2026-08-01 05:24:28
After visiting the New York Art Book Fair in 2011, Adelene Koh was smitten with the world of bookbinding. Her professional training commenced in Japan, then led her to London, and she’s now based in Taiwan, where she runs a studio called dddots. This year, Koh was one of 30 finalists for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, which celebrates innovation across a wide range of artisanship.
As a bookmaker and conservator, Koh draws upon the technical precision and heritage of bookmaking to create unique sculptures using paper and thread. Her work “Endless” was included in the prize’s exhibition of shortlisted artists, consisting of a kind of ouroboros-like cylinder of meticulously folded paper and edges stitched with colorful fiber. “The result is an endless loop of a book’s spine and fore-edge bound together by the English endband sewing techniques from the 18th and 19th centuries,” says a statement.
Sewn endbands are not exactly invisible, but they’re usually tucked snugly inside the cover. The thread is also not necessarily colorful, as it may be selected to blend in with the pages or other parts of the binding. For Koh, this underappreciated element becomes the highlight through vibrant combinations and rhythmic patterns. “I’m interested in bringing hidden elements of books into focus,” Koh says. “I’m drawn to the overlooked, the sidelined, the parts that quietly support everything else.”
The winner of this year’s competition is Jongjin Park, and Colossal readers may also recognize the work of finalist Xanthe Somers. See more on Koh’s Instagram.
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2026-08-01 00:14:37
Every year, the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) of New South Wales celebrates AstroFest, a festival of astronomy during which amateur photographers and scientists from around the globe are invited to submit their best views of the night sky and beyond. This year, the overall prize was awarded to Stefan Buda for his tonal moonscape titled “The Lunar Apennines,” which captures a detailed view of Montes Apenninus.
Categories include Deep Sky, Solar System, Wide-Field, Nightscapes, and more, allowing photographers to contribute images of phenomena ranging from distant nebulae and spiral galaxies to the Milky Way and aurora australis, or the southern lights, shining above impressive terrestrial landscapes. A 2027 calendar featuring the winning images is available for purchase, and you can see the entire gallery of top shots on the award’s website.
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2026-07-31 22:39:52
Set against uninterrupted backgrounds, the bold, metallic portraits of Kip Omolade float almost deity-like amid vibrant color. Known for his hyperrealistic treatment of chrome-like visages in oil paint, the artist sometimes incorporates spray-painted elements, drawing on the graffiti culture of New York City’s subways during the 1980s and 1990s when Omolade tagged using the moniker “Kace.”
The artist also presents the mask-like faces from different vantage points, sometimes with incredible eyelashes, whether peering directly at the viewer or positioned in regal profile. Reflections are typically abstract, showing little indication of the surrounding space beyond perhaps blue skies, the sun, and local color, although the monumental “African History” is an exception.
Upon closer inspection, the whorls of “African History” reveal numerous additional faces inspired by a wide range of carved sculptures the artist observed in a long-running exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The African Origin of Civilization, plus other examples from art history. Within this one, larger-than-life identity is a host of time-honored traditions and creative expressions.
See more on Instagram.
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2026-07-31 01:48:19
From meticulously cut and painted pieces of paper, realistic birds emerge amid foliage and forests in compositions by The Paper Ark. The collaborative practice of Nayan Shrimali and Venus Bird, which focuses on intricate paper reliefs, also centers on ecology by illustrating real species and their habitats around the world. The duo aims to raise awareness of biodiversity and conservation by evoking a sense of wonder akin to how we also often feel in nature.
The artists recently exhibited a number of the pieces shown here with Antler Gallery at Seattle Art Fair, and “Great Green Macaws” appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Audubon Magazine. See more on The Paper Ark’s Instagram.
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2026-07-31 01:10:06
In 1906, Devil’s Tower in northeastern Wyoming became the first national monument in the U.S., preserving a little more than 1,300 acres around the 867-foot-tall column of igneous rock. Amid the rolling hills of the plains, it can be seen from miles around, and it’s been a sacred site and gathering place for myriad Indigenous American tribes, who refer to it by names like Bear Lodge or Bear’s House.
