Closely resembling what you might find in newspaper comics, Dan’s wall drawings are hard-hitting, comprehensible and good for a laugh. But Lia’s work isn’t so straightforward. It’s hard to even draw any conceptual connections between her arrangements of seemingly random objects, let alone read her handwriting. Such first impressions are inevitable upon entering “Knowledge Museum, Doubts & Comments,” and are quite true to defining the nature of the artists’ works—but don’t be rash to pick favorites based on surface judgments. At the exhibition, you’ll not only find Dan’s signature marker drawings executed in thick, black lines, but also “Art in
Hotel”—a series of photographs on various hotel room paintings he found during his frequent travels from 2008–2015, all shot with a compact point-and-shoot. Despite the faintly scrawled text on the wall, the titles of works like “Art in Hotel” and “Erased Graffiti” point directly to the concept of the work. The photo series “Erased Graffiti” does in fact, document erased graffiti found all over the world. But the question to what is erased is debatable, as in the efforts to cover-up certain graffiti, the content of the drawings are merely re-represented and traced out like superb stencil jobs done in white paint. Lia’s work, on the other hand, is conceptually attached to personal poetry and narration, as shown in her subjective timeline on art history. Duchamp’s urinal makes the cut as a notable event in defining the history of contemporary art (as most historians would approve), but so does a neon, barbed-wire bracelet that the artist purchased from Oxford, as well as a handbook on a sculptor’s guide called How to Survive & Prosper as an Artist: Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul. Without having a one-on-one chat with the artist herself, it's difficult to figure out how the selection and the curation came about, but some questions can be answered with a bit of Googling on the spot, just as the artist intended and did in the past. After Romania broke from its Communist regime, Lia also sat down with a paper dictionary to translate the news of her neighboring country, Hungary. So it’s not a really a stretch for the artist to ask the viewers to adapt to her studious nature. After all, it is dubbed the “Knowledge Museum,” and knowledge doesn’t come overnight.