Whenever the topic of “art youth” comes up, many are eager to throw cold water on it. Some keep quiet, reflecting on the now seemingly unfounded optimism and heedless idealism of earlier generations, while others, reacting more to a current situation, fear that the young can only become pawns in someone else’s chess match. This…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=”5710″] THE RISE OF CHINA’S “NEW ART YOUTH” Produced in collaboration with the Zhang Anding and Lisa Li’s consulting office “China Youthology,” this report looks to come to sociological terms with the phenomenon of the “art youth.” PROFILES IN YOUTH Visits with six extraordinary individuals, couples, and collectives who demonstrate the range of…

Polit-Sheer-Form, which marks its fifth birthday this fall, has been a steady presence on the Chinese art scene of these dramatic years. Coming together at regular intervals for debate and a trip or two to the bathhouse, Hong Hao, Leng Lin, Liu Jianhua, Song Dong, and Xiao Yu ponder what it means to belong to…

This exhibition is brimming with tension. From it, one can easily detect the frailty of the Chinese contemporary art world, as well as its sense of internal anxiety. Perhaps that’s not at all the impr…

The full range of discussions regarding the merit and worth of “the biennale,” whether concerning spectacle, universal precarity, making worlds, cultural tourism, consumer culture or “the new,” in what is effectively a global competitive market, all surface in this year’s Biennale of Sydney, and not just in its hyperbolic title, “Beauty of Distance: Songs of…

As the Baha’i saying goes, “Love me (so) that I may love thee,” so you must visit an exhibition for yourself before you dare speak of it. So much of what people say of exhibitions whiffs of a mixture …

After the Duolun Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 2002, the neighborhood around it became a designated tourist attraction and a melting pot for a wide range of art institutions. In short time,…

Initiating discussion on the abstract topic of the mechanisms of creation requires one to be both insouciant and courageous. Of course, neither insouciance nor courage are innate qualities. When artists, musicians, writers and other fellow unemployed get together, when this group of people appeal to the roaming notions and floating emotions of the creative process…

In his solo exhibition “Fit,” the artist Liang Shuo’s role first seems that of a furniture designer. He transformed the entire C5 Art space into a building made up of multiple rooms. In the “living room” Liang “designed” stylish furniture, where visitors may, for example, lie down on a sofa and watch television. However, this…

Since the 1990s, the unique characteristics of contemporary Chinese society and art have been the focus of a great number of artists and curators. There seem to have been an equal number of critics who have pointed out that this type of creation and exhibition is exceedingly simple, spiritually one with traditional realism. In the…

The exhibition “Stepfather Has an Idea!” features six paintings completed by Xie Nanxing since 2009, divided into two series that communicate in apparently dissimilar languages. The works in the “Untitled” series are nonfigurative in nature, employing implied and imaginary systems of words and symbols to transmit to the viewer, for example, a sexual re-interpretation and…

Skulls have been portrayed in art as early as the Middle Ages, especially in biblically themed work, where they have been used to symbolize death, eternity, the fleeting nature of time, and a number of other metaphors. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull and Takashi Murakami’s cartoon skull have taken this symbol and given it contemporary pop…

There are a few reasons why “200 Artworks 25 Years: Artists’ Editions for Parkett” feels like an apt fit at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute but none more compelling than the proposition that an organization which is at its core an art magazine might be naturally allied with another organization which is at its core…

Joseph Needham once said: “In the history of intercultural communication, nothing seems comparable to the Jesuits’ arrival to China in the seventeenth century.” To be sure, in China, the opinion of a Western scholar can still not be regarded as historical truth, even if history textbooks in China’s high schools do make mention of the…

Whether in his artwork or in the lectures he gives his students, Qiu Zhijie’s “Total Art” principle permeates everything he does. According to Qiu, “Total Art” is a “an artistic strategy that, taking cultural research as its foundation and shouldering concerns about society and the everyday experience, proposes comprehensive solutions to the problems of art…

The casual visitor to the CAFA Art Museum late this spring would have noticed a giant nine-by-nine meter ink painting hanging in the atrium of the still novel Arata Isozaki building, in telling contrast to the characters of the CAFA moniker as written by Mao Zedong. The painting belonged to CAFA director Pan Gongkai, some…

This is an issue about “art youth,” a designation that sounds much more natural in Chinese. It’s hard to convey all the connotations it instantly summons, but for starters, it doesn’t mean “young artist.” It’s a subcategory of the “arts and culture youth,” a stock character in the contemporary urban imagination who sports Warrior sneakers…

For me the creative process is nothing but the pursuit of perfection … Great emotional and physical effort, energy and persistence are required. However, if tapestry art becomes one’s destiny, it requires one’s whole existence. —Maryn Varbanov (1932-1989) Maryn Varbanov was one of the most influential figures in the history of Chinese and international contemporary…