heat. Interspersed throughout the months of May through August, each highlighted project, workshop, and event opened with a “Pool Party.”

Participating artists in SPF includes Lu Zhang, Aria McManus, Ben Langford, and an “Overflow” curation by John Belknap.

Melding the two essentials for all things beach, no need to carry a cumbersome towel and an easy to lose swimsuit — here they come as one, materialized as ideal. Keep the baes at bay, have all your haters throw in the towel when they lay eyes on you in this. Put the OW in towel, make them wish they were the sun of your beach. Follow suit, make this the one piece you get laid on the beach in.

Special Special Edition No. 23, Towelkini, is an art edition of 42, in Athletic Gold and Hot Pink, serves all purposes for the summertime for $199.00.

Aria McManus (b. 1989, St. Paul, MN) is an artist based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in various solo and group shows, including at 99 Cent Gallery, Fisher Parrish, Muddgutts, the New Museum (all New York), AA|LA, Ed Varie (Los Angeles), Sunset Drive Gallery (Miami), and Biennale Internationale Design (Saint-Etienne, France). Aria is a founding member of Auto Body, a curatorial collective based in Bellport, Long Island.

Towelkini is part of SPF, our first group show transforming the living room storefront into a swimming pool. SPF is a metaphor of the Special Special logo, a blue oval that is the pool of water to be submerged for creative dialogues. A fluid arrangement of various artist projects evoking the spirit of a poolside retreat, offering New Yorkers a refuge from the sweltering heat. Interspersed throughout the months of May through August, each highlighted project, workshop, and event opened with a “Pool Party.” 

Participating artists in SPF includes Lu Zhang, Aria McManus, Ben Langford, and an “Overflow” curation by John Belknap.

“It Takes 11 Years Practice to be at the Same Pool,” or “Pool Date” is a dating experience and installation in Special Special’s summer group show, SPF. For each Pool Date, two participants who sign up for the same time slot meet at a pool installation with allusions to secluded suburban backyards, high-rise rooftops, and urban public pools. Kick off your date by choosing one of seven classic mock-tail drinks, served in a hand-made larger-than-life ceramic cocktail vessel from the Special Special bar. Each date lasts one hour.

Inspired by the Chinese proverb “十年修得同船渡” which translates to “It takes ten years practice to be on the same boat,” the Boat Date becomes a Pool Date when “It Takes 11 Years Practice to be at the Same Pool” (十一年修得同池渡). This project is built on the concept of yuánfèn where one’s good deeds from past lives will lead to the “fateful coincidence” of those you meet in this life, whether as friends, lovers, or acquaintances.

Everyone has different associations with the pool. For some it is where best summer memories of their backyard pools are formed, for others it is reminiscent of an era where pools were inaccessible to some. In New York City, pool culture implies the exclusivity of private pools or the crowded waters of public swimming pools. Pool date is an imagined space that brings two people together to have meandering conversations around memories of swimming pools, summer romances, and childhood dreams. Along with Special Special, Pool Date intends to create openness, patience and appreciation of the moments when two people encounter each other at our imagined city pool.

Pool Date is a project by Wildman Clab in collaboration with Special Special. Since 2017, Wildman Clab, created by Lu Zhang, is a lab/club to research and prove the existence of primitive individuals. By providing activities and experiences within specific environments, WC explores the unknown and unexplainable part of human relationships. Wildman Clab has previously created social encounters through mobile karaoke at Columbus Park, Chinatown, NY; and in Boat Date at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY.

“It Takes 11 Years Practice to be at the Same Pool” is part of SPF, our first group show transforming the living room storefront into a swimming pool. SPF is a metaphor of the Special Special logo, a blue oval that is the pool of water to be submerged for creative dialogues. A fluid arrangement of various artist projects evoking the spirit of a poolside retreat, offering New Yorkers a refuge from the sweltering heat. Interspersed throughout the months of May through August, each highlighted project, workshop, and event opened with a “Pool Party.”

Participating artists in SPF includes Lu Zhang, Aria McManus, Ben Langford, and an “Overflow” curation by John Belknap.

Special Special presents BOLTS by Oona Brangam-Snell, a set of blankets featuring contemporary interpretations of classical painting motifs. BOLTS (a unit of measurement for fabric) consists of five original blankets by Brangam-Snell designed over the course of the past year. In addition, a sixth blanket designed in collaboration with Special Special in limited edition, depicts a night sky with creatures surrounding an oval oculus, looking onward to the universe in contemplation and wanderlust. Tapestries have traditionally hung in peoples’ homes as insulation and decoration. With BOLTS we offer a modern interpretation in the form of blankets that can embellish our living spaces, warm us through the chills of winter and blasts of air conditioning in summer, and even provide us with comfortable seating for convivial springtime picnics.

The BOLTS blankets use traditional images: monarchs in profile, bouquets of fruit and wine, nudes with livestock, enchanted landscapes, all liberated by synthetic colors and kinetic forms that would have been beyond the reach of the handlooms of the past. The quoted artworks, no longer ecclesiastically enshrined, present themselves as intimate companions, in the guise of blankets. The creatures and characters that populate these textiles are freed of the authority they used to embody. But they still remind us, in an era defined by the ascendancy of invisible forces, that sight comes before words and that we never lose our primal desire for beauty, food, nature and ornament.

Oona Brangam-Snell is a New York based textile artist whose work highlights the enduring power of traditional symbols and the emerging power of contemporary iconography, in an era defined by the digitization of fabric production. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Brangam-Snell is influenced by centuries of textile production, from medieval tapestries to theater curtains. She works as a fabric designer for the textile firm Maharam.

