My curiosity in Liao Guohe started from his CV. He was born in Calcutta in 1977, studied mechanical drawing in the United States, and now lives in Hunan. Before World War II, about 20,000 Chinese fled to Calcutta; by the end of the Sino-Indian War in 1962 this population was down to a cool 7,000…

THE GENUINE CONTENT of science fiction is not much more about the future than the present. According to Fredric Jameson, its interest is not to provide us with “images” of the future, but to bewilder …

This large-scale retrospective of the famous German photographer and Turner prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) provided a complete tour through his enormously versatile oeuvre. Tillmans is known…

THE EVERYDAY AND THE CORE—LlN XUE’S UNTITLED DRAWINGS Lin Xue (b. 1968) achieved instant fame when his work was shown at the
 55th Venice Biennale this year. Curator Massimiliano Gioni had invited Lin
to participate in “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico.” Prior to the show, no more than a thousand people had seen Lin’s work or had heard…

A British scientist once attempted to design a system of global weather forecasting based on a constant stream of data provided by 60,000-plus people. Nowadays, not only are we able to easily establish models for weather prediction, we can even imitate the unruly characteristics of Brownian motion to design other models for random movement. Such…

The exhibition “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution/ Us as Institution” has a title that could be a slogan, and its programming schedule is no less intense. In just six short weeks, the Times Museum also organized artist workshops, seminars, round table discussions, a symposium, and publications. In her selection of artworks and…

In New Zealand’s post-apocalyptic film, The Quiet Earth (1985), three solitary protagonists survive a cataclysmic disaster in Hamilton. Surrounded by refuse and wreckage, the stunned survivors of this science fiction fallout yearn to connect with a place bereft of population. For Hou Hanru, “The remote New Zealand, a faraway ‘there’…can now be seen as a…

SU WEI When we work together, many ideas, anxieties, and problems are interrelated and sometimes projected onto each other. Though these connections are not always apparent, our collaboration has been based upon a common ground we share when we discuss, initiate, and explore things together. Looking back on our past collaboration, I would say what…

Photos from Zhang Huan’s 1994 piece 12 Square Meters have become emblematic of contemporary Chinese performance art. The artist rests in a moment of stasis, existing within different pulls and sensati…

In the 1830s, the electric telegraph was invented. It was designed to organize English characters and punctuation according to the frequency with which they occur in text, and then establish a set of rules. Combinations of dots and dashes were used to represent each letter or sign, those occurring most frequently possessing the shortest assignments….

One salient feature of the exhibition “From Gesture to Language” is the anachronistic juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary. This is perhaps due to the participation of curator Pascal Torres Guardiola, who heads the department of chalcography—engravings, lithographs, and other printed matters—at the Louvre. The longstanding historical connection between engraving and printing in European arts here…

In 1989, two wildfires raged through Taiwanese society, leaving devastation and pain in their paths, while they continue burning to this day. In Su Yu-Hsien’s solo exhibition at TKG+ gallery, “Hua-shan-qiang,” these furious flames are refracted through the exhibition—photographs, a narrative video, and on-site installations—and the result is a beautiful yet tragic world rooted in…

The projection in “Entropy Wrangler,” Ian Cheng’s solo exhibition at Matt Moravec’s new space Off Vendome, is not a video work. It is a program where elements exist in a space defined by forces of causation individual to each figure. Projected in the basement of the Off Vendome space, Moravec describes it as a video…

Chen Zhou holds a knife to his wrist but doesn’t press down. This event early in his new film seems to express the artist’s present state more precisely than anything else—“I want to, but I can’t.” In Chen’s previous work Spanking the Maid, the same “inability” can be found, only on this occasion, the identity…

For readers unable to visit this exhibition in person: The perspective in the photograph to the left appears even stranger in real life. Ignore the stove, clay models, and flames and there is another perspective in a male figure, its body pierced several times with knives, looming gargantuan amongst “mountains.” Gazing beyond him to the…

The exhibition opens with two photographs of the artist, Tang Song, being taken away by police, stepping on the logo of “no returns” of the “China Avant-Garde Exhibition” at the National Art Museum in 1989. In a letter Tang Song had written to the late Dutch archivist Hans van Dijk soon after his release from…

Around 30 years ago, Italo Calvino used a story from the Boccaccio classic The Decameron in a lecture as a prime illustration of the concept of “lightness.” Boccaccio paints the portrait of a hermetic Florentine poet in Guido Cavalcanti, the refined and solemn philosopher who is distrusted and cast out by Florence’s profligate socialites and…

Although “Wang Peng: A Crowd of One” is billed as a retrospective of the artist’s 30-year career, one has difficulty placing the exhibition inside an existing art historical framework. Many a typical retrospective would have the artist carefully select the works shown, exhibition approach, and the venue. The artist would pay close attention to the…

This Su Wenxiang-curated exhibition possesses a title that immediately conjures an atmosphere of political opposition. Yet the title seems dissociated from the exhibition itself, lingering instead by the gallery entrance, or drifting like a soft cloud above the visitor’s head. During its travels between the mouths of its visitors, it is soon simplified into an…

In 2011, Guo Hongwei created three collage works, Shadow in Shadows, The Sunshine Behind the Sunshine, and Highlight of Highlights. His practice fragmented somewhat, and he engaged in various different projects; in a collaboration with an art and fashion magazine, Guo again employed manual, cut-and-paste collage techniques, transforming advertisements into a formal structure, illusory in…