“McLaughlin was a California abstract, hard-edge painter interested in Japanese Zen Buddhism. You can see that reflected a bit in this work— it’s something totally abstract and about visual meditation. . . .  It offers a kind of aesthetic moment where you’re not thinking about anything else other than the work of art.”

“I really love this Motherwell because it is very small, and though he made more than  200 Elegy paintings over the course of his life, this one he made a year before he died. There’s something very pro-found thinking about the fact he was making this then.”

“Tiehai is a contemporary artist who plays with your expecta-tions of him as a Chinese painter. For instance, in this work—which is airbrushed, not done by hand—he’s cropped [his composition] so even if  it references a letter, you can’t see it. He abstracts the form
completely. In that way, you  can perhaps see other things, like more figurative forms.”

“This is my favorite piece in the series, which, of course, is by the great artist Ruth Asawa. It is a line rendered three-dimensional in all of its possibilities. She’s taken the line and carried it and repeated it and overlapped it over itself and, in doing so, created a sculpture out of something you could otherwise consider to be purely two-dimensional.”