Zaha Hadid passed through town a few weeks ago, for meetings with her clients at SOHO China and a highly publicized “first lecture in Beijing” just after the opening festivities for her latest creation, the Guangzhou Opera House. LEAP correspondent Jian Cui got a chance to sit down with her after outmaneuvering the SOHO public-relations…

Beginning on October 19, 1981, a four-day conference for the sixth Aga Khan Award for Architecture was held in Beijing. The topic of discussion was “The Changing Rural Habitat,” which remains a meaningful and relevant topic to this day. The conference was divided into two components. The first presented case studies: “Rural Architecture in the…

I hire models for nearly all my paintings, but sometimes I also find subjects through friends or acquaintances. A few days ago I was at a Prada party, and I saw a very pretty woman, so I took her photo. I collect these materials, but I don’t use everything. Some remain just as ideas. When…

We find in Hong Kong something of a curatorial anxiety: there are very few makers of exhibitions active in the local art scene, and, though this is entirely in keeping with the small scale and number of available exhibition spaces, intimate connections between institutional academic research and critical writing in the territory lead to a…

After a decade producing experimental music through his label Subjam, sound artist Yan Jun spent 2010 organizing a monthly performance series at UCCA in 798. When I met with him a few days before the final event in the series, he spoke with a mix of disappointment and mischievous anticipation. Over the course of the…

In the final hours of 2010, en route from Philadelphia to Shanghai, I received a company e-mail from our chairman promulgating a change of slogan for Modern Media’s flagship publication, Modern Weekly. Ten years on, no longer would it offer the promise of “Read Modern Weekly, Keep Up With the World.” Instead, by changing one…

On November 20, 1993, Wang Peng held a solo exhibition at the short-lived Contemporary Art Gallery at 123 Longfusi Street in Beijing. The name of the show was “93: Wang Peng’s Installation Exhibition,” but there was only one work, entitled “Wall.” At the time, Wang was still a professor at the Central Academy of Fine…

“I ask it be extinguished / This crude iron light / The light of lovers / The light of the sun.” Such goes the first line of the poet Hai Zi’s work I Ask: Rain. According to Liang Yuanwei, this “crude iron light” leaves a biting sensation in her mouth. Sometimes words and fleeting images…

Massimo Torrigiani is not just another fair director. Before taking the position late last year, he launched the photographic quarterly Fantom, the latest in a long string of cultural entrepreneurial ventures. We caught up with him for Japanese barbeque in Beijing to talk about his plans for the fair and his read on an art…

EVENT HORIZON 迈阿密·MIAMI THE DAYS OF China exuberance in the U.S. are over, as everyone knows, and as the recent edition of Art Basel Miami Beach testifies. Where in 2007 you had a glitzy Sotheby’s sel…

American eyes have long been prepared by popular culture to see the urban geography of Shanghai, which could be said to carry within it the residual image of Blade Runner— that 1982 neo-noir where the future is not presented in sleek, slender forms but rather arises through a process of accretion. Each passing era’s technology…

On November 13, 2010, Zhu Fadong’s solo exhibition “All for Sale” opened at 798’s White Box Museum of Art. It was no different from any other opening on any other Saturday in 798. All the mandatory guests, journalists, and VIPs were present, and a ballet performance afterward added to an otherwise lively spectacle. The work…

Asia Art Archive and the Museum of Modern Art jointly launched two projects based around first-hand accounts: the plan for the AAA’s “Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990,” and MoMA’s book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. Through the careful collection and translation of primary materials, the two bodies of texts explore…

Cheng Xindong recently took us to his second art space in Beijing’s 798. He entered his courtyard like a boss and passed through his gallery, closing the gate on his way. He was sporting formal dress in preparation for our photo shoot, neatly scheduled between an appointment with some foreigners and another media interview. Fortunately, we got a…

The tragedy of contemporary Chinese art—and I believe that it is at present an intensely tragic one—lies in the inability of its makers to fully exploit the critical potential of their work. As Martina Köppel-Yang has indicated with reference to writings by the cultural historian and theorist Stuart Hall, all forms of cultural production, including…

Minsheng Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art,” which opened this past April in Shanghai, used the medium of painting as a tool for combing through the whole of artistic development in China. Hung right at the entrance to the exhibition was an iconic canvas by Zhong Ming, He is Himself—Sartre. While…

The question of space for art in China is one of the most expansive around. These days, so are the spaces—or at least so the adage goes. But beneath the proliferation of venues in the last decade or so there lies a fundamental lack, less a function of China than of our general global condition,…

It’s best to get the fact that Tobias Wong died on Sunday, May 30th of this year out of the way immediately. He was 35. Wong’s burgeoning career began as a precociously incisive graduate student at Cooper Union when he ganked a new armchair from no less a design luminary than Philippe Starck. He turned the chair into a lamp…

Whereas those we have previously interviewed for the “My Miles” column may be called “busy,” perhaps it’s more appropriate to describe Cui Xiuwen as “diligent”—she won’t even allow herself a vacation. As soon as we step foot into her Feijiacun studio, she immediately invites us to take a look at her latest work in progress. She persists in asking our impression of…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude = “4026”] Online apparel retailer VANCL launched in 2007; by the end of 2009, it had 800 employees and annual revenues of RMB 2.4 billion. Ranked the fastest-growing tech company in China after expanding by 29,756% in its first three years, VANCL’s 2012 revenues are forecast at some RMB 18 billion. Clearly it was time for…