For this edition of Fan Mail, Josh Highter of Berkeley, California has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. Josh wrote about his paintings as “inventions shaped by forces of society, economics, technology,[.....]

Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[.....]

For both Walt Disney and Llyn Foulkes, it all started with a mouse. Mickey, to be precise, accompanied both men throughout their respective careers—Disney in a manner of lucrative iconography, and Foulkes in a manner of psychological distress. To most, the cartoon rodent was the paragon of jubilant youth, but through Foulkes’ lens, Mickey was a sanitized, furtive representative of the rats infesting the politics,[.....]

Against the backdrop of industrial chimneys, tidal waves and soaring satellites, satanists play their synthesizers while the world is falling apart. Inside a Corbusian building a middle aged man is hitting a woman with a whip. She’s on hands and knees, tightly leathered up. A third person is standing in the same room, watching them. Discarded pieces of human flesh are scattered around, some are[.....]

Four days ago, a hacker named Guccifer broke into former President George W. Bush’s email account, letting loose upon the world three stolen photographs of Bush’s newest hobby, painting. Besides gravitating toward more standard fare, such as landscapes, Bush seems to have surprised art critics with two self-portraits that, in the words of Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic, “demonstrate to us a more inward looking Bush,[.....]

Central to Doug Aitken’s “100 YRS” exhibition at 303 Gallery is a new “Sonic Fountain,” in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the[.....]

The first time I saw New Year’s Day Swimmers, the current exhibition at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, I didn’t mean to. I intended to pop into the gallery to drop something off, but as soon as I crossed the threshold I was completely captivated by the works and forgot everything else I was supposed to accomplish by my visit. Floating through the gallery,[.....]