Symposium on “The Borders of Art” DATE: 2010.5.30 / LOCATION: CENTRAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS MUSEUM, VIP LOUNGE Held in conjunction with “Pan Gongkai Conceptual Art Exhibition” FROM LEFT PAN GONGKAI Art theorist and educator; President, China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) ZHU QINGSHENG Professor of Art, Peking University AN YUANYUAN Director, Art and…

Simon Kirby had just called in a food delivery. Kirby, director of the gallery Chambers Fine Art Beijing, was sitting in the Ai Weiwei-designed gallery courtyard out in Caochangdi on a summer afternoon, plotting an exhibition with his visitors. He asked Yangzi about the origins of their group, the Wangjing Painting Society (WPS). Then Dong…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000] History has abandoned time, we have lost our souls. Magicians This world lacks a clear concept of time; we live in emptiness. Right and wrong are confounded! There are no laws, no rules. Lies dominate! Here there are only the cheaters and the cheated. I am a formerly great prognosticator. These days, I practice as a magician, wearing a…

QIU XIAOFEI & HU XIAOYUAN Qiu Xiaofei and Hu Xiaoyuan have been living together for fifteen years now. Best not to think about how long it’s been, Hu says. “It gets scary.” They grew up with no access to computers, and didn’t find out about the Internet until after university. Today, Qiu has little faith in digital images. The aversion…

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A China Youthology x LEAP Special Report For over two years, China Youthology conducted an ongoing study of China’s young people. They are a generation affected by the Internet, a rapidly developing economy, a transforming social structure, the onset of globalization, and the arrival of consumer culture. There are a lot of changes going on. That’s true for China’s youth. What…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=”5710″] THE RISE OF CHINA’S “NEW ART YOUTH” Produced in collaboration with the Zhang Anding and Lisa Li’s consulting office “China Youthology,” this report looks to come to sociological terms with the phenomenon of the “art youth.” PROFILES IN YOUTH Visits with six extraordinary individuals, couples, and collectives who demonstrate the range of…

Polit-Sheer-Form, which marks its fifth birthday this fall, has been a steady presence on the Chinese art scene of these dramatic years. Coming together at regular intervals for debate and a trip or two to the bathhouse, Hong Hao, Leng Lin, Liu Jianhua, Song Dong, and Xiao Yu ponder what it means to belong to…

This exhibition is brimming with tension. From it, one can easily detect the frailty of the Chinese contemporary art world, as well as its sense of internal anxiety. Perhaps that’s not at all the impr…

The full range of discussions regarding the merit and worth of “the biennale,” whether concerning spectacle, universal precarity, making worlds, cultural tourism, consumer culture or “the new,” in what is effectively a global competitive market, all surface in this year’s Biennale of Sydney, and not just in its hyperbolic title, “Beauty of Distance: Songs of…

As the Baha’i saying goes, “Love me (so) that I may love thee,” so you must visit an exhibition for yourself before you dare speak of it. So much of what people say of exhibitions whiffs of a mixture …

After the Duolun Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 2002, the neighborhood around it became a designated tourist attraction and a melting pot for a wide range of art institutions. In short time,…

Initiating discussion on the abstract topic of the mechanisms of creation requires one to be both insouciant and courageous. Of course, neither insouciance nor courage are innate qualities. When artists, musicians, writers and other fellow unemployed get together, when this group of people appeal to the roaming notions and floating emotions of the creative process…

In his solo exhibition “Fit,” the artist Liang Shuo’s role first seems that of a furniture designer. He transformed the entire C5 Art space into a building made up of multiple rooms. In the “living room” Liang “designed” stylish furniture, where visitors may, for example, lie down on a sofa and watch television. However, this…

Since the 1990s, the unique characteristics of contemporary Chinese society and art have been the focus of a great number of artists and curators. There seem to have been an equal number of critics who have pointed out that this type of creation and exhibition is exceedingly simple, spiritually one with traditional realism. In the…

The exhibition “Stepfather Has an Idea!” features six paintings completed by Xie Nanxing since 2009, divided into two series that communicate in apparently dissimilar languages. The works in the “Untitled” series are nonfigurative in nature, employing implied and imaginary systems of words and symbols to transmit to the viewer, for example, a sexual re-interpretation and…

Skulls have been portrayed in art as early as the Middle Ages, especially in biblically themed work, where they have been used to symbolize death, eternity, the fleeting nature of time, and a number of other metaphors. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull and Takashi Murakami’s cartoon skull have taken this symbol and given it contemporary pop…

There are a few reasons why “200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett” feels like an apt fit at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute but none more compelling than the proposition that an organization which is at its core an art magazine might be naturally allied with another organization which is at its core…

Joseph Needham once said: “In the history of intercultural communication, nothing seems comparable to the Jesuits’ arrival to China in the seventeenth century.” To be sure, in China, the opinion of a Western scholar can still not be regarded as historical truth, even if history textbooks in China’s high schools do make mention of the…