The exiled knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. — Edward Said Anida Yoeu Ali’s “Buddhist Bug Project” offers a particularly unique perspective on dis- placement:…

For the art audience in Jakarta, Yuz Museum has its particular position, which is quite different from other spaces in the city. Yuz Museum has a focus on showing Chinese contemporary art, especially from its collection, which is quite distanced from Indonesian audiences. In the beginning of its establishment, Yuz Museum had shown important figures…

“Let’s get lost, lost in each other’s arms / Let’s get lost, let them send out alarms,” Chet Baker praises the romantic mystique and disruptive force in letting go of orientation. This lust of wandering reflects the mood of “Urban Synesthesia,” a five-person group exhibition curated by Wang Chun-Chi. The usual highways to understanding an…

Showcasing Song Dong’s work from the mid-1990s to the present, “Doing Nothing” occupies two out of three of Pace’s 25th Street galleries. Pace’s larger space, 534 W 25th, surveys Song’s performance-based work from 1994-2012 through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, while the smaller space at 510 W 25th St presents new, mostly sculptural works expanding…

For his first solo show in the United States, Liu Wei fashions reclaimed wood from domestic interiors into a soaring, architectural ensemble, transforming the gallery space into a curious amalgam of Gothic cathedral and country home. A version of this body of work first debuted in the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, where the improbable title— Merely…

What can Andy Warhol do for us? At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, situated by Victoria Harbour, “15 Minutes Eternal” features over 400 works brought from the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, on the streets surrounding the museum, tourists from all over the world are busy racking up their credit…

Double entendres and word plays abound in this exhibition, which is intent on displaying the dual contexts that result from cultural translation, often with comical results. Zhang Lehua delights in such post-colonial treasure hunting. From the words and phrases incorporated into his works, the images used, exhibition layout, to the show’s title, and even the…

After first passing through a black room, the viewer discovers that the large exhibition hall actually contains three rooms, each painted a different color. The middle room is yellow. A blue room, multi-angled, juts out from one end of the gallery, its walls seemingly transparent and spectral. Only one work is placed outside of the…

For a contemporary art exhibition of any scale, plans can change quickly. Whether it is achieving the potential of the concept through implementation or meeting local requirements for fire safety at the site, the audience remains unaware of the multitude of factors that influence the final outcome. So for artists, their artworks, and exhibition layout,…

Upon exiting the elevator, you come face to face with an installation by the Xijing Men, a large Xijing flag hanging on the wall opposite the elevator. In front of the entrance to the exhibition hall is a pile of carefully stacked, clean cardboard boxes partitioning off the “Exit and Entry Bureau.” But this affected…

In the state of Kerala in southern India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened its doors on December 12, 2012. The picturesque old colonial town of Kochi, or as the locals call it, “God’s own country,” welcomed over 150,000 visitors in the first month of the exhibition. Many works of the 94 participating artists were made on…

Only a couple of years since the ZKM first fell for globalization, we step again onto the terrain of global reality as soon as we enter “Move on Asia,” an exhibition imported from Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul. Here, more than 140 works are gathered under the “Asian” label, with artists from China, Hong Kong,…

There is something about Hong Kong’s urban landscape that invokes the dystopian future envisioned in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?— a sci-fi tale of the android bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his chase for murderous, thinking robots set in a consumer-saturated city. Perhaps this is why curator Qinyi Lim chose…

HISTORY LESSONS: REFLECTIONS ON OCAT PUBLISHING ALTERNATIVES TO RITUAL: A CASE STUDY OF SHENZHEN OCT CONTEMPORARY ART TERMINAL On January 26, two exhibitions opened to mark OCAT’s eighth anniversary: “History Lessons: Reflections on OCAT Publishing,” curated by Fang Lihua and Li Rongwei, and “Alternatives to Ritual: A Case Study of Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Art Terminal,”…

Taipei’s Hong-Gah Museum has long been the home of video art in Taiwan. The role that its modestly-sized biennial serves is akin to an observation tower. The first two editions, titled “Dwelling Place” and “Eattopia,” were jointly curated by Chen Yung-Hsien and Sean C. S. Hu, and chose as their starting points the material world…

At Gasworks in London, three video works made by Lana Lin between the 1990s and the early 2000s explore the artist’s Taiwanese heritage— and her Western influences— both materially and thematically, in work that explores the complex feeling that comes from existing between multiple cultural frameworks. The exhibition begins with Taiwan Video Club (1999), in…

Huang Yong Ping’s “Circus” presents a herd of beheaded taxidermied beasts posed amongst an oversized bamboo cage in Gladstone Gallery’s southernmost Chelsea space. The dome-shaped cage dons a monumental, wooden marionette hand, its strings connected to the skeleton of a robe-clad monkey puppeteering the bones of a smaller monkey— a reference to the trickster monkey…

An islet named Pulau Sejahat, or “Evil Island,” once sat along the northeastern coastline of Singapore. According to folklore, a fierce battle broke out between the Acehnese and the Portuguese in the waters surrounding Pulau Sejahat in the eighteenth century. Despite the staggering size of the Sumatran Acehnese army, their arrows and spears were no…

German curator Alfons Hug has served as Director of the Goethe-Institut in many cities since the 1980s, including Lagos, Medellín, Brasilia, Caracas, Moscow, and currently Rio de Janeiro. Of the five BRICS countries, Hug is familiar with three. Two years ago, he began to plan BRICS-related programs, the starting point for which is an exhibition…

If Heman Chong had dedicated himself entirely to writing, by now he would most likely be stuck in its tight and unmarketable shackles, hanging around dingy dive bars bemoaning his plight to a bunch of good-for-nothings. Luckily, there are plenty of readymade forms beyond the written word able to bear the weight of his intense…