In the last thirty-some years, most exhibitions of contemporary art in China have been spontaneous, community events, although such events have not yet been entirely accepted by society as part of mai…

SHOES This is a personal experience of a friend who studied abroad. When he was interning at an art center, he often guarded art exhibitions by himself. One time, he was guarding a video installation….

As the financial hub of Southeast Asia, Singapore has clear cultural ambitions within the region. With the fourth Singapore Biennale, the primary aim is the study and display of Southeast Asian curato…

Ink is ancient Oriental culture’s great contribution to the world. Compared to artistic media such as oil painting and miniature painting, ink painting is a result of the free and spontaneous flow of water and ink on paper, and the dilemma between the controllability and uncontrollability of the four materials—brush, ink, water, and paper— constitutes…

A defining property of music is its ordered relationship to time. The experience of sound, on the other hand, is one of disorder. Sound can ring out abruptly, and it can vanish at random. Human understanding has been suppressed by the weight of visual experience. Sometimes, our hearing is a victim of dependence, or even…

For her first solo exhibition in China, Pipilotti Rist created several new works for the Times Museum in Guangzhou and the surrounding community. These included a series of lanterns made of recycled materials from the residential complex below, the 30-meter-long video installation Mercy Mercy, a humorous chandelier made of underwear, and brightly colored videos that…

NICOLAS BOURRIAUD HAS drawn on botanical concepts in order to define aesthetic characteristics in a globalized context, as distinguished from the extreme modernist “radical” tradition. In their pure pursuits, their thirst for the establishment of a new order, and their infatuation with the roots of “l’essence,” practitioners of contemporary art frequently adopt a kind of…

On first encountering the works of Taiwanese artist Liu Han-Chih, few people fail to be amused by the sense of black humor around them. One, titled Collar Seizing Device, is a mechanical installation which sports a handle that connects directly to the viewer’s collar. When the handle is turned, the viewer is dragged upwards by…

The title of Wang Chung-kun’s “Series of Another Soundscape” seems to misadvertise the show as a sonic exploration of sound as environment. The exhibition, hosted by Nou Gallery, Taipei, features five kinetic sculptures that notate music: a lottery machine that decodes the winning number on digital screen; a fax machine that prints a continuous sheet…

The division between Liberalism and the New Left that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s polarized the Chinese intellectual world. Adherents of Liberalism, guided by the theories of free markets and constitutional democracy put forth by Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman, argue that China’s key challenges are returning power to the markets and combating…

A summer pavilion usually provides three basic amenities: seating, shade, and shelter. From a distance, it is unclear whether Sou Fujimoto’s Serpentine Pavilion, which seems to hover atop a clearing i…

BIRDMAN: CURE VERSUS CULTIVATION The film Birdman of Alcatraz was adapted from the true story of Robert Stroud. Wild, erratic, and irascible of temperament, Stroud was sentenced to 12 years in prison …

FROM THE 1950s through the 70s, propaganda art was valued as a crucial weapon for political struggle. It was an effective way to mobilize the people, in particular, peasants and workers who, at the co…

Authorship is a subject matter that has returned repeatedly throughout the history of avant-garde art practices in the twenty-first century. Ever since Marcel Duchamp mocked the artistic genius behind…

The oppressive heat of this Tokyo summer is a fitting setting for the second half of a two-part solo exhibition from Francis Alÿs at MOT in Tokyo, based on his recent work Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River. In the main exhibition hall a two-sided screen plays a video loop of…

My curiosity in Liao Guohe started from his CV. He was born in Calcutta in 1977, studied mechanical drawing in the United States, and now lives in Hunan. Before World War II, about 20,000 Chinese fled to Calcutta; by the end of the Sino-Indian War in 1962 this population was down to a cool 7,000…

AS A YOUNG artist heading towards and steadily exploring maturity, Li Binyuan brings, on at least two different levels, a degree of tension to the origins of his art: one is in the manufactured grammar that has emerged in modern poetry, and the other in the physical essence of the sculpting experience. As a former…

Let Panda Fly opens with an aerial shot—accompanied by emotional music—of four children on a mountain road, setting out into the morning sun. The powerful scene seems almost purposely to leave the audience in suspense. It is the beginning of the film, but the end of the story. All of the “pandas” have long since…

THE GENUINE CONTENT of science fiction is not much more about the future than the present. According to Fredric Jameson, its interest is not to provide us with “images” of the future, but to bewilder …

  TIME: THE FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANNIE WAN EXCAVATING THE FUTURE UNKNOWN ACCORDING TO THE Hong Kong novelist Dung Kai-Cheung, future archaeology is a dialectical method to create the present. It…