One oral narrative describes how bears attacked a group of seven girls, and the ground swelled up to push the children toward the sky. There, they became the constellation Pleiades, or the “Seven Sisters,” which can be seen over the monument. In other stories, the distinctive striations around the landform are said to have been created by bears clawing at the earth to try to reach the girls.
For nomadic photographer Zac Henderson, the unique geological formation proved an irresistible subject. He travels the continent making dreamy images of landscapes and natural phenomena, often merging reality with a sense of the uncanny. When it comes to geology, there’s hardly a more iconic example than Devil’s Tower, which formed tens of millions of years ago as a column of hardened magma was gradually revealed through erosion.
Henderson captures the moodiness of clouds casting shadows in black-and-white images that are redolent of Ansel Adams’ deep tonal shifts. Even though the monument sees hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, there is a sense of isolation and unadulterated wonder, as if we are encountering it for the first time. Henderson also captures the changing light and otherworldly textures and ochres of the rock face, which can be seen from a network of paths around its one-mile base circumference.
See more timelapses on Henderson’s Vimeo, and explore more on Behance.
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2026-07-30 22:40:26
At the age of 14, Janice Yang and her family emigrated from South Korea to the U.S. in the wake of a financial crisis that upended their sense of security. (Incidentally, the Korean stock market is experiencing a historic crash this month in the wake of unwinding global trade in the AI sector.) Displaced from everything they knew, her family had to start again. “Our stable economic situation in Korea changed to more precarious working-class reality in the U.S., where repeated business failures left us in a lot of debt,” Yang tells Colossal.
For two decades, Yang worked unpaid at her family’s small sushi restaurant, where she dreamed of eventually pursuing her studies to become an artist, all while navigating a new culture and helping to carry her family’s financial burden. “These years of labor and adaptation have profoundly shaped my identity as a first-generation immigrant and my artistic practice,” she says. Her figurative paintings, which often center self-portraits amid busy kitchens, are accompanied by dream-like clouds and distant vistas that open up in walls and windows or float around the figures’ heads. There’s also a lot of fish.
Whether filleted, whole, chopped, or cooking, salmon are prevalent in many of Yang’s compositions. In a sense, they were the artist’s constant companions for years. “Every day, I saw salmon getting flayed and prepped in plastic wrap to be stored into the fridge,” she says. “I would develop personal feelings to salmon and personify them, since they reminded me the unfulfilled dream I had as an artist.” They also represent the desire to return home.
Every year, salmon complete the physically demanding biological process of spawning, in which they migrate from the ocean to their native freshwater streams and rivers to lay eggs. Huge numbers of the fish home in on the place they were born, fighting their way upstream to ensure the survival of the next generation. “This related to my feelings and hopes to reach my dream and find the sense of belonging in a new place where I felt often lost,” Yang says. Occasionally, her paintings incorporate salmon ash along with acrylic and oil pigments.
The artist also nods to symbolic elements of Korean art history and visual culture, such as a scroll painting by Ahn Gyeon, a court painter during Joseon Dynasty in the 15th century. The unfurled work sits on the lap of the figure in “Ahn Gyeon’s Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land.” The painting is now held in a collection in Japan, and Yang describes how Koreans hope to see the painting returned to its homeland someday. Korean aesthetics converge with classical Western artistic methods like one-point perspective. Yang says, “For me, this blending of visual languages becomes a way to think through ideas of home, coexistence, and contradiction, and to reflect on the complexity of diasporic identity.”
Starting next month, Yang will be an artist-in-residence at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she will also present an exhibition. And in September, she will commence a nine-month artist residency at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago, where she will teach, in addition to being a visiting lecturer at the School of the Art Institute’s Painting and Drawing Department. See more on Yang’s Instagram.
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