From The New Yorker:
Late one afternoon in December, the artist Sarah Sze and six assistants were completing the installation of eight new sculptures at the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side. Sze, who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, arranges everyday objects into sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (Q-tips, pushpins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and surge toward ceilings. Sze’s show, which ran through March, was about the relationships between landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. Several pieces of finished sculpture had been fashioned in Sze’s studio during the previous months, but since arriving at the museum they’d been dismantled and reconfigured so extensively that only a fifth of the original compositions would end up in the show. “You have to be willing to destroy what you’ve made, in order to let it evolve,” Sze said. She is married to the Indian-born oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Sze grew up in Boston. Her father, who is of Chinese descent, is an architect; her mother, of Anglo-Irish descent, is a retired schoolteacher. Sze graduated from Yale in 1991. In 1995, she enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan, and her work promptly attracted notice.
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