By the end of the twentieth century, nearly every commodity in this world had been made available for purchase online, and it wasn’t long before the opportunity to acquire art in cyberspace arose as well. Of course, nothing much came of early attempts to sell art over the Internet— the first online dealers quickly found…

IN 2000, WANG GUANGLE had just graduated from the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He spent a short time working at a publishing house, and then quit, because he hated the working stiff’s lifestyle, but also because artist and CAFA professor Liu Xiaodong had connected him to a collector who…

These are 19 of the most beautifully designed books we have come across in recent years. The majority are artist monographs or otherwise art-related, and some are publications on visual culture in general, but worth noting is that a good number of them are independently published. Most importantly, though, whether due to corporeal chaos or…

WHEN THEY FOUNDED it two years ago, the two Australians, Kain Picken and Fiona Lau, christened their “unisex, prêt-a-porter fashion label” ffiXXed. The unlikely name (pronounced simply as “fixed”) might be an homage to the sense of dependability evinced by the family-like atmosphere that their four-story in-house production studio plays home to, or just as…

In our information age, electronic media have changed attitudes toward traditional printed texts, and toward printed characters themselves. New technology has engendered a new aesthetic for character form, one that inevitably feels overly cold and rigid. Against this, traditional typefaces are starting to make a comeback. Ying Yun-Wei is one designer adopting traditional character forms…

A CHINESE SINGAPOREAN man in an emerald green dress looks into a mirror. He tremblingly tells his character’s black mother— here played by an Indian-Singaporean actor— “I’m white. White. White!” On a dual screen, another Indian Singaporean actor simultaneously delivers the same lines, this time to a Malay Singaporean actor playing his character’s black mother….

WHEN STEVEN HOLL laid eyes on his first commission in China, the site was “overgrown with vegetation— no roads, site boundaries, no clear site plan.” Initial plans called for an “Art and Architecture Museum.” That day, he “began making sketches . . . based on [his] understanding of axonometric perspective in Chinese painting.” In the…

ENMESHED IN MID-AIR: THE NANJING SIFANG ART MUSEUM When Steven Holl laid eyes on his first commission in China, the site was “overgrown with vegetation— no roads, site boundaries, no clear site plan.” Initial plans called for an “Art and Architecture Museum.” That day, he “began making sketches . . . based on [his] understanding…

Wang Xingwei was born in 1969 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. He did not come from an artistic family; rather, as a natural-born lover of painting, he ended up in all sorts of interest groups and classes. He took an exam and wound up in the art department of Shenyang Normal University. Growing up in an…

For Huang Kui, a serious accident was the beginning of an entirely new understanding of the concept of life, and what triggered a reconsideration of his relationship to the world. From Me to The World I See, Huang Kui has engaged in a series of reflections and creative works that make up his current exhibition,…

Ironically, for a show titled “Guanxi” after the Chinese word for “connection” or “relation,” each artist enjoys the benefit of an independent space, minimizing the possibility of mutual interference among the works. To give just one example, it appears that curator Jiang Jiehong had some problems showing the work of artist Xiang Jing: here her…

Biennales have largely become marketing events for nations and cities, used to show off an idealized image to outsiders. This edition of the Singapore Biennale, taking place in venues such as the National Museum of Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Old Kallang Airport, and Marina Bay, continues to demonstrate the cultural strata of the country by…

Following artist Rong Rong’s lead, people have flocked into the little village of Caochangdi from all corners of the photography world. Right after the conclusion of the opening ceremony, the recipients of three much-anticipated awards were finally announced. Twenty-two year old female photographer Zhe Chen was awarded the Three Shadows Photography Award; Luo Dan (see…

The title of MadeIn Company’s latest exhibition at Long March Space is something of an awkward phrase— after all, how can consciousness be physical? But the phrase is deceiving: the four character Chinese phrase for “Physique of Consciousness” is just one character different from the Chinese for “ideology,” suggesting that through minor manipulation, ideology can…

“Nineteen Solo Shows About Painting” is in many ways a sort of classroom exercise— one through which featured artists can express their individual revelations with regard to painting, art, and existence. Coincidence or not, the majority of these paintings— derived from scenes of daily life— depict similar and universal experiences. The words of Jia Aili…

To recognize and identify artworks by Zhao Zhao (b. 1982) in terms of a certain style or medium is virtually impossible. Without prior knowledge, one might assume that Zhao’s current solo show at Alexander Ochs Galleries was in fact a group show of various artists. The pluralism on display is part of the artist’s critical…

The customarily stark ambience of art galleries took on a warmer if still largely minimal feel in Lee Kit’s first solo show in the United States. Gauzy cerulean cotton sheets hung over the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling front windows, while cardboard pieces lined the walls, featuring layers of paint half-obscuring the logotypes of various drugstore products, from…

A distinctively Chinese designation, “academic experimental art (xueyuan shiyan yishu) refers not to experimental art within the academy in general, but to the work produced in academic programs on experimental art, particularly those at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the China Academy of Art. Unlike the more canonical “COPS” (Chinese painting, Oil painting,…

The collective creation of a group of sculptors from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1965, Rent Collection Courtyard was first displayed in Beijing forty-five years ago. Making a return to Beijing, the current exhibition displays copper-plated fiberglass replicas of the original clay sculptures, produced from 1974 to 1978. Compared to its first grand opening…

It’s an easy mistake, for those of us who came to contemporary art by way of China, to think that a big face painting is a big face painting. From Luo Zhongli’s coining of the genre with his penwielding peasant Father, to Geng Jianyi’s analytical innovation on the form in 1988 with his monotone “Second…