Pierre Huyghe’s latest film, Human Mask (2014), opens with drone footage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, site of the 2011 meltdown, before settling in Kayabukiya Tavern, a modest establishment just outside the quarantine zone in Utsonomiya, Japan. Before the disaster, the tavern made headlines for its monkey waitstaff, dolled up in masks, wigs, and…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Our modern world is fast.  The connections we make are immediate yet superficial:  texting, social media, and mass media swirl past us to until we are left over-saturated by information, much of which is useless.  Amidst all of this, hiding in plain sight, are the evils of corruption, poverty, and the complacency we…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Edouard Malingue has made the long trek across Queen’s Road Central, down Pedder Road, and up Des Voeux Road Central. His new space—easily double the size of his old one, which boasted a clever OMA design by which office and auxiliary space surrounded a central, off-axis exhibition area—is designed by the young architectural…

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…

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK 2014.11.09~2015.02.22  “If something is not yet known, then only what it is not can be understood,” wrote the artist Elaine Sturtevant—who preferred just Sturtevant professionally—in a 1971 letter. One of the most extraordinary and undervalued minds on the international art scene, the Ohio-born artist passed away earlier this spring,…

PLATFORM CHINA CONTEMPORARY ART INSTITUTE, BEIJING 2014.10.25~2014.11.02 Seven medium-sized photographs, four videos, a few paragraphs of text: Zhuang Hui’s solo exhibition appears as a re- strained a…

LONG MUSEUM, SHANGHAI 2014.09.28~2014.12.10 When the Long Museum West Bund opened in 2013, many wondered how it would solicit repeat visits to the collection of Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian. Hosting visiti…

  PALAIS DE TOKYO,PARIS 2014.10.20~2015.01.11 The mission of the Palais de Tokyo has always been to actively discover young international talent; the rumor goes that one former director was asked…

  SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK 2014.10.31~2015.02.16 How much meaning can be read into the presentation of a single solo exhibition? Much has been made of the fact that Wang Jianwei’s exhibition at the Guggenheim is the first such major museum solo for a Chinese artist; while the viability of this claim depends entirely…

BEIJING COMMUNE 2014.09.30 – 2014.11.15 Song Ta’s exhibition at Beijing Commune is unusual in that the work he includes does not make use of a common visual language, nor does it have a clear co…

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 “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…

Throughout his career it has been Ruby’s installation work, deliberately inchoate hybrids of forms and media, that has earned him the most critical attention. They touch a nerve with their visceral, g…

HOW DO YOU occupy something as abstract as capitalism? This was one of the main questions posed by the Occupy movement in its quest towards an alternative system; one that was more sustainable, democratic, and just. A system run by corporations directs our understanding and representation of the world. To fully understand a system you…

IF YOU HAVEN’T seen Brooklyn-based artist Zak Prekop’s paintings, asking for a visual description won’t help you much. Figure-ground reversal, color theory, patterns, and collage—all of these might make you groan, “Not another Digital Age abstract painter with an MFA!” But although the above characteristics might seem generic, Prekop does them differently. He collages the…

GUANGDONG TIMES MUSEUM 2014.08.23~2014.10.26 Times Museum projects are often accompanied by discussions about localization. This project was first disputed two years ago, when curators tried to question the definition of an art museum through the exhibition “A Museum That is Not,” particularly around the notion of a community art museum. How can a museum dropped…

THE LOS ANGELES PROJECT ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART 2014.09.13~2014.11.09 Due to the structure of the Chinese art world, most of the international art that comes to Beijing arrives in the form of group exhibitions at the behest of private dealers and collectors. As a result, the works included in these exhibitions often seem to…

Founded in 1995, the Gwangju Biennale has an international reputation based partly on its status as a public memorial to the Gwangju Massacre, and partly on the usual elements of a biennial: the choice of curator, theme, and quality of work. The ten shows have spanned 20 years, the first 10 of which coincided with…

  On Sunday the 26th, two solo exhibitions opened at White Space Beijing: “Xie Fan: Back to the Footlights Tomorrow” and “He Xiangyu: Dotted Line.” Although White Space’s double openings are intended as separate shows, it’s hard not to observe the moments where the two overlap. White Space tends to favor artists born after 1980…

“Sue Williams” at James Cohan Gallery For decades, American painter Sue Williams (b. 1954) has been creating colorful, large-scale works that pose a dialogue between abstraction and the body. Her solo show at James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai is a miniature retrospective, beginning with her 1996 painting Darklight and culminating in a selection of her…