If you are in Seattle, we recommend you stop by the Frye Art Museum and view a new exhibit on the brutality of the death penalty by University of Washington Professor and artist Zin Liu. You can view one of the paintings and learn more about the exhibit here. The exhibit runs through January 25. A fully illustrated color catalogue is available in the museum store.

In a group of 12-by-7-foot paintings titled "Five Capital Executions in China," Lin makes us party to shocking, almost off-hand executions played out among crowds of people who show little emotion as they cluster to watch or simply pass by on their daily routines. The paintings — which show decapitation, starvation, flaying, drawing and quartering, and shooting — aren't modeled on actual events. But Lin's fictional scenes do depict real methods of execution, past and present, which for him represent a long history of human cruelty not confined to any one nation. Because of the large scale of the paintings and Lin's clever compositional tricks, we end up feeling like passive onlookers to the carnage.

As the reviewer of the exhibition points out, it's tempting to think this can't happen in America. But, as the exhibition catalog points out,

The death penalty has been abolished in 106 nations, and 80 percent of the world's recorded executions take place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The artist's message:

I feel strongly about capital punishment," he says. "It's government sanction of killing, a vicious cycle that doesn't end."

Here's more on the art: