TRANSLATION / Daniel Nieh The voices of actual students describing their experiences are generally missing from discussions of art school education. The following short story, by the young artist YK, …

TRANSLATION / David East A FEW MONTHS AGO , when I started planning an exhibition of work by graduates of Chinese art academies with fellow curator Luan Zhichao, we agreed to work by observing first and choosing a theme only later. After reviewing the graduate exhibitions of the major academies, we focused our curatorial work…

TRANSLATION / Xi Winkler THE LABEL OF “experimental” art has developed new meanings in China since its formulation in the 1990s. In an academic context, the term means something very specific, more qu…

WHAT MIGHT A theory of history look like at this moment? How might art make forms that at least suggest a way forward? These are pressing questions now that we know this era is the Anthropocene, that …

Each generation of artists has to be sensitive to the needs of changing social and cultural structures in order to select the tactics of their practice. Tactics involve shaking off the rigidity of the…

                        WEB EXCLUSIVE The evening of January 12th, an unlikely speaker gave a presentation at The Bookworm, Beijing’s oldest…

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 Although still in the process of receiving her BFA degree, Singapore-based artist Jennifer Mehigan (b. 1988, Ireland) has managed to make a splash with her work in both physical and virtual space. Using online platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram, and Vimeo as conduits, Mehigan’s multimedia practice, with its signature pastel palette and organic,…

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…

                                        LAST WEEKEND, ICA London hosted a Lunch Bytes event inviting writer/ artist/ curator Holly Childs, theorist Florian Cramer, artist David Jablonowski, artist Cally Spooner, and writer/ poet Elvia Wilk to moderate a discussion on linguistic…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Avery Singer (b. 1987, lives and works in New York) is known for her monochromatic airbrush paintings that manage to simultaneously raise philosophical questions and poke fun at the clichés of contemporary art. Her most recent show, “Pictures Punish Words” at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which will soon travel to the Foundazione Sandretto Re…

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…