In the China Pavilion of the Shanghai Expo, the image of Qingming Festival—the twelfth-century work of Zhang Zeduan of the Northern Song—is projected onto the wall. By now, this famous painting has played itself out as a popular, massive, dynamic ink creation—throughout the course of Chinese art history, Zhang’s depiction of the Bianjing city marketplace…

If identity and personal memory maintain a certain degree of unity, then Yangjiang Group’s exhibition “The Garden of Pine—Also Fierce Than Tiger II” at Tang Contemporary Art in Beijing traps people in the dislocation between personal identity and historical memory. The first sight upon entering the exhibition hall is a scene cast entirely in paraffin…

As the name suggests, the word “past” in “Learning From the Past and Opening a New Age,” refers to traditional Chinese painting; “new age” refers to the style of modern Chinese painting championed by Huang Qiuyuan, and “learning from” here is more like “relying on.” The last and most important portion of the exhibition title…

Some exhibitions lie at once entirely within reason and completely beyond expectation. The National Art Museum’s special exhibitions memorializing the works of Hua Junwu (1915-2010) and Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), which opened concurrently in July, serve together as a perfect example of this possibility. These two painters both hold important positions in the history of art…

When the harvest moon comes out, we feel the pangs of place. American schools hold homecomings. Jews build booths. Chinese families reunite to stare into the sky. There is something fundamentally human in the autumn air, the feeling that things have turned, cyclically, but irrevocably all the same. The fruits of the bygone summer are…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=”5852″] In this issue, we ask ourselves a few questions: Is there any connection between the places artists come from and the art they make? Why do artists leave their homes, and how do they return? What does being from a particular place mean for an artist’s self-construction, artistic creation, and career development?…

Symposium on “The Borders of Art” DATE: 2010.5.30 / LOCATION: CENTRAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS MUSEUM, VIP LOUNGE Held in conjunction with “Pan Gongkai Conceptual Art Exhibition” FROM LEFT PAN GONGKAI Art theorist and educator; President, China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) ZHU QINGSHENG Professor of Art, Peking University AN YUANYUAN Director, Art and…

Simon Kirby had just called in a food delivery. Kirby, director of the gallery Chambers Fine Art Beijing, was sitting in the Ai Weiwei-designed gallery courtyard out in Caochangdi on a summer afternoon, plotting an exhibition with his visitors. He asked Yangzi about the origins of their group, the Wangjing Painting Society (WPS). Then Dong…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000] History has abandoned time, we have lost our souls. Magicians This world lacks a clear concept of time; we live in emptiness. Right and wrong are confounded! There are no laws, no rules. Lies dominate! Here there are only the cheaters and the cheated. I am a formerly great prognosticator. These days, I practice as a magician, wearing a…

QIU XIAOFEI & HU XIAOYUAN Qiu Xiaofei and Hu Xiaoyuan have been living together for fifteen years now. Best not to think about how long it’s been, Hu says. “It gets scary.” They grew up with no access to computers, and didn’t find out about the Internet until after university. Today, Qiu has little faith in digital images. The aversion…

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A China Youthology x LEAP Special Report For over two years, China Youthology conducted an ongoing study of China’s young people. They are a generation affected by the Internet, a rapidly developing economy, a transforming social structure, the onset of globalization, and the arrival of consumer culture. There are a lot of changes going on. That’s true for China’s youth. What…

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,…