FINISHING FIRST IS a dubious honor. Zhang Peili plays down his unshakable title as the “godfather of Chinese video art” by emphasizing the contingent nature of the situation in which he won it. But the fact remains: Zhang was the first artist to bring a piece of completed video work to a high-profile gathering of…

LUIS CHAN WAS born in Panama in 1905, moved to Hong Kong in 1910, and stayed there until his death in 1995. His artistic career spans nearly the entire twentieth century, and he is widely regarded as Hong Kong’s pioneer of modern art. He never received formal art training, but he showed an early interest…

LUIS CHAN: A STRANGE LITTLE ISLAND No matter whether to a Western or a Chinese audience, nearly all of Luis Chan’s paintings have the mystical, illusory quality of a foreign place. But to true Hong Kongers, they possess a familiarity that is as aesthetically pleasing as it is difficult to articulate. A DISTANT SPIRIT OF…

Photography, as a tool for representation, is always entangled with time and memory. The figures in a photograph appear before the audience as would actors on a stage; there are roles to be played, all an indication of some absent “other.” In the quiet gap that exists between the space and time at which a…

At its most elemental, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s ongoing collaborative project “The Way of Chopsticks” is a simple binary: as with husband and wife, one chopstick needs the other in order to properly function. As with the previous two installments, also shown at Chambers in 2002 and 2006, “The Way of Chopsticks III” finds…

There will always be artists who move from private dwelling to town square, from self to public: artists who make speeches, who show their works, who focus on the public dimension of art. This phenomenon is not limited by generation, as evidenced by the work of three young artists participating in “The Personal Is Public.”…

“The Stock Exchange, Weather and Sex” may sound borrowed from a Hollywood classic, but the implied drama and tension between these three disparate yet quotidian symbols finds scant response in the artist’s new collection of paintings. Instead, the audience encounters a series of color paintings made of lines and checkered patterns, their anticipation mercilessly flattened…

There is no denying the distinctiveness of Yao Lu’s photomontages. Looking at the 31 works grouped together in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern, uniformity amongst the various scenes evokes a contradictory sense of security and insecurity that persists long after the images have been digested. The sharply rendered photomontages express the continuous…

The great Australian-born critic Robert Hughes noted in the documentary Mona Lisa Curse that the role of art is to “make us feel more clearly and intelligently” about the world we live in; to provide “a place outside ourselves that tells us that there’s more to life than our everyday concerns and needs.” Many artists…

The artist Wim Delvoye is notorious for his penchant for depraving the human experience with either subtle or otherwise extremely crude humor. In his 1999 work Anal Kisses, he used red lipstick on hotel stationery, producing the puckering of an anus; in another 2000-2001 series he used an X-ray to record sexual activity, and unabashedly…

I went to see this new installation by Yves Netzhammer with a lawyer friend. At one point he turned to me and asked, “What’s this guy actually trying to say?” This question has been asked numerous times in art galleries, and will surely continue to be. Always likely to draw a slightly patronizing smile, its…

Securing loans of key works Spring Winds Have Awoken and Youth from the National Art Museum of China sealed the predictable decision to organize a new solo exhibition for He Duoling in Shanghai. Harking back to the 1980s Chinese art scene, the two paintings are representative works of the broader “Scar Art” movement of the…

The phrase “I am your night” could essentially be interpreted as a blunt statement aimed at the audience, and especially at the artists, or socalled experts, who showed up to Zhao Yao’s latest solo show. And if this audience adopt this rather poetic phrase for their own rhetorical needs— by turning it into one of…

Giving visual form to body language, Jiang Zhi reveals the silliness and entanglement of everyday life .

Upon entering Zhang Ding’s exhibition “Opening,” the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s piece The Mirror immediately springs to mind. Three years ago, as part of the installation series “Too Late,” The Mirror transformed London’s Victoria Miro Gallery into a “nightclub,” complete with sofas, dancefloor, discoball, DJ booth, cloak room and bathrooms. At “Opening,” one first…

Taking light as the starting point for an exhibition of contemporary art is a bit like choosing the passage of time as the theme for a film festival: initially obvious, effectively versatile, and ultimately, perhaps, inspired. At least some part of the painter’s craft has always been about depicting light, and light makes a neat…

It may seem odd that among the highlights of this year’s Beijing Design Week (September 26 to October 3) will be the goings-on in a handful of empty, run-down spaces in Dashilar. Many have asked why we would focus on an historic neighborhood known more for its kitschy tourist attractions and overall shabbiness than the…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=””] The body of “The Face of Facebook” is made up of more than sixty “unit works,” each different in size and form (painting, photography, video, and installation all are accounted for). Zhu Jia asked artists and public figures for their reactions to a famous profile photo of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg which…

The concept of “design for the poor” was put forward in 2006 by artist Qiu Zhijie and a class of his design students at the China Academy of Art. It refers to the ways people at the bottom rung of society use design and manufacturing to meet the challenges of their everyday problems. DURING THE…

Just what is it that makes today’s Berlin so different, so appealing? Klaus Wowereit, member of the German Social Democrat party and governing mayor of Berlin also doesn’t know exactly. But there is one thing he knows: “That many artists from Germany and around the world live in Berlin, developing their cutting-edge work here.” So,…