WEB EXCLUSIVE Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka exhibit together for the first time at Gagosian Hong Kong; Wood is new to the Gagosian roster, a surprising move after a long allegiance to Los Angeles dealer David Kordansky, and both artists are new to Hong Kong, so the relationships are fresh all around. The one constant…

TEXT / Shi Qing（1） TRANSLATION / Katy Pinke EDUCATION IS AN ancient profession. In China, the arts academy has a long history, dating back centuries. Since the dawn of the modern era, it has been the …

TEXT / Song Yi TRANSLATION / Sarah Stanton The art academy we propose here is not a place where everyone studies at the same fixed stage of life; rather, it is a process of self-directed maturation governed by a plethora of unknown factors, full of accidents, misunderstandings, accommodations, and any number of other unexpected mishaps….

Each generation of artists has to be sensitive to the needs of changing social and cultural structures in order to select the tactics of their practice. Tactics involve shaking off the rigidity of the…

                        WEB EXCLUSIVE The evening of January 12th, an unlikely speaker gave a presentation at The Bookworm, Beijing’s oldest…

WEB EXCLUSIVE  ShanghArt Beijing’s latest group exhibition, “V&P,” is ambitious in scale and content, juxtaposing still with time-based works, established with emerging artists, and realism with fantasy. Because the exhibition, whose title stands for “video and photography,” features over a dozen artists and 20-plus artworks, it runs the risk of being a cursory overview of…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Although still in the process of receiving her BFA degree, Singapore-based artist Jennifer Mehigan (b. 1988, Ireland) has managed to make a splash with her work in both physical and virtual space. Using online platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram, and Vimeo as conduits, Mehigan’s multimedia practice, with its signature pastel palette and organic,…

WEB EXCLUSIVE “RIVALS” is a savvy interrogation of complicity in a hyper-capitalist era: a time in which artworks are being treated like commodities as never before, resulting in the repetition of certain styles and tropes seemingly repeated ad nauseam. This is cannily reflected in this exhibition through the pairing of consumer products taken from the…

                                        LAST WEEKEND, ICA London hosted a Lunch Bytes event inviting writer/ artist/ curator Holly Childs, theorist Florian Cramer, artist David Jablonowski, artist Cally Spooner, and writer/ poet Elvia Wilk to moderate a discussion on linguistic…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Avery Singer (b. 1987, lives and works in New York) is known for her monochromatic airbrush paintings that manage to simultaneously raise philosophical questions and poke fun at the clichés of contemporary art. Her most recent show, “Pictures Punish Words” at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which will soon travel to the Foundazione Sandretto Re…

As LEAP explores possibilities for art’s existence in zones of creative and political instability, Larissa Sansour proves that there are always daring alternatives for this core relationship of discourse and space. With the short video Nation Estate (2012), she proposes a viable two- state solution for Palestine and Israel not by divvying up territory in…

MOSCOW UNIVERSITY, 1953 Riverside. The sense of waking up in a silvery shower of leaves; lying on a cool bed of brambles in a forest. Water trickles by my sides all around; screeches and hoots periodically emanate from the greenblue light twinkling. My presence emerged from the wrinkled hands of a man in a foreign…

When I first mentioned the idea of making a queer cover feature to friends and colleagues, their most common reaction was “you’re going to write about that beverage?” The beverage in question is Qoo, a Coca-Cola product aimed at kids and teenagers originally from Japan and introduced to the Chinese market in the early 2000s….

I There are places we end up when we don’t really belong anywhere else. This sense of not-belonging, it is naturally felt by those existing on the fringes of society. There of course is no “outside” o…

Dear Editor, Thank you very much for sending the interview with Zheng Shengtian for the studio’s reference—the article offers a conscientious review of the experiences of many Chinese artists in America over the past decades. It bears a lot for domestic art circles to contemplate, and will most likely exert a long-term influence. However, while…

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…

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…

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…

The openness of contemporary art with regard to medium and context allows for a wider range of formal possibilities, and its social orientation also serves to consistently expand the limits of these. …