Practitioners of walking meditation often move at a glacial pace, engaging each step the way a sitting meditator registers every breath. The exercise is usually performed in a quiet room, not the bustling D.C. sites depicted in “Abiding Nowhere,” the 10th installment in Tsai Ming-liang’s “Walker” series and the first shot in the Western Hemisphere. The film was commissioned by the National Museum of Asian Art to mark the 2023 centennial of its Freer Gallery of Art, where the 79-minute movie will screen on March 1.
Washington, D.C
Review | In the galleries: A filmmaker’s latest edition of souls on separate journeys
The red-robed man moving with exquisite deliberation through Georgetown, the Mall and Union Station is not an actual monk. He’s played by Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s longtime collaborator and on-screen alter ego. The Malaysian-Taiwanese director largely abandoned narrative filmmaking a decade ago, but has continued to make “Walkers,” inspired by Xuanzang, the 7th-century monk who journeyed to India to acquire Buddhist texts and bring them back to China.
Although “Abiding Nowhere” tells no story, it shares much with Tsai’s earlier fiction films. The director has always employed long takes and leisurely action, thus calling attention to the passing of time. The latest “Walker” alternates the monk’s steps with moments that feature a secondary character (Anong Houngheuangsy, a recent addition to Tsai’s repertory company); in one scene, the latter wears a T-shirt that reads “time to kill.”
In interviews, the director often compares himself to a painter and says that his style has been shaped by exhibiting his films in museums such as the National Museum of Asian Art (long a reliable supporter of his work). The Freer itself appears in “Abiding Nowhere,” but so do scruffier, lesser-known D.C. locations, many of them associated with the local art scene. In a sense, all these places are equal: backdrops for the detached motion of bodies and minutes. Tsai’s latest film is set in Washington, but also in a realm outside place and time.
Tsai Ming-liang: Abiding Nowhere At 7 p.m., March 1 at the Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu. 202-633-1000.
Many color-field abstractionists have rejected the notion that their pictures look like landscapes, but sometimes the resemblance is hard to deny. Most of the vivid canvases in Hemphill Artworks’ “Willem de Looper: Paintings 1972-1975” were made soon after the Dutch-born D.C. artist’s 1973 trip to the American Southwest. The large pictures sweep horizontally and are usually in the colors of stone, sand and clay. (There are also three heavily blue ones, at least one of which predates the excursion.) The paintings are not literal landscapes, but the inspiration is palpable.
De Looper (1932-2009) was among the second group of Washington colorists to achieve prominence, and he adopted some of the methods of his predecessors. Like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, he stained unprimed canvases with acrylic pigments, which had been developed at that time. But the long-unexhibited paintings in this group were not made by brushing or pouring. Instead, de Looper used rollers to sweep bands of color horizontally across the composition.
This technique yielded pictures that suggest a spectator’s movement through vast expanses of tans and browns, or layers of rock built up and worn down by millennia. The arrays of close-colored streaks can also suggest other things, such as unglazed pottery. Whatever the softly striped hues evoke, de Looper used watery washes of diluted paint to conjure something profoundly earthy. These paintings are gauzy and solid at the same time.
Willem de Looper: Paintings 1972-1975 Through March 2 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. hemphillfinearts.com. 202-234-5601.
One piece in “A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell” seems to encapsulate the life and the work of this acclaimed but conflicted artist. Made when Sockwell was 15, “Hands Off Me/Am I Bad?” is an oil-pastel drawing of a face that combines geometric and expressionist aspects and includes the picture’s title, roughly written in white.
The juxtaposition of spontaneous and calculated lines recurs in the art Sockwell made between the late 1950s and his 1992 suicide, at age 49. A native Washingtonian who grew up in Foggy Bottom — the neighborhood was then predominantly Black — Sockwell showed great artistic promise as a teenager, encouraged by an art therapist who worked with him while he was committed at St. Elizabeths Hospital.
The show includes Sockwell’s collage portrait of one of his patrons, Walter Hopps, who was the Corcoran Gallery’s director from 1967 to 1972. More typical, however, are purely abstract works. All the pieces are on board and paper, sometimes shaped, and feature tones that are mostly dark or muted. “Mirror Composition” is an expanse of black graphite and oil pastel, separated into blocks by silvery lines and framed under glass to reflect the viewer’s face. Gazing into this void is a suitably ambiguous experience. Sockwell assuredly conjured his own uncertainty.
A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell Through March 9 at Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, Corcoran Flagg Building, 500 17th St. NW. bradygallery.gwu.edu. 202-994-1525.
Brentwood Arts Exchange’s “Chosen Family,” curated by Lauren Davidson, presents work by seven African American artists who constitute three sets of friends: Omari Jesse, Bria Edwards and Olivia Bruce; Wesley Clark and Rodney “Buck!” Herring; Austin “Auz” Miles and Angelique Scott. The standout, as he usually is in group shows that include him, is Clark.
The artist’s two entries are part painting, part sculpture. Screws and nails intrude on planes of thickly applied, partly cracked pigment, set off by wooden shingles or a band of weathered steel. The works evoke making and unmaking simultaneously.
Where Clark’s abstractions have an industrial vibe, most of the other work is at least partly representational, often portraying domestic scenes or private moments. What many of the artists share with Clark is an interest in metamorphosis. In Bruce’s drippy triptych, a nude woman takes on aspects of the water around her. In Miles’s portrait of a woman, the face appears solid but the rest is fluid. In Edwards’s scene of a couple in a kitchen, metal objects rendered in silver leaf add a sculptural quality. The figures and their environments are ordinary, but endowed with an intriguing mutability.
Chosen Family Through March 9 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com. 301-277-2863.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
Have a news tip or see an error? Write to us here. Please include the article’s headline in your message.
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4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
Washington, D.C
‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington
The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.
In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.
“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”
Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.
Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.
“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.
“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”
Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”
A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.
Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.
Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.
But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.
“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”
At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.
The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.
Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.
For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.
“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”
For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.
In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.
Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.
“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”
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