The moment we arrive at a threshold, we often already know what to expect. The senses distill for us where we are and what we’re supposed to do: as when entering a coffee shop. Increasingly ubiquitous, these houses of high culture appeal through a blending of aromas and symbols; we feel comfortable, worldly, and know…

“Illuminated,” curated by artist Guo Hongwei, is the fifth exhibition held at his nonprofit Gland Space. The exhibition, born of the artist’s personal creative experience, embodies the eclectic accumulation of his work as it has evolved over time. This rich, inclusive presentation has a strength of vision that surpasses the effects of his solo work,…

Woman Jumping off Building, 2015, acrylic and pencil on paper, 109.2 x 157.4 cm Liu Yin has realized, like most of us, that she spends far too much time browsing news and advertising images. This tremendous swatch of visual information has long been part of our lives, but its intrusiveness has risen to historic heights…

In 2013, Korean-born, New York-based artist Anicka Yi began a trilogy of exhibitions entitled “Denial,” “Divorce,” and “Death,” inspired by human emotions attached to love and heartbreak. Presented as a forensic investigation of these affective, illusive, and hardly measurable states, Yi’s work captures the signs, evidence, and residue of these phases embedded in and transmitted…

There is a strain of contemporary art centered around 3D renderings and augmented reality, where the technology itself is reason for the work to exist. Lawrence Lek’s series “Bonus Levels” is a series of site-specific, immersive video game installations. Each section of the project is structured like a novel, based on a real building that…

It’s one thing to pretend to be authentic; it’s another to pretend to be fake. In the space of two years, PC Music has gone from little more than a Soundcloud page to a cult dance music collective followed by those in the know and from there to a legitimate pop culture happening—the loosely-defined label/brand’s…

October 31 through November 1, 2015 marked the beginning of the tenth annual New York Asian Contemporary Art Week. With it came the three-day “FIELD MEETING Take 3: Thinking Performance,” a series of performances, lecture-performance, artist talks, and symposia. Central to these meetings was an attempt to look at how artists in Asia have used…

Under a large emblem of Black Mountain College we read the list of well-known names who lectured there: Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, Albe…

Ping Pong (《乒乓》) is a new indie comics anthology featuring works from an up-and-coming generation of Hong Kong comics artists and illustrators. This new generation follows in the footsteps of alternat…

What is there to be observed on the road? The concept of “roadway observation,” a localized set of the techniques of the f lâneur, can be traced to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Tokyo was dilapi…

IN THE POSTSCRIPT to Wang Min’an’s collection of theoretical essays, A Discourse on Household Electronics, he writes that one of his best students once asked him to explain their scholarly significanc…

More than once I have asked Xie Nanxing to explain the secret magic behind his painting. When we struggle to find some guiding principle behind the variations of his imagery in his work, are the materials he uses important? By way of response, Xie points out that my curiosity points to a false proposition. This…

A small-scale exhibition, “Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice” showcases the initial results of Asia Art Archive’s research into the late artist’s life, work, and personal …

One of the best-known creatives to emerge from the turmoil of postwar Japan—a time marked by leftist resentment of capitalism as well as increasing openness with American aid and occupation—was Osamu Tezuka, who made manga into a modern product fashionable with young people. Although Japanese comics had already appeared in embryonic form before the Second…

In a brightly decorated bedroom, a man and a woman are having intercourse on a narrow single bed. The woman is bent over and the man is half-kneeling behind her. Dressed in neon green stockings, both …

IN 1906, NATIONAL Geographic published a series of 70 black-and-white photographs titled “Hunting Wild Game with Flashlight and Camera,” depicting scenes of deer congregating, hopping about, and resti…

In 2007 we knew Hatsune Miku only as a virtual pop star program. By 2010 we began to realize that a huge number of people had produced derivative work, marking a development in both the medium and in …

For one Chinese artist, Wen Ling, the work of American art collective Paper Rad has exerted an enormous impact through his discovery of their work, unmediated by third-party interpretations. Wen Ling’…

“Capital has conquered the future. Capital has no fear of utopias, since it even tends to produce them.” ——Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication In the near future, a technology referred to simply as “Patch” is widely adopted. A soft, white substance worn on the maxilla, which taps into the human nervous system, enables the sharing of physiological…

Some readers may recall the early days of 179 Canal, the gallery and den of rambunctious activity that sat on Canal Street, lower Manhattan’s main thoroughfare, just east of Broadway. A generation of downtown New York artists remember its experimental installations and wild parties. Spanning both Chinatown and the Lower East Side, Canal Street is…