ARTIST: Liu Ding PHOTOGRAPHY: Chai Lizeng MAKE-UP: Daniel Zhang (Tony Studio) HAIR: He Zhiguo (Tony Studio, Sebastian) STYLIST ASSISTANT: Chiu PRODUCER: Aimee Lin PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Bian Jiaojiao MODEL: Anna

FORGET ART IS an independent organization established in 2009 by the artist Ma Yongfeng. Doubling as a loosely defined creative collective, it came to notice after engineering the project “Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse” in September 2010. For this project, participating artists adopted a strategy of “microintervention”— launching artfully insinuated threats and acts of resistance against…

Consisting of artists Song Dong, Xiao Yu, Hong Hao, and Liu Jianhua, and critic/curator/gallerist Leng Lin, Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) was originally charted to seek out “collective form.” This book chronicles this six-year search, and in a very detailed manner: in a nod to the absurdist connotations the name PSFO holds in Chinese (translated literally, the…

The root of the word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiotes, which originally described those incapable of shouldering communal responsibility. The definition certainly fits people in current popular culture who also shirk all responsibility, preferring to spend their time following absurd internet trends. To an extent, these modern idiots bear the shadow of the hippies,…

A sculptor by training, Wang Sishun has in recent years been creating conceptual art seemingly unrelated to sculpture. In these works, Wang takes a playful, Dadaist approach to transforming readymade products and everyday materials, dismantling their physical properties, function, and value to restructure our sensory experiences of once-familiar objects. For Uncertain Capital, Wang melted down…

“Chasing Sites” was a relatively sedate presentation for artist Weng Wei, focusing on her ink paintings on rectangles of paper and cutouts affixed to clearly delimited sections of the gallery walls. These new works and their installation in Pékin Fine Arts have calmed the spontaneity of her earlier appearances, and this aspect of spontaneity— instigated…

Yan Xing adores Hans Belting. He doubts so-called “innovation” in contemporary art. He prefers his work to be visually pure in classic black and white, and as beautiful as possible, as sharp as a knife. He might not even object to being called less an artist than a raconteur, a carefully voiced plurality of the…

In October, artist Zhang Huan’s exhibition “Q Confucius” will draw back the curtain on the newly renovated Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The exhibition comes courtesy of Nanjo Fumio, noted Japanese critic, curator and director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. We caught up with him after a recent press conference for Zhang Huan’s…

In the vast, far-stretching OCT gallery space, curved walls separated two works produced for this exhibition of Qiu Anxiong’s new work. The work A Study in Autopsy appeared to simulate the organs and circulatory system of a human body, while Surplus Value featured projected images of a running horse, accompanied by racing equipment. On a…

A comprehensive article by archaeologist and translator Bruce Doar portrays Aniwar as a refined traveler in the manner of a solitary, spiritual nomad. This uncommon aura is borne out by the paintings, drawings, and felt works shown recently at Platform China. Vivid yet earthy, they seemed attuned to the natural world and its moods, colors,…

WIND LIGHT AS A THIEF | Arrow Factory, Beijing 2011.07.03-2011.09.20 I AM CURIOUS YELLOW, I AM CURIOUS BLUE | Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing 2011.07.16-2011.08.16 A MOLE ON EACH BREAST AND ANOTHER ON THE SHOULDER | Magician Space, Beijing 2011.07.28-2011.08.21 Summertime is downtime for the gallery system. There are bound to be a few inconsequential group…

Elephants drop through the ceiling, dogs poke their heads through pipes, and parrots perch on upside-down human statuary. Gao Lei’s mixed-media installations draw on a bestiary to examine human ambition and human limits. His art is populated by a carnival of animals that appear in room-sized installations, photographs enclosed inside lightboxes, and mixed-media oil paintings,…

In the short period of time from 2008’s “Synthetic Times” exhibition to the recently opened “Translife” exhibition, the “International Triennial of New Media Art” has done much to reinvigorate the National Art Museum of China. “Translife” is divided into three sections: “Sensorium of the Extraordinary,” which investigates the human senses; “Sublime of the Liminal,” which…

The canonizing ramps of the Guggenheim rotunda played host to this five-decade retrospective of Korean-Japanese artist Lee Ufan (b. 1936), tracing his prolific career in a chronological and thematic upward spiral curated by Alexandra Munroe. Series of gestural, postminimalist paintings punctuated the hike, while sculptures informed by inherent and enlivened “encounters” among things of different…

SIX YEARS AFTER the completion of its building, Guangdong’s Times Museum welcomed its first self-planned exhibition “SHIFT: Exhibition on young American artists creating on-site artwork in China.” (Cumbersome English title theirs.) The gallery space is situated on the top floor of a residential building that Rem Koolhaas designed for Times Real Estate. To get to…

In 1967, Sony released the Portapak portable camcorder in New York. This household camcorder, with its playback function and lightweight, easy-to-use design, would rescue moving images from exclusive use by professionals and deliver them into the hands of individuals for their own memories and imaginations to manipulate. Twenty years later, China reached a similar turning…

To get an idea of what this exhibition is like, it is perhaps best to start with a description of Liang Shuo’s Fortified Colors (2011), an installation of multicolored affordable household items stuffed behind three pieces of glass to form an extremely soft and colorful screen. However, behind is an entirely different scene: chaotic furniture…

The founding aspiration of the local and regional “Cultural Assets and Equity Exchanges” now popping up around China was to create an adjoined service platform between culture and capital: providing cultural industries with a wider range of access to funding and implementing a system of convenient, standardized, and efficient service and support for investors. Set…

According to curator Nikita Choi’s introduction, a series of real experiences and encounters at the Times Museum were what inspired her to put together an exhibition reflecting on the concept of the museum. In her words, art couriers only see two sides to an art museum: the bank and the store. They unfortunately turn a…

Propaganda is a one-way affair. It is a device, a prop, controlled by the powerful to dictate to the weak. Do this. Believe that. For it to be successful, there can be no talk back. But what if propaganda were a tool of self-reflection? What shape would it take? What if, when you looked into…