Without the aid of mirrors, artists seem to be incapable of self-reflection. Their images and works are constructed and processed in the face of the many peers surrounding them, one orbiting another l…

Taiwanese artist Yin-ju Chen often places herself in a position both perilous and challenging: by means of an approach based on mysticism, she deduces and infers narrative relations between mankind an…

In the past few years, there has been a move towards art and writing that abandons irony completely in favor of sincerity. “New sincerity” has been a buzzword for the art and literary world since the mid-1990s. It was the name of a literary movement sparked by David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” where…

I fell in love with the idea of Jaakko Pallasvuo after watching Vanilla (2011) on Vimeo. The shaky forty-second clip features the artist rubbing ice cream onto his face, hair, and body at an exhibition opening. Dancing erratically to “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” onlookers clap and cheer the artist on in the background. This…

There are those who say that if an artist not of the ‘West’ engages with abstraction, conceptual practices, and other approaches generally perceived as descending from the European tradition, they are abandoning their cultural heritage, merely aping the ‘West’ in some sort of cultural cringe, or colonial hangover. Conversely, especially with regard to China, there…

“You know the way animals are… They’re run by instincts. You can’t expect them to behave morally. It likes to eat, it likes to have sex… Don’t expect too much from a thing like that. Just take it for what it is.” —Scarlet Droppings (1990), George Kuchar Cinema has historically been a fecund site of…

The basic premise of the Lovelace test, created to determine intelligence within the cognitive sciences, is that a machine must originate an idea on its own. Ada Lovelace, for whom the test is named, argued that this was the marker of true intelligence. In distinction to the Turing test—which tests the ability of a machine…