Sui Jianguo’s solo exhibition at Pace Beijing mounted the representative works of his various phases from the 1980s on, the earliest of which is a plaster cast sculpture from 1987, when Sui was still a student working toward his MA. The most recent of works on display is 2011’s bronze cast, The Blind. As it…

THE 30 SHORT years since the advent of Chinese contemporary art have also seen wave upon wave of interest in Western theory, beginning with the popularity of existentialism in the 1980s. The impact of these trends is readily apparent within artworks such as Zhong Ming’s He Is Himself—Sartre. Later, following the entrée of postmodern theory,…

“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981” (“UBBS”) is a sprawling exhibition that hinges on a bold claim and a stubborn refusal. The claim, made by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, is that the unruly, anything-goes pluralism of California art during this period had far-reaching consequences that are “just beginning to be understood.”¹ America…

Ever since the ‘85 New Wave, discussions about theory have been part of the progress of contemporary art in China, and on multiple occasions theoretical debates have taken center stage. In the 1980s, translations of Sartre and the existentialist writers, of varying quality and accuracy, found their way into the country, as did a great…

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. At the New Museum’s second Triennial “The Ungovernables,” however, visitors often find themselves needing to trudge through lengthy, jargonistic labels in order to make sense of the many artworks and projects on display. While this seems to have become the norm these days for contemporary art…

MU XIN, WHOM we had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing in December 2010, was one of the world’s greatest artists. He made a profound impact on anyone who had such good fortune. For many others, who knew him through his writings and art, his impact was equally as powerful. Throughout his creative life,…

Douglas Coupland wants to know what being alive means to you. What would you say to someone 100 years in the future, or 100 years in the past? His own answers are provided by his work in the group exhibition “By Sea, Land & Air, We Prosper” at Art Labor 2.0. This is Vancouver’s motto,…

In Taiwan, clues to the Tehching Hsieh legend could originally only be found in fragments amongst brief, incomplete scatterings of text. As of 1986, after the artist’s year-long performance No Art Piece (or One Year Performance 1985-1986, New York, during which he made no art and abstained from discussing or viewing art of any kind),…

Yang Fudong’s film noir aesthetics have been employed in both his monumental arthouse epic Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003-2007), and in his exuberant foray into advertising for Prada’s First Spring (2010). Considering this, it is difficult to know where this artist stands and for what. The answer may be clearly developed in his…

Cai Guo-Qiang’s work straddles a sometimes-uncomfortable line between spectacle and meaning. The title of his blockbuster solo show at MATHAF in Doha, “Saraab”— which translates from the Arabic as “mirage”— as well as its “explosion event” in the desert nearby are a wholly appropriate allusion— officially, to the subject matter of the works, but unintentionally,…

PHOTOGRAPHY: Liang Yue STYLIST: Moni MAKEUP AND HAIR: May STYLIST ASSISTANT: Mayble PRODUCER: Aimee Lin MODEL: Sisi

The relationship between old master or modernist art and contemporary work is not immediately easy to comprehend. The paintings of Manet and Matisse reveal obvious visual connections to Giotto’s frescoes, but installation, performance, and video art appear to have radically different concerns. In China, the connection between traditional and present-day art is even more elusive….

“AMONG COMRADES” Philosophy (theory) is often abstruse. Even when reading the works of celebrity philosophers like Žižek, it is impossible to avoid the obscure (specialized) element of philosophy. Strip out the Hitchcock references, political jokes and raunchy remarks, and what remains of a Žižek essay is a specialized text interlaced with all kinds of concepts….

Oil painting is dead, and if you believe the cynics, it has been for a long time. It died with the arrival of conceptual art, or photography, or Damien Hirst and those infernal YBAs— call it whenever you want, that does not change the fact that it’s still dead. Why paint anymore when there are…

IN ACCORDANCE WITH the auction house pattern of holding major sales in the spring and autumn, the Chinese art market saw a succession of major auctions throughout the fourth quarter of 2011. The crowded schedule spanned autumn and winter, and as the schedule progressed, the season seemed symbolic of the state of the art market,…

Wang Xingwei’s painting is essentially isolated from the critical establishment. His take on art history starting in the mid-1990s was nothing more than a bone tossed to the critics. In the so-called “narrative” paintings that received the most attention, the repetition of the everyday mixed with literary themes of sex, violence, illusion, and death made…

Using things from the past, both material (old documents or objects) and immaterial (memories or forms), has already become stale artistic practice; many artists nowadays instead exert great effort searching for the differences, or the dialectical relationship, between the past and the present. Although Hong Hao makes use of “old” materials in this exhibition, it…

FOR HER MOST recent work Charwei Tsai has amassed a large pile of white feathers. The pile is placed on a circular mirror and heaped up to about half a meter high and one meter across. Down is mixed with wing feathers to make the whole pile seem fluffy and insubstantial. Were this not inside…

This project deals with the practice of exchange between poetry and art; it is also a plan of considerable duration and continuity that is still in the midst of execution. Positioned within the private art museum landscape as it is today— its good mixed in with its bad— it is an undoubtedly imaginative initiative. Its…

For those who have been paying attention to or are simply familiar with Jiang Zhi’s artistic practice this past decade, signs and echoes of Jiang’s previous works abound in the exhibition “A Thought Arises,” whether in the exquisite depth of the video installation The Light of Transience or the poetic wisdom expressed in the needles…