NOT VACANT, JUST INVISIBLE IN 2011, YUCHENG Chou held an exhibition in Taiwan’s Hong-Gah Museum titled “TOA Lighting” (1). When the exhibition first opened and the audience, stepping onto smooth floorboards, entered the exhibition space, they were greeted with bare walls and not a pedestal in sight. The whole space was devoid of anything that…

THE BODY, AS the most apparent symbol and object of all the various forms of conscious- ness and conceptual undertakings, along with the evolution of modern industrial society and contemporary consumerist culture, has itself become a prominent discursive object, which is continuously being redefined, rewritten, and disciplined. Of the artistic practices that correspond to or…

TAIWAN’S MARTIAL LAW provisions included laws clearly suppressing assembly, demonstrations, and the forming of organizations. Nonetheless, one afternoon on a holiday in 1983, five youths appeared on Ximending Street dressed in white khaki pants and wearing cotton bags over their heads. They walked, shoulder-to-shoulder, from the Red House to the Wannian Theater, attracting the attention…

Entering Hu Xiaoyuan’s most recent solo exhibition, “No Fruit at the Root,” begins with passing through a somewhat narrow corridor in the shadow of tall separating walls. This winding corridor joins three spaces: one dark, one bright, and one with darkness set in the center of light. The layout is in graceful disorder, and the…

THE NARRATIVES OF Duan Jianyu’s paintings tend to start out with everyday reality, and then midway through fade out and slip slowly into the world of the mind. This kind of narrative technique appears consistently in the artist’s creations. Take for instance the fictional text of New York, Paris, Zhumadian (2008), inspired by a piece…

I can’t tell the difference between wisdom and the ability to feel (intuition); they’re the same thing. — Jean-Luc Godard EXPOSURE THERE REALLY AREN’T many things we can do. Most of the time, initiating an activity begins with “observing” both the world and our own position within it; the means and outcome of this observation…

This is a real back garden, a place of exile, a place to seek refuge, a place for the recluse. Here is a living, breathing specimen of history and nature— on this piece of land, a complex mixture of past and present, a Naxi Village where a movement in words and language is now taking…

The process of urbanization and the expansion of cities have created economic and physical spaces where urban and rural characteristics mingle together. Various land uses and administrative systems come together at what is known as the urban-rural fringe. In fact, we (the Urban Rural Fringe Group) are not concerned with the aesthetic, political, and everyday…

“Kunshan—Under Construction,” an intervention-style research project marrying art and society, began in 2010. The project observes and investigates China’s New Countryside program of rural construction. The specific locale of the project is Kunshan New Village in Chengdu’s Shuangliu county.1 The multidimensional, integrated art intervention project has included field research, on-site creative projects, short-term themed workshops,…

As a rural reconstruction project, the “Bishan Project” has major problems accessing funding. As can be seen from our current resources, going through art projects seems to be the best way to alleviate this problem. I curated the 2011 Chengdu Biennale, and so the Bishan Harvestival joined as part of it, and this way I…

My hometown is near Putian, Fujian. The village is a little bit like an island: past the Mulanxi river, in the hills, surrounded by mountains. Because the village is in the foothills, there are no fields for farming. It is over 30 kilometers from the sea, so fishing isn’t convenient either. The villagers live off…

In the ink wash paintings of the American immigrant Yun-Fei Ji, the equivalent of nostalgia appears as the reflection and examination that follows the rejection of modernity, not as an aesthetic decision based on questions of cultural identity. His works bear the marks of his generation, as well as a critique of reality. Together, the…

IT WAS WHEN we found ourselves tone-deaf and with two left feet that we fell in love with noise. Since his performance at The WALL in June 2011, “Blackwolf Nagashi” has made converts of music fans of all stripes in Taipei. With the release of his debut album Blackwolf Nagashi in Bedroom in May 2012,…

In China, the development of sound art stretches back 15 years (from another perspective, we could perhaps adjust this figure to 12 years; see below). This, in spite of the fact that sound art still occupies a misunderstood and marginalized position (in this respect, media art isn’t much different). However, there are already enough people,…

The Park Avenue Armory has been New York’s “secret art armory” for four or five years now. Every year there are a few unconventional programs of exceptional scale from art world heavy hitters. From Christian Boltanski’s gigantic installation No Man’s Land, to Ariane Mnouchkine’s marathon play Les Éphémères, to Peter Greenaway’s multimedia epic Leonardo’s Last…

QIN QI HAS done fewer and fewer large-scale works over the past two years, essentially changing his form of practice since the art world first became familiar with him. Looking back to the start of 2005, Qin’s large-scale works appeared frequently in all sorts of contemporary art exhibitions. At that time, regardless of whether the…

It would be easy to view the artistic practice of Lee Kit as a quaint celebration of the quotidian side of life, or perhaps as a pensive homage to the everyday carried out through a mute interplay of found objects placed within a space. In this sense it resembles so much global arte povera seen…

The greatness of Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, according to Georges Bataille, lies exactly in its relationship to the original— Francisco Goya’s El Tres de Mayo 1808— or its inheritance of resistance: the regard for and expression of indifference. “There is no essential difference between him painting the scene of an execution or painting…

In 1957, the filmmaker Agnès Varda assumed the role of photographer during a two-month journey around both urban and rural China with a delegation of French dignitaries. Fifty-five years later, Varda resolved to display the photographs she took during that trip as part of the exhibition “The Beaches of Agnès Varda in China,” and in…

The decision by Ma Qiusha to call her new solo exhibition “Static Electricity” was not one born of careful deliberation. It was made after accidentally coming across the term in a book during an anxious search for a title for her new exhibition. The objects and experiences implied by the term “static electricity” themselves bear…