Song Dong’s latest outing at Pace Beijing consists of four video projections in a single dark room, sealed off by labyrinthine curtains. Each video features a seasonal diorama of a landscape, entirely composed of cooked and uncooked foods. As a composition of form and color, each of the foodscapes is aesthetically appealing in a peculiar,…

It has been quite some time since I have experienced this feeling: I walk into an exhibit—without having read any thought-provoking reviews, without having listened to any step-by-step guides to interpretation—and my attention is instantly, viscerally attracted to a work. Facing Shao Fan’s work directly, one can neither perceive his subjective consciousness as an artist,…

As its name implies, “By Day By Night” is different from other exhibitions: it works round the clock, day and night. As the second part of its name, “Or Some (Special) Things A Museum Can Do,” suggests, the role of the museum for this exhibition has also expanded to include more functions than for past…

MoCA Shanghai’s third “Envisage” biennale departed from the mélange of the first two editions; this time the sole focus was on the works of young artists. Entitled “Reflection of Minds,” the exhibition assembled the creations of 27 young artists—hailing from cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou—mostly born since 1980. The pieces displayed at MoCA…

The collaboration between Contemporary Art and Investment magazine and the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art has been fruitful. In late 2009, the magazine’s staff, whose office is based in the Iberia facilities, collaborated with the center on the exhibition “Work in Progress: How Do Artists Work?” The artists shown in “Work in Progress” had all…

“Conception As Enzyme” is consistent with curator Bao Dong’s overall curatorial and critical direction. A creative experiment based on the notion of “conception,” the exhibition resorts to an in-depth discursive and representative exploration that opens out into a profound inspection and review of present reality. The venue’s set-up is a visual labyrinth that consumes the…

The latest incarnation of Heman Chong’s work with the lives of books reaffirms him as a straight-talking artist who reserves a place for the personal and the material within the gestures of post-conceptual art. The London-trained Singaporean artist who is represented by Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou/Beijing), delves into literature and yet side-steps the prosaic to…

Lu Yang’s recent Shanghai solo exhibition—a series of works that straddles the two major topics of science and alternative culture—displays her works in simple, easily recognizable formats: sketched diagrams, stylized videos, lo-fi laser projections. The light, upbeat presentation of the exhibition actually serves to transform it into a profoundly ironic contemplation of our world; taken…

Starting off in September 2009, Jiang Zhi’s solo outing “Attitude” passed from Shanghai to Hong Kong to Beijing in his largest scale, longest spanning exhibition yet. Jiang Zhi used video, installation, painting, and a variety of other methods to focus on the expression of the “rhetoric of the subject” and “the relationship between body and…

Hu Xiaoyuan and Liang Wei’s solo exhibitions opened successively in 798; separate spaces exhibited both of the artists’ four most recent video installation pieces. The works of the two artists not only are of similar volume, but also similarly feature the use of multi-channel monitors. Both made coinciding choices regarding form, electing to embody the…

It is usually just as dusk approaches: Michael Wolf silently scales a high-end office building downtown, resisting gales of wind as they howl across the concrete jungle. He raises his sniper rifle, holds his breath, and takes aim. His armament of choice: a medium format camera. His targets: New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris,…

“Brussels Body Speech,” the cultural promotion project of Brussels’ regional government at the Shanghai World Expo, had an obvious purpose: to generate interest in the arts and culture of Brussels and Belgium through the use of “art” as an “ambassador.” Fortunately, this was not just another instance where curators load up on cultural postcards in…

“Woodcuts in Modern China” offers a concise history lesson in two small gem-studded rooms. The exhibition is also conceived as a somewhat more intimate conversation between contemporary woodblock artists and early twentieth-century masters that preceded them. The older work is drawn from the Theodore Herman collection, a trove of more than two hundred prints obtained…

The museum system’s function within our contemporary art ecosystem is to aptly reflect a certain national condition. Whether nationally or privately operated, the majority of art museums currently keep to the baseline function of serving as public institutions of art, taking a piecemeal, case-by-case approach to collection and exhibition, and seldom carrying out such social…

As with all cities whose cultural resources are unevenly distributed, the most lively art spaces in Xiaozhou village were once scattered along the periphery. But now, with the XiaoZhou-Art Festival, the town has come alive. After the successful hosting of three sessions, the event has already become Guangzhou’s most dynamic folk art festival, a low-cost…

The eighth edition of the Gwangju Biennale was, in artistic director Massimiliano Gioni’s words, an “anthology of portraits” and “a show of faces and eyes.” Based on a simple conceit—that humans make images to stymie the flow of time, and having made them, do strange things in their service—it offered a bulky compilation of pictures…

In its inaugural year, the Aichi Triennale takes its own unique place in a continuum of large-scale periodic exhibitions. More along the lines of an international arts festival than a traditional triennial, the exhibition aims to convey the latest trends in contemporary art to a Japanese public. Taking place in the Japanese city of Nagoya,…

“Great Performances” looks like an art historical exhibit. Curator Leng Lin puts together works derived from a variety of fields—including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance a…

“The Youth Sale Store” is an art project launched by a group of young Shanghai artists—an exhibition-turned-mobile-art-shop. The first stop was hosted in the Shanghai M50 Creative Park, and the next stop is Beijing. Participating artists collect, display, and sell the works of other artists in their own peer networks, and new documentary photographs accompany…

Shi Qing and Shao Yi’s two-person exhibition “Elementary Spectacle” is not so much a fascinating laboratory of materials as it is an anxiety-inducing image world. In this world, “objects” are the law. Classic models of elevated stature are constructed through a form of imitation solemn in its cheapness; taboos are used to highlight the existence…