View of “Arrow Paradox – Fu Jingyan,” 2018, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing. Courtesy of Platform China Contemporary Art Institute.     Peering into Shenyang-based artist Fu Jingyan’s world is to peer into an enigma, but one which is not altogether impregnable. To a certain extent, the constitution of this strange world is intelligible. Various…

View of “Frontier Imaginaries: Trade Markings,” 2018, Van Abbemuseum, Nederland. Courtesy of Van Abbe Museum   Imagine you are a falcon, perching on the arm of your master falconer, eyes covered by a hood, in a gallery of a contemporary art museum called Van Abbemuseum. You are being watched by a group of people, although…

       Steffen Bunte, Canto, 2018, sculpture, mixed media, 123 x 120 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Open Forum “Wetland” exists in the ambiguity between wet and dry states. Within the designated five-hour duration of the exhibition, its temporary state mirrors a constantly changing wetland; it can disappear at any time but contains the…

Jes Fan, Mother Is A Woman, 2018, video, sound, color, 4 min 44 sec. Videographer: Asa Westcott.   What is a body made of, and how does that impact the way it is perceived? Does an impression of a body reflect its constitution? Artist Jes Fan posits these queries by investigating how the material science of…

Wong Kit Yi, Uploading Consciousness to a Lotus Root, 2018, single channel HD Video, 20 min. I made a promise that expires in 99 years [1]. At the Golden Computer Centre [2], I transferred my body’s lease on life to the Emperor. Filled out the form: red hair, pale skin, female. Couldn’t remember my birthdate….

  A l’origine, l’histoire chinoise « Yu Gong Yi Shan » (Moving Mountains – la légende du vieil homme qui déplaça la montagne) est une histoire plutôt romantique. Un très vieil homme, soucieux d’é…

The original story of Yugongyishan (Moving Moutains), the legend of the old man who moved the mountain, is actually a rather romantic one. The story goes that an elderly man of over seventy, driven by…

“You Won’t Be Young Forever” serves as a distinct example of how to work collaboratively with youth. A small office building set to be demolished needs no renovations or any visual disguises, it simpl…

The first hint of something a little unusual afoot in this exhibition is the extrusion of a grid-like, metallic structure from the bounds of the gallery proper, an effect made doubly jarring in settin…

There seems to be a certain fetishization surrounding the concept of experimentation. Maybe the idea of experimentation is linked to the idea of creating something “alternative”—another deeply fetishi…

DADA CANNOT BE EASILY ACCEPTED, NOR EASILY REJECTED. IT RECALLS THE WORDS OF THE “DADA MANIFESTO”: “… THAT’S IT. BUT OF COURSE… IT’S A QUESTION OF CONNECTIONS, AND OF LOOSENING THEM UP A B…

Consider the travelogue. Some sensitive soul alights in a part of the world somehow different from their home, and they enact a traversal of this space, accruing images and relating experiences in a r…

The opening of “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in December, 2013, was met with both cheers and disgust by the Chinese ink painting community. …

Dada is not at all modern; it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. —Tristan Tzara Conference in Weimar, Germany, 1922 As often pointed out by modern art historians, notably…

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…