Her work has been in group shows, including exhibitions at Woods Gerry in Providence; The (Hot) Pink Salon in the West Village; and the Paisley Exhibit curated by artist Peter Hristoff at the School of Visual Arts. She has carried out a number of private commissions in New York and Toronto, and most recently completed a mural for Dewey Dufresne’s new shop, Byggyz, on the Lower East Side. This is Brangam-Snell’s first solo exhibition.

A Pre-Valentine's Day workshop for participants to create a personalize flower arrangement with local, and seasonal flower for someone Special Special. The workshop was co-hosted by flower specialist Mackenzie Younger with aesthetic demonstrations from K Bao Luu, complete with an art school critique at the end. 

For the Inaugural Creative China Festival, Special Special in collaboration with Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation (BCAF) presents LUYANG Asia Character Setting Show. Featuring edgy garment design and contemporary Chinese media art by the acclaimed contemporary artist and designer Lu Yang. 

Lu’s video and new media art merges science, computer programming, and digital imaging technologies (e.g. infrared camera image and X-ray), with moving image and various types of new media. Her fashion design, which is part of her own label: Lu Yang Asia, is deeply rooted in the context of anime, gaming, and sci-fi subcultures. As well as exploring complex issues such as mortality, mental illness, neuroscience, religion, and sexuality.

Presented as part of the Creative China Festival, this presentation of Lu Yang’s new media art and fashion designs offers an insight into the current trends of contemporary Chinese art and fashion exploring elements of edgy, urban and anime-inspired culture.

Lu Yang (b.1984) is a Shanghai-based multi-media artist who creates fantastical, often morbid visions of death, mental illness, and neurological constructs of both real lifeforms and deities. Her work is deeply immersed in the subcultures of anime, video games, and sci-fi. Lu Yang earned two degrees from the new media art department of the China Academy of Arts. Her work has been presented both in China and abroad, including USA, Japan, Germany, Denmark, UK, Turkey, Canada, Russia, and Australia. In 2015, her work was presented in the China Pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Special Special presents Moon Baby Boo! A Halloween ensemble starring: Ghost, Angel, Skull, and Pumpkin (GASP!).

Fashioned in Tyvek by K Bao Luu, designed with Seokhoon Choi. Wear white or give color. Write onto them love poems or hexes. Paint the town red. Moon Baby is the oeuvre of K Bao Luu—a collection of objects that read as lyrics, fashioning clothes of tomorrow.

Exhibition Duration: October 13 (friday) – November 1, 2017. Each costume was made in our backroom by K Bao Luu, in an edition of 4. Editorial photographs by Wen-You Cai. 

Special Special presents Mackenzie Younger's Jackets.

Inspired by NASCAR racing jackets and the streetwear fashion of Younger’s youth, the Jackets are both sensational and critical, addressing ideas around mimicry, recognition, the art world, and commodification.

The exhibition at Special Special presents the Jackets in the context of a gallery concept store and will feature a new edition of 100 satin green and black Jackets; the eight original unique Jackets, which hang over paintings; all within a site-specific installation involving garden plants native to New York and live butterflies hatched onsite.

Younger’s custom garments, emblazoned with iconic art world logos, is made available for collection and presented outside of a performance. Throughout 2017, the Jackets have appeared and participated in happenings at The Armory Show in New York and at Art Basel Hong Kong, among other venues.

Mackenzie Younger (b. 1990 NYC) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. Younger exhibited with A+E Studios in NYC, 2015, and the Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA, 2016, and contributed to auctions at the Emily Harvey Foundation and Paddle8. Professionally, Younger runs the company Native NY Gardens, which specializes in insect and native plant ecology.

Ripple Scribble is a reflection on the moment when a stone is thrown into water. A small action can cause unexpectedly large effects—as an old Chinese saying goes, “one stone can create thousands of waves.” For this exhibition at Special Special, we present ephemeral landscapes of ceramic tableware.

Each piece begins with a slab of clay that is hand-shaped by the artist. The glaze is poured onto each piece and shifted around in uneven layers, creating varying densities of color on the surface. This process renders each piece consistently unique. Every piece is coated with food-safe glaze and fired at 2232°F.

Michele Xiaoyun Fan is a ceramic artist based in New York. Inspired by the history of the medium that dates back thousands of years, she explores the infinite possibilities of ceramic through color and form. In 2015, she started her ceramic studio Atelier F.

Fan obtained her Master’s degree in Western Modern Art History from Christie’s Education in New York and studied photography at Syracuse University. She has worked at major art organizations, such as Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio and Christie’s Auction House.

Special Special presents John Belknap’s first solo exhibition, Bathroom Interiors. Bathroom Interiors is a harmonious dialogue between the architectural interior of Special Special and Belknap's playful and contemplative re-imagining of intimate spaces. This show presents unique collages, GIFs, and exclusively produced editions of shower curtains and postcard.

John Belknap (b. 1993 in Detroit, Michigan) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in New York. His work explores ideas of space, identity, displacement, and longing, through pen drawings, photography, collage, and animated GIFs. John graduated from NYU's Gallatin School where he concentrated in queer theory, art history and criticism.

Press: Art F City: See This Tonight: John Belknap’s Bathroom Interiors

Special Special hosts our friends E for Effort on their launch of Twist Tie rings, featuring miniature dioramas by Chandra Bocci, as backdrop for posing with ringed fingers. 

A Special Special Edition Twist Tie Ring was subsequently produced in the color blue. 

E for Effort is a New York based design brand started by Beka Goedde and Rachel Ostrow. Inspired by Annie Albers and Bauhaus design, puns, paper, and packing materials, E for Effort’s products transformed the everyday into wearable fashion.

For the soft opening of Special Special, in conjunction with the documentary release of Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai-Guo-Qiang, Special Special presents art editions and merchandise by Cai Guo-Qiang.