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…

GUANGDONG TIMES MUSEUM 2014.08.23~2014.10.26 Times Museum projects are often accompanied by discussions about localization. This project was first disputed two years ago, when curators tried to question the definition of an art museum through the exhibition “A Museum That is Not,” particularly around the notion of a community art museum. How can a museum dropped…

THE LOS ANGELES PROJECT ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART 2014.09.13~2014.11.09 Due to the structure of the Chinese art world, most of the international art that comes to Beijing arrives in the form of group exhibitions at the behest of private dealers and collectors. As a result, the works included in these exhibitions often seem to…

Founded in 1995, the Gwangju Biennale has an international reputation based partly on its status as a public memorial to the Gwangju Massacre, and partly on the usual elements of a biennial: the choice of curator, theme, and quality of work. The ten shows have spanned 20 years, the first 10 of which coincided with…

As LEAP explores possibilities for art’s existence in zones of creative and political instability, Larissa Sansour proves that there are always daring alternatives for this core relationship of discourse and space. With the short video Nation Estate (2012), she proposes a viable two- state solution for Palestine and Israel not by divvying up territory in…

  On Sunday the 26th, two solo exhibitions opened at White Space Beijing: “Xie Fan: Back to the Footlights Tomorrow” and “He Xiangyu: Dotted Line.” Although White Space’s double openings are intended as separate shows, it’s hard not to observe the moments where the two overlap. White Space tends to favor artists born after 1980…

“Sue Williams” at James Cohan Gallery For decades, American painter Sue Williams (b. 1954) has been creating colorful, large-scale works that pose a dialogue between abstraction and the body. Her solo show at James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai is a miniature retrospective, beginning with her 1996 painting Darklight and culminating in a selection of her…

LAST MONTH, BEIJING-BASED artist Xu Qu (b. 1978) constructed his first large-scale outdoor installation: a tennis court on the terrace of Taikang Space in Do on funny free online sex games up amateur nude free amsterdame web cams on joe reichert adult friend finder have acne no. Beijing’s Caochangdi. Tennis Court, exactly 1/6 the size…

  IN HIS ESSAY “From Image to Media File: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” art critic, media theorist, and philosopher Boris Groys describes the notion of “original” for digital photographs as no longer accurate.[1] In today’s world of digitized images and virtual means of distribution, digital pictures have rather become copies, often absorbed into…

CAMILLE HENROT QUESTIONS where history begins, often incorporating indigenous cultures and anthropological research into her practice. Her most recent exhibition, “The Pale Fox” (2014), is an architectural display integrating found objects, sculpture, drawing, and digital images. The title is taken from a 1965 anthropological study of the West African Dogon people, whose mythology synthesizes the…

IN AN ART WORLD that often seems to elevate style over substance and rewards gloss and flashiness, Kwok Mang-ho, a.k.a. “Frog King” (b.1947), is a welcome antidote. He is easy to place and hard to pigeon-hole, a persona that is a mixture of childish adornment, joy, and serious long-term commitment. Frog King, by his own…

LIU WENTAO’S PAINTING may be consistently monochrome, but it’s anything but monotonous. For nearly a decade, the artist has resisted using color in his work, obsessively reusing two materi…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Former punk musician Wendy Yao is the founder of Ooga Booga, an indie store in L.A.’s Chinatown that carries everything ranging from artist’s books to crochet platform sandals. Since Ooga Booga was founded in 2004, it has been a nexus of creativity in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Asia Art Achive’s Chantal…

GUO HONGWEI (b. 1982) moves beyond his signature watercolor paintings in his latest show at Chambers Fine Art Beijing, “The Great Metamorphist.” At first glance, you might question disbeli…

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…

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…

“Film Directors in Correspondence” is a series of film-related exhibition events, each of which explores the work of an outstanding director from different perspectives, and also features the work of another in order to establish a dialogue. The solo exhibition of Chinese director Wang Bing is one of such exhibition, and Wang chose his longtime…

In trade and economics, the term “positive” is perhaps even more undesirable than its antonym—within the art industry, constantly high on “positivism” (which is essentially no different to fetishism),…

Light, sound, space, and time effectuate four dimensions inseparable from the fulfilled human sensory experience. The quotidian, however, tends to overlook their existence. Art tends to emphasize it; herein lies art’s ontological value. The more illuminating an artist’s delineations of the contours of these dimensions, the more lauded the artist. Zhang Peili is a very…