After touring the Asia-Pacific region since the beginning of 2011, The Absolut Art Collection has stopped in China to add to its growing range of artworks.

Absolut Vodka has been driven by creativity since it was first bottled 30 years ago, and has now built a reputation with artists worldwide for its involvement with the art world.

Ever since 1985, when Andy Warhol became inspired by the aesthetic of the Absolut bottle and created Absolut Warhol, the brand’s creative journey has continued to flourish. The whole collection now features over 800 pieces of artwork and over 400 artists.

Since early 2011, Absolut, which is regarded as the world’s leading premium vodka from Sweden, has toured cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Dubai and Sydney.

It has taken 19 of its most famous pieces of original artwork, and has settled in an exhibition held at Beijing’s Today Art Museum. The chosen artworks span a variety of mediums, from canvas to photography, and also include works by Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente and Louise Bourgeois.

The two most classic works, the Absolut Warhol (1985) and the Absolute Bourgeois (2003) will be the flagship pieces of the Absolut Art Tour 2011.

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Creating dioramas of urban environments requires some painstaking patience and not to mention a steady hand!

Artist Alan Wolfson was blessed with such necessary skills to become one of America’s leading diorama creators, with dexterity, creativity and a bundle of patience being seemingly etched on his soul.

The artist has been creating dioramas of urban landscapes for more than 20 years, and has accrued an uncannily realistic selection of miniature streets, bars, hotels and many other significant cityscape components.

Being born and bred in New York, most of Alan Wolfson’s miniature sculptures are dedicated to a certain aspect or feature of his hometown. Although it is Wolfson’s latest creation, the Canal Street Cross-Section diorama, which is really causing pulses to race within the art world at present.

Comprising of a street scene, upper subway and lower subway, the Canal Street Cross-Section mini urban sculpture took the artist 18 months to complete.

Since the 1970s, virtual reality has been a powerful component in shaping society’s social and artistic environment and constructing small-scale hand-built depictions of real-life environments has been at the heart of this prevailing artistic trend.

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Since the first Mercedes-Benz vehicles were introduced in 1926, the company has led the way in creating innovative features to the automobile industry and has become one of the world’s best-known car brands in the world.

Not only is Mercedes-Benz the oldest standing automobile brand name still in existence, but ever since its inception, the German car manufacturers has become synonymous with style, quality, durability and luxury.

Given the brand’s seemingly inherent dexterity to withstand the boundaries of time and produce features and components which become mirrored by car manufacturers across the globe, it is almost taken-for-granted when Mercedes-Benz announce a concept car with a design that is said to be inspired by “the wind and the waves, as well as engineering aviation”.

Incorporating a dash-mounted tablet, the modern-day gadgetry society has now become reliant on is at the heart of the Mercedes A-Class concept car.

The ‘aviation-inspired’ car will also have a BlueEFFICIENCY 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine under the hood, which will produce a whopping 210-horsepower, guaranteed to get the pulses races of lovers of high-speed, quality vehicles.

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Just when we all thought it was Victoria Beckham who was the fashion designing maestro of the ‘brand Beckham duo’, her superstar husband has stepped into the design limelight, by announcing he is to design a children’s clothing range with his A-list celebrity pal, Snoop Dog.

From hairstyles to tattoos, sarongs to shirts, out of the two, it is arguably David who has always paid homage to a devout string of followers and has exuded a touch more style and class than his ‘fashion diva’ wife.

Although Posh need not panic that there will be a rival designer hot at her heels, as David is steering well clear of designing the sexy and stunning dresses Victoria has become renowned for, as her husband is interested in designing clothing for babies and children, presumably inspired by the couple’s shopping for clothes for their growing brood and baby who is due to be born sometime in the summer.

According to several reports, the 39-year-old rapper Snoop Dog has already began sketching out ideas for the range.

According to the British tabloid the Daily Mirror, Snoop said,

“I’d love to do a babygro range and baby house shoes with Beckham.”

Now it looks like there is to be more than one world renowned fashion designer in the Beckham household, or should David stick to what he’s best at – free kicks?

In 2002, the Bush administration prevented the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum located in Pittsburgh, from bringing Cuban artists into the States to participate in an artistic show that explored the issue of race in Cuba known as “Cuba: The Artists in Residence”.

Nine years later, with the reinstating of more relaxed travel laws, the Mattress Factory has achieved what it set out to do almost a decade earlier and brought nine of the thirteen artists from Cuba to the States to platform the highly controversial and thematically complex show.

The exhibition is now bigger and bolder than the one originally planned in 2002 and has arrived in New York this month.

The show, which has been given the profound title “Queloides”, the name of the scars left on the skin of black slaves in Cuba in the mid-1900s, is no means exclusive to Cuban history.

The highly provocative show includes the works of Manuel Arenas, Juan Roberto Diago and Douglas Perez, and offer provocative takes on controversial issues including poverty, migration, overcrowding and insight into the pain and anguish many black migrants were exposed to during a highly disturbed epoch in Cuba’s history.

One of the exhibition’s particularly divisive pieces is “The Raft”, a sculpture by Armando Marino. The sculpture is of the empty body of a Plymouth in the 1950s with its wheels replaced by a forest of black legs.

Since the exhibition was first launched in Hanava in April last year, it has received mixed views. Much of the Cuban media decided to ignore “Queloides” due to the fact that racism in Cuba is considered a highly taboo subject.

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