On May 5th, 2011, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in conjunction with the China Art Foundation, hosted Strategies of Contemporary Art: Past and Present, East and West, inviting American master of abstraction Frank Stella and preeminent Chinese avant-gardist Huang Yong Ping to bump heads on a mélange of topics, ranging from education to inspiration and…

A CHINESE SINGAPOREAN man in an emerald green dress looks into a mirror. He tremblingly tells his character’s black mother— here played by an Indian-Singaporean actor— “I’m white. White. White!” On a dual screen, another Indian Singaporean actor simultaneously delivers the same lines, this time to a Malay Singaporean actor playing his character’s black mother….

A LIBRARY IS a place full of curiosities, both concrete and abstract. It provides storage for knowledge, yet it is also a site where different groups of people meet. In the urban life of Beijing, the symbolic significance of libraries has long surpassed their actual function. The National Library of China, located in the university…