The subtitle of the inaugural CAFAM Biennale, “Super-Organism,” is “Research and Experiment from a Specific View.” This “non-biennial,” established within a biennial framework, brings an abstract theme to a specific space through the arrangement of works and coordination of related activities; it also summarily seeks theoretical propulsion through texts including a catalog, a forum transcript,…

The root of the word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiotes, which originally described those incapable of shouldering communal responsibility. The definition certainly fits people in current popular culture who also shirk all responsibility, preferring to spend their time following absurd internet trends. To an extent, these modern idiots bear the shadow of the hippies,…

A sculptor by training, Wang Sishun has in recent years been creating conceptual art seemingly unrelated to sculpture. In these works, Wang takes a playful, Dadaist approach to transforming readymade products and everyday materials, dismantling their physical properties, function, and value to restructure our sensory experiences of once-familiar objects. For Uncertain Capital, Wang melted down…

“Chasing Sites” was a relatively sedate presentation for artist Weng Wei, focusing on her ink paintings on rectangles of paper and cutouts affixed to clearly delimited sections of the gallery walls. These new works and their installation in Pékin Fine Arts have calmed the spontaneity of her earlier appearances, and this aspect of spontaneity— instigated…

In the vast, far-stretching OCT gallery space, curved walls separated two works produced for this exhibition of Qiu Anxiong’s new work. The work A Study in Autopsy appeared to simulate the organs and circulatory system of a human body, while Surplus Value featured projected images of a running horse, accompanied by racing equipment. On a…

A comprehensive article by archaeologist and translator Bruce Doar portrays Aniwar as a refined traveler in the manner of a solitary, spiritual nomad. This uncommon aura is borne out by the paintings, drawings, and felt works shown recently at Platform China. Vivid yet earthy, they seemed attuned to the natural world and its moods, colors,…

WIND LIGHT AS A THIEF | Arrow Factory, Beijing 2011.07.03-2011.09.20 I AM CURIOUS YELLOW, I AM CURIOUS BLUE | Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing 2011.07.16-2011.08.16 A MOLE ON EACH BREAST AND ANOTHER ON THE SHOULDER | Magician Space, Beijing 2011.07.28-2011.08.21 Summertime is downtime for the gallery system. There are bound to be a few inconsequential group…

Elephants drop through the ceiling, dogs poke their heads through pipes, and parrots perch on upside-down human statuary. Gao Lei’s mixed-media installations draw on a bestiary to examine human ambition and human limits. His art is populated by a carnival of animals that appear in room-sized installations, photographs enclosed inside lightboxes, and mixed-media oil paintings,…

In the short period of time from 2008’s “Synthetic Times” exhibition to the recently opened “Translife” exhibition, the “International Triennial of New Media Art” has done much to reinvigorate the National Art Museum of China. “Translife” is divided into three sections: “Sensorium of the Extraordinary,” which investigates the human senses; “Sublime of the Liminal,” which…

The canonizing ramps of the Guggenheim rotunda played host to this five-decade retrospective of Korean-Japanese artist Lee Ufan (b. 1936), tracing his prolific career in a chronological and thematic upward spiral curated by Alexandra Munroe. Series of gestural, postminimalist paintings punctuated the hike, while sculptures informed by inherent and enlivened “encounters” among things of different…

In 1967, Sony released the Portapak portable camcorder in New York. This household camcorder, with its playback function and lightweight, easy-to-use design, would rescue moving images from exclusive use by professionals and deliver them into the hands of individuals for their own memories and imaginations to manipulate. Twenty years later, China reached a similar turning…

To get an idea of what this exhibition is like, it is perhaps best to start with a description of Liang Shuo’s Fortified Colors (2011), an installation of multicolored affordable household items stuffed behind three pieces of glass to form an extremely soft and colorful screen. However, behind is an entirely different scene: chaotic furniture…

According to curator Nikita Choi’s introduction, a series of real experiences and encounters at the Times Museum were what inspired her to put together an exhibition reflecting on the concept of the museum. In her words, art couriers only see two sides to an art museum: the bank and the store. They unfortunately turn a…

Propaganda is a one-way affair. It is a device, a prop, controlled by the powerful to dictate to the weak. Do this. Believe that. For it to be successful, there can be no talk back. But what if propaganda were a tool of self-reflection? What shape would it take? What if, when you looked into…

Every periodic exhibition is ultimately, institutionally, about something. And just as Gwangju is a memorial to the Korean democratic movement and Singapore is a government creativity scheme, Yokohama is a remedy to a very specific national cultural situation, one that in suitably Japanese terms cannot be easily described but that has something to do with…

Photography, as a tool for representation, is always entangled with time and memory. The figures in a photograph appear before the audience as would actors on a stage; there are roles to be played, all an indication of some absent “other.” In the quiet gap that exists between the space and time at which a…

At its most elemental, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s ongoing collaborative project “The Way of Chopsticks” is a simple binary: as with husband and wife, one chopstick needs the other in order to properly function. As with the previous two installments, also shown at Chambers in 2002 and 2006, “The Way of Chopsticks III” finds…

There will always be artists who move from private dwelling to town square, from self to public: artists who make speeches, who show their works, who focus on the public dimension of art. This phenomenon is not limited by generation, as evidenced by the work of three young artists participating in “The Personal Is Public.”…

“The Stock Exchange, Weather and Sex” may sound borrowed from a Hollywood classic, but the implied drama and tension between these three disparate yet quotidian symbols finds scant response in the artist’s new collection of paintings. Instead, the audience encounters a series of color paintings made of lines and checkered patterns, their anticipation mercilessly flattened…

There is no denying the distinctiveness of Yao Lu’s photomontages. Looking at the 31 works grouped together in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern, uniformity amongst the various scenes evokes a contradictory sense of security and insecurity that persists long after the images have been digested. The sharply rendered photomontages express the continuous…