TODAY, IT IS challenging to keep artistic practice and politics apart. With the shift from structuralism to biopolitics, philosophers and scholars have become obsessed with the subject. Jacques Ranciè…

LI SHURUI’S series of paintings “Lights” has found a relatively reasoned form of visual expression, to the point where the paintings look almost too proficient. It has been nearly ten years since she …

How long is mourning? (Dictionary, Memorandum): eighteen months for a father, a mother ——Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, October 29, 1977 Roland Barthes started writing his Mourning Diary, October 26,…

Nine years ago, Zhai Liang called a selection of his works the “Decisions Collection.” They are small watercolors, mostly of scenes from daily life. Some include human figures and some are simple scenes. Titles such as Tian’anmen Square, Dancing to Sounds, The Ambush, and Massive Dust Particles emphasize the narrative force of the paintings. As…

THOUGH SHANG YANG enjoyed great success with his series “The Dong Qichang Project,” he has far from rested on his laurels in the decade since. In his latest solo exhibition at the Suzhou Museum, “Shan…

AS A YOUNG artist heading towards and steadily exploring maturity, Li Binyuan brings, on at least two different levels, a degree of tension to the origins of his art: one is in the manufactured grammar that has emerged in modern poetry, and the other in the physical essence of the sculpting experience. As a former…

  TIME: THE FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANNIE WAN EXCAVATING THE FUTURE UNKNOWN ACCORDING TO THE Hong Kong novelist Dung Kai-Cheung, future archaeology is a dialectical method to create the present. It…

In his work , Zhao Yao has found a sound and sustainable mode of exhibition that he calls “serial performance.” Born out of his suspicion with regard to all of the formalized complacencies created by contemporary art, the method allows him to engage in ongoing strikes against mechanisms of the exhibition as well as of…

ONE COULD SAY that Li Songsong’s The One is a major work, one that seeks purity by way of refining the understanding of the language of oil painting, or by way of the conceptual. The work itself, roughly speaking, is a cylindrical silver tunnel, the inner walls of which are covered with 91 monochromatic paintings…

Xu Qu gained a certain degree of recognition after his contribution to “51m²” at Taikang Space: the single-channel video work Upstream, in which the artist and a friend navigate a rubber dinghy along Beijing canals starting outside of the city center and ending in the vicinity of the central government’s headquarters in Zhongnanhai, where they…

NARI WARD IS a Jamaican-born installation artist whose work forges new semiotic possibilities for our relation to objects. Ever since his breakthrough work Amazing Grace (1993), in which he amassed nearly 300 abandoned baby carriages from Harlem streets and bound them together with fire hose in a disused firehouse, the “reinvention” of found materials has…

“VAMPIRE” MAY MARK the first time Pace Beijing has held a Western artist’s solo exhibition, but this is not Sterling Ruby’s first show in China, he having also made an appearance in UCCA’s 2008 group exhibition, “Stray Alchemists.” In that show, his piece, a nine-meter-tall monument, took up almost the entirety of UCCA’s central hall….

South Africa – New York – South Africa LEAP: So, what got you into making art? Kendell Geers: Well, it’s very simple. In South Africa during apartheid, every white male was supposed to go into the military. Conscription was mandatory and involuntary. I was against apartheid and therefore against the military. And the only way…

“I ask it be extinguished / This crude iron light / The light of lovers / The light of the sun.” Such goes the first line of the poet Hai Zi’s work I Ask: Rain. According to Liang Yuanwei, this “crude iron light” leaves a biting sensation in her mouth. Sometimes words and fleeting images…

Matt Hope has spent the last three years deep within the recesses of a studio and gallery compound on the south side of Caochangdi, putting off his debut solo exhibition. Instead of rushing into the public eye, he has used this time to explore the processes and infrastructures of fabrication throughout Mainland China. Hope knows his fabricators well: from the machine…