Photography, as a tool for representation, is always entangled with time and memory. The figures in a photograph appear before the audience as would actors on a stage; there are roles to be played, all an indication of some absent “other.” In the quiet gap that exists between the space and time at which a…

At its most elemental, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s ongoing collaborative project “The Way of Chopsticks” is a simple binary: as with husband and wife, one chopstick needs the other in order to properly function. As with the previous two installments, also shown at Chambers in 2002 and 2006, “The Way of Chopsticks III” finds…

There will always be artists who move from private dwelling to town square, from self to public: artists who make speeches, who show their works, who focus on the public dimension of art. This phenomenon is not limited by generation, as evidenced by the work of three young artists participating in “The Personal Is Public.”…

“The Stock Exchange, Weather and Sex” may sound borrowed from a Hollywood classic, but the implied drama and tension between these three disparate yet quotidian symbols finds scant response in the artist’s new collection of paintings. Instead, the audience encounters a series of color paintings made of lines and checkered patterns, their anticipation mercilessly flattened…

There is no denying the distinctiveness of Yao Lu’s photomontages. Looking at the 31 works grouped together in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern, uniformity amongst the various scenes evokes a contradictory sense of security and insecurity that persists long after the images have been digested. The sharply rendered photomontages express the continuous…

The great Australian-born critic Robert Hughes noted in the documentary Mona Lisa Curse that the role of art is to “make us feel more clearly and intelligently” about the world we live in; to provide “a place outside ourselves that tells us that there’s more to life than our everyday concerns and needs.” Many artists…

The artist Wim Delvoye is notorious for his penchant for depraving the human experience with either subtle or otherwise extremely crude humor. In his 1999 work Anal Kisses, he used red lipstick on hotel stationery, producing the puckering of an anus; in another 2000-2001 series he used an X-ray to record sexual activity, and unabashedly…

I went to see this new installation by Yves Netzhammer with a lawyer friend. At one point he turned to me and asked, “What’s this guy actually trying to say?” This question has been asked numerous times in art galleries, and will surely continue to be. Always likely to draw a slightly patronizing smile, its…

Securing loans of key works Spring Winds Have Awoken and Youth from the National Art Museum of China sealed the predictable decision to organize a new solo exhibition for He Duoling in Shanghai. Harking back to the 1980s Chinese art scene, the two paintings are representative works of the broader “Scar Art” movement of the…

The phrase “I am your night” could essentially be interpreted as a blunt statement aimed at the audience, and especially at the artists, or socalled experts, who showed up to Zhao Yao’s latest solo show. And if this audience adopt this rather poetic phrase for their own rhetorical needs— by turning it into one of…

“THE LIGHTING’S ALL wrong! I have been to all of the world’s major art museums, and I know, paintings like this need to be lit from directly above!” June 11, 2011. The opening ceremony for the exhibit “Jin Shangyi: Compliments to Vermeer” at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM) in Beijing. After the…

Giving visual form to body language, Jiang Zhi reveals the silliness and entanglement of everyday life .

We met Qiu Xichun and Tang Xin at the company’s head-office near Fuxingmen, Beijing. The differing appearance and manner of these two gives a true impression of the double-life of this extraordinary and an experimental contemporary art space. Taikang has been collecting art since the 1990s; on August 20, it will open “Image/History/Existence: A Celebration…

One need look no further than de Sade’s salacious masterpiece Justine (1791) to see that his philosophy posits God as a mercilessly evil being. In it, the hapless twelve-yearold protagonist naïvely places faith in the virtuous magnanimity of strangers, all of whom end up either raping, beating, robbing, or otherwise enslaving her. Morality thus bows…

Landing on the occasion of Berlin-based Korean-born artist Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition at the Zumthor-designed Kunsthaus Bergenz (KUB) in Austria, Arrivals expands beyond solo exhibition catalogue to stand as a catalogue raissoné, a printed compilation of Yang’s creative output from 1994 onward. It is this that forms the bulk of this hefty publication, as a…

Upon entering Zhang Ding’s exhibition “Opening,” the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s piece The Mirror immediately springs to mind. Three years ago, as part of the installation series “Too Late,” The Mirror transformed London’s Victoria Miro Gallery into a “nightclub,” complete with sofas, dancefloor, discoball, DJ booth, cloak room and bathrooms. At “Opening,” one first…

Taking light as the starting point for an exhibition of contemporary art is a bit like choosing the passage of time as the theme for a film festival: initially obvious, effectively versatile, and ultimately, perhaps, inspired. At least some part of the painter’s craft has always been about depicting light, and light makes a neat…

ACCORDING TO THE official documentation that initiated the “Binder HQ” project— dated December 29, 2006 and directed at the artists of Kunming— the tenets of “Project Binder” were as follows: participating artists would pay a small fee of RMB 100 and contribute content in the form of 101 sets of four to ten pages, bearing…

It may seem odd that among the highlights of this year’s Beijing Design Week (September 26 to October 3) will be the goings-on in a handful of empty, run-down spaces in Dashilar. Many have asked why we would focus on an historic neighborhood known more for its kitschy tourist attractions and overall shabbiness than the…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=””] The body of “The Face of Facebook” is made up of more than sixty “unit works,” each different in size and form (painting, photography, video, and installation all are accounted for). Zhu Jia asked artists and public figures for their reactions to a famous profile photo of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg which…