NIETZSCHE’S RALLYING CRY presages postmodernism. Many believe that, with the advent of postmodernism, we are finally freed from the weight of history to pursue a more relaxed, freer, pluralistic life of pleasure. Everything will flow, and burdensome realities will dissipate as laughter rings out. Not so long ago, when Stephen Chow’s A Chinese Odyssey became…

By today’s standards, Musique Concrète seems like idealist fundamentalism, attempting as it does to provide a morphology and paradigm for sound art. Yet can this paradigm once again initiate revolution? Though war has been, is now, and will always be a catastrophe for art and culture globally, in the wake of the flames of the…

Joseph Beuys’ theory of social sculpture is a philosophical touchstone for Marko Daniel, curator of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. As he sees it, social sculpture expands the concept of sculpture beyond physical form and into the realm of social relations. It also anticipates the interactive, cooperative, and participatory paradigm in which“everyone is an artist.”…

The golden rule of communication studies is that new media is necessarily born of new culture. The artist may have no business in pre-empting these changes, but when it comes to new media in art in practice, the important question lies in the extent to which a work can alter modes of presenting art and…

THE PRIVATE ART museums appearing on the outskirts of Chinese cities in recent years are like vast fairy tale castles flung down from the sky—they bear no relation to their surroundings. Forging the ambitious myth of art in the wilderness, after all, is a great way to catch our attention. It is actually quite fitting…

In the 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud became one of the most influential authors of contemporary art criticism thanks to his work Relational Aesthetics . From 1999 to 2006, he served as co-director of Palai…

MOSCOW UNIVERSITY, 1953 Riverside. The sense of waking up in a silvery shower of leaves; lying on a cool bed of brambles in a forest. Water trickles by my sides all around; screeches and hoots periodically emanate from the greenblue light twinkling. My presence emerged from the wrinkled hands of a man in a foreign…