How can performance art, which is essentially an ephemeral occurrence, negotiate with the extensive temporality of nuclear catastrophe and the fragility of traumatic memories?

A series of utterly ordinary things – a bulge on the trunk of a wutong tree, rubber gloves hanging from the handlebar of an electric scooter, a waterproof jacket on a washing line, some ethereal glimmers on the fencing around a construction site—that nonetheless inspire a certain uncanny feeling inside us.

Although deliberate confusion of time implies something too nostalgic for digestion, it calls out a suppressed desire for the ghostly echo of the “past” ringing in “now” and “future.” It also renders various derivative points about being sarcastic with the objects to prefer nature to culture, ornament to function, instinct for death to drive for life, and sex drive to intellectual drive—being pared down to a new cycle of extraction, fermentation, condensation, and transpiration.

By imagining a “nether world” that is also euipped with economic, political and cultural aesthetic systems, the plea of the artist that “the netherworld should break away from all the domination from the world of the livings” has its relevance winding in our realities.

Zian Chen called exhibitions that give Chinese Contemporary Art look-backs in variation as Instant Retrospectives, which applies Hauntology theory to uncover substitutions between what happened in the past and what is possible in the future, in an attempt to articulate a rebellion against a linear time within contemporary art.

The framework of the fictional space encompassing Kafka, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Bulgakov and Marina Tsvetaeva among many others overlaps with the sphere of the canvas, which simultaneously tells a story without words.

A bit hard to imagine, but also oddly convincing—thinking through the state of quarantine and isolation ultimately brings us to fewer “selves” and more “others.” In a present moment where each of us is increasingly tired of the myriad disruptions to our ways of life, perhaps it is these relative distances, inexorable and inexplicable, that reveal the state of a world continuously splitting apart, and reforming itself.

Geocinema’s research reflects both the architecture and infrastructure behind this network, which to it constitutes a decentralized moving-image apparatus. It also engages with the intersection between corporations and governments that feed into and extract from this widely dispersed network of footage. In addition to the political implications of surveillance—from an individual, global, and astronomical perspective—it is also interested in how this vast constellation of visual, auditory, and geographic data is increasingly utilized to predict the future.

Screen bodies exist only to be penetrated—yeah, that makes everyone female, and that’s why they are, and rightfully should be, fucking afraid of us.  

As life was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Sammi Liu, owner of Tabula Rasa Gallery, and artist aaajiao (Xu Wenkai) have been stranded in London and Berlin respectively. Author Danielle Shang who lives in Los Angeles and curator Weng Xiaoyu at the Guggenheim Museum in New York have hunkered down for nearly a year, unable…

Artist, educator, writer, activist, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Patrisse Cullors discusses the history of BLM, the prejudice against the movement, the deep trauma wound represented by the Trump regime, and how these issues are embedded in her artistic and pedagogic practices.

The northeast is all too frequently portrayed as an area of economic ruin, rampant crime, and a decadent scrabble to live. Media and popular representations of the region are often abrasive and flattened. It’s a stereotype with which Ban Yu dissents.

In the new issue “In the Field,” critic Zoe Meng Jiang discusses the director Diao Yinan’s recent film The Wild Goose Lake, seeing it as an act of internal diaspora for Chinese art cinema.

Some works seem to have suffered from permanent amnesia after their trip leaving the Earth and forgotten what it felt like to be human on Earth, while others seem to have never left.

What is China’s “ecological civilization,” and what are its ideological origins? Understanding how the ideas and history of Marxism in China interlock with ecological thought, as Long March Project has set out to do, is crucial.

Julie Mehretu’s works require space: large walls and a great distance for the eye to take in the entire picture that rises and stretches, up to several meters above the viewer, who is both dwarfed and dazzled by its dimensions.

Cui Jie, an artist who came of age in the 1980s and 90s, shows a keen grasp on the various architectural patterns that have had a profound effect on the rapid renewal and expansion process of Chinese cities, and is adept at selectively harking back to these precedents of modernization in her painting and sculptural practice, thus triggering a momentary sense of the immediate future.

Human (un)limited_Beijing exhibition, jointly curated by Ars Electronica and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, will open to the public on November 19th at the Hyundai Motorstudio in 798. This year’s theme, Human (un)limited, follows the practice from last year in China, South Korea, and Russia, to show that the artists around the word are not only helping build a better life today, but also improving living conditions for tomorrow.

Founded in 2012 when its three members reunited in Saigon, Art Labor was borne of a shared interest in interdisciplinary collaborations that experimentally and exigently test the social parameters of art. As Art Labor works with and through communities, their artistic practice is not characterized by creative ownership over self-made art objects, but rather by long-term social engagement and intangible, interpersonal bonds.

When images enter the virtual world, all physicality is left behind, their weight eliminated, their size adjustable, and only a virtual shadowing resurrected. One day, when we have nothing left of ourselves but images, will they too have shadows?