A visit to Whitechapel Art Gallery

I needed a break in my mind that has almost always been preoccupied with economics recently. So I paid a visit to Whitechapel Art Gallery this evening as it is open late on Thursday. The Gallery, located in East London, is more or less on the way from the School to my home. So it's also convenient to visit on the way home.


The ground floor exhibition pretty much sucks. Even if a piece of modern art sucks, however, you can still enjoy it with a digital camera in hand. A photograph can be very powerful. You can throw away any unnecessary images out of the picture frame. What you see on the right is such a result. The title of this installation is "zero built a nest in my navel", by the way.

Upstairs, on the other hand, is quite intriguing, personally. It is an exhibition to introduce the works of British architect David Adjaye. I didn't know of him, but it turned out that I did know one of his buildings: Idea Store in Chrisp Market Street, which I believed was the world's coolest local library.

What's more, several more works undertaken by this architect are located in places more or less familiar to me: T-B A21 Olafur Eliasson Pavilion (follow this link and scroll down to see photos) was built in Venice (the link will take you to my photos), which I visited last year (but I missed the Pavilion); a residential building under construction on Fairfield Road, which is within a walking distance from my place in East London; Rivington Place in Shoreditch (again in East London), where I frequently walked around; and Idea Store Whitechapel (yet again in East London), built near a vast Sainsbury's supermarket store I visited a couple of times.

The exhibition explains how he designs such buildings by taking into account the area surrounding the building site and by being inspired by African craft designs, which was quite intriguing.

On the way home, I paid a visit to one of his buildings - Idea Store Whitechapel: