Nail art has a long history in China. As early as 3000 BCE, royals combined gum arabic, gelatin, beeswax, egg whites, and crushed flower petals to lacquer their digits—so it’s fitting that two new projects innovating the medium have sprung up here. Beijing artist Ye Funa’s “Curated Nails” is an ongoing platform considering the nail…

Every two years, the Guggenheim Museum administers the Hugo Boss Prize. Funded by the eponymous German clothing company, the prize is presented to an artist “whose oeuvre constitutes an outstanding co…

Click to play the internet rap playlist specially commissioned for the issue Two years ago a video surfaced online of a not-entirely-confident-looking Scandinavian teenager in a bucket hat and windbreaker rapping about “peeing on old people’s houses” over a loop of new-age singing and rattling drum machine beats. Now boasting more than four million YouTube…

With “South by Southeast,” Filipino curator Patrick Flores and Romanian curator Anca Mihuleţ propose the new interpretive dimension of “southeasternness” by looking at generalized geographic concepts …

Last year, when the pseudonymous French street artist Invader touched down in Hong Kong, his iconic tile minions appeared on several dozen facades throughout the city. Many were removed overnight, and the rest were invariably scrapped and sandblasted away within the week. Then, in May this year, documentation of the covert operation was exhibited at…

Hong Kong artists Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong’s “Museum of the Lost” features an ongoing archive of anonymous figures drawn from various mass media sources. Wong and Leung isolate individuals found in photographs with their backs turned or faces obscured and write stories about them, imagining what they might have been doing at the…

In 1995, Japan’s legendary Nobuyoshi Araki awarded a prize to a 17-year-old photographer, a rising star who called herself Hiromix. He praised her work: “Girls tend to hold nothing back, and don’t think too much. Without thinking too much, they let their feelings rule their actions.” This was likely meant as a compliment, but it…

Kim Kardashian shot a nude cover for the independent New York magazine Paper’s winter issue; reader reaction to the photo itself was dominated by questions of Photoshop. Today, anything modified in po…

A recent project at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden titled “Supermarket of the Dead” examines the growing prevalence of luxury items among the paper goods traditionally burned for ancestors. In Chinese custom, it is believed that in our departure we are left without worldly possessions and therefore our relations must provide us the necessary accoutrements—food, accommodation,…

In the ten days before and after the Labor Day holiday, Double Fly Art Center—the collective known for its signature brand of absurd slapstick and carnivalesque live events—rehearsed two clamorous pro…

Simon Denny’s installations, which defamiliarize the crass imagery of the revolution in technologically mediated “disruption,” serve as a catalyst for debates about how forms of critique and complicit…

!Mediengruppe Bitnik belongs to a new class of artists working with the inter¬net, using hacking as a strategy. Recently they made global news headlines beyond the art media by creating an automated o…

At the National Palace Museum in Taipei, visitors cue up for an unlikely icon. The nineteenth-century Jadeite Cabbage, which sits just 18.7 centimetres tall, is admired for its natural gradient and de…

I make three-dimensional sculptures and show them in two-dimensional environments. This data can be used for multiple outcomes: videos, still images in unrestricted sizes, 3D printing, and virtual env…

In the barren depths of northeastern China, Bitcoin mines churn day and night, consuming enormous amounts of electricity and emitting such heat that the indoor temperature persists at 40 degrees Celsi…

He An opens his cryptic solo exhibition with a list of terms positioned next to but also including its title: Preface, Night or with Its Daytime, He Taoyuan, EVA00 Prototype, Armenia, Bride, Love Chil…

Chinese artists have long been attracted to David Hockney’s work—painting, photography, visual technique, art history, and even his legendary life story. The story goes that the younger Liu Wei was a …

It is a special time, that moment when a pop culture phenomenon becomes utterly exhausted, having sold out and merchandised itself to passé status, but then bubbles back to the surface in a new, irrev…

In Asia, alcohol is the great equalizer—it turns everyone pink, regardless of race or ethnic origin. Christopher Doyle has grasped this truism, drinking copious volumes of the magical elixir to cross …

Often, I catch my eyes, sliding easily, as if they rolled on bearings, or had been oiled, off the identical rows of houses of people, and back up to the more peculiar trees. 1. YARVIN DREAMS OF NORWAY…