Ashik Mene, a Turkish Cypriot artist living in the north part of Nicosia, was welcoming and unsurprised when he heard American English on his mobile phone. In a typically Cypriot way, word had already arrived that a foreign artist wanted to speak with him. It happened when he was waiting at the border crossing from…

Melissa Meyer is big in Japan. Not in the euphemistic sense applied to rock stars, but literally. She has just completed her largest paintings to date there. Tokyo’s newest skyscraper, the Shiodome City Center, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates, is also, at 43 floors, the tallest. Ms. Meyer has created a pair…

You have said that your paintings are “family disputes between order and derangement.” Can you talk about that? That’s just a metaphor that came to me; it doesn’t reveal itself in the final product in a literal way. It’s something that happens in my brain, the working out of the painting process. And I guess…