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…

In the two recent photography shows “Unspoiled Brats” and “Tora Tora Tora” (subtitled “Chinese Cutting-Edge Photography Exhibition” and shortened below to “Tora”) I saw faces and expressions resembling nothing so much as those of the Beat Generation. The young people in the photographs were immersed in their own performances, flirting with the boundaries of the mainstream value system;…

China’s ever and rapidly increasing prominence on the world stage is no secret, and recently, that world has begun to pay attention to rapid developments in a special relationship: that between China and Africa. And just as China celebrated a milestone moment of global emergence in 2008 with the Beijing Olympics, this month Africa prepares to host the…

But if we want to talk about the shows themselves, they share something on the level of their calm, restrained and dignified dispositions, although “Seven Young Artists” emphasized a delight in langua…

As the social compassion and peripheral perspective contained in the punning title “Rem(a)inders” and the poetic allusion to the processes of artistic production in “Glass Factory” suggest, these two …

Olafur Eliasson, introducing his latest work at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), riddled his audience thus: “How are you? And who are you?” Pausing for a moment, he then explained that save for the order of their letters, “who” and “how” are such similar words that the questions are almost the same. Where one might…

In BIC’s inaugural exhibition, we see an unorthodox slice of a rapidly changing metropolis in the process of transformation, which in the case of Wuhan, exposes a city of China’s interior in a state o…

Three pairs of Chinese men and women, their eyes blindfolded and looking like hostages kidnapped by terrorists, appear on three different screens speaking the same lines. It is a video installation by Swedish artist Per Hüttner, who plans to hire actors in different countries—China, Sweden and France—to recite the same text concerning a world on the edge…

Boulevard du Général de Gaulle, renamed Boulevard du Centenaire, is one of the best-kept stretches of road in metropolitan Dakar and arguably all of Senegal. Originating at the Place de l’Obélisque and extending with unobstructed sightlines into Centre Ville, the Boulevard and its surrounding neighborhood—collectively referred to as Centenaire—occupy a perfectly strategic sliver of urban space. It is here…

“Jungle” was by no means one of those ordinary name-dropping group shows of Chinese contemporary artists, even though its presentation was familiar: more than sixty artists at its opening, a list that might be described as long and exhaustive, covering artists of every age bracket and working in many different media. Fortunately the show was aimed at displaying…