Apart from the need to hide in the shade of art during the hot vernissage of the Venice Biennale, it is always with anticipation that one enters the Arsenale and Giardini. The possibilities are neverending, but are also trapped within the walls of buildings, not to mention the town of Venice itself. During these opening…
Read MoreRecent reappraisals of the Republican era have been a long time coming. From the inclusion of the New Woodcut movement in the Shanghai Biennale to the rediscovery of artists like Wu Dayu, academics and collectors alike have unearthed the legacies of the first half of the twentieth century. This sudden rise in interest on the…
Read MoreIndépendamment du désir que l’on éprouve, lors des heures brûlantes du vernissage de la Biennale de Venise, de s’abriter à l’ombre de l’Art, on est toujours saisi par l’excitation à l’idée de pénétrer dans l’Arsenal et les Giardini. Les possibilités sont infinies, mais circonscrites par les murs des édifices, et par Venise elle-même. Durant ces…
Read MoreCes dernières années, le monde de l’art contemporain s’attache à réhabiliter l’héritage artistique de la République de Chine (1912-1949). L’exposition des œuvres du Mouvement de la Nouvelle Xylographie à la Biennale de Shanghai, ou la « redécouverte » d’artistes tels que Wu Dayu, dénotent une volonté des universitaires et des conservateurs d’exhumer le Modernisme chinois…
Read MoreCurrent events in the international sphere, including the emergence of the Islamic State, invite us to think about de-westernization after the Cold War and decoloniality after decolonization. If a point of reference is needed, the 1955 Bandung Conference is a good one. China was under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and Zhou Enlai, first Premier…
Read MoreJamian Juliano-Villani’s website is structured along the lines of popular blog host Tumblr, fittingly resembling the countless blogs that catalogue images of contemporary art and online ephemera. The 28-year-old New York-based artist’s name sits in gothic font layered over a stream of images, an animated GIF to the side showing a creature dunking its head…
Read MoreWe live in a state of the perpetual present. With the revolving door of exhibitions in more and more venues, commercial and scholarly alike, thousands of artists appear on a relatively flat plane of aesthetics. This is good for a lot of things—fair art criticism among them—but it tends to hurt our understanding, as viewers,…
Read MoreCet article traite d’une question classique, à savoir que le fait de corriger ou reconsidérer l’Histoire ne se limite pas à un objectif politique. En réalité, il s’agit d’une attitude admise et adoptée par la société toute entière. Tout un chacun se trouve généralement attiré par une réalité ou un récit idéalisé sur le plan…
Read MoreSamson Young is a genre artist: everything he does builds on his training as a composer, an approach that is increasingly rare in the multi-disciplinary art world of today. Young is also a rare exampl…
Read MoreMika Rottenberg’s film No Nose Knows, a highlight of the Arsenale in OkwuiEnwezor’s 2015 Venice Biennale, returns to China (it was shot in the coastal areas of Zhejiang) in this small exhibition in Beijing. Touching on the pearl industry, empty housing developments, and the absurd gestures of the everyday, Rottenberg considers her piece a “diagram…
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