IN 2002 OKWUI ENWEZOR curated Documenta XI. As exhibitions go, it was a sort of Bretton Woods moment, setting the parameters of a conversation about the relationship between art and global geopolitics that stayed in place for over a decade. It also coined a format for large-scale exhibitions in an implicitly global age, including a…

It is an incontestable fact that, in contemporary China, the original social and critical nature of cartooning has diminished. An exhibition of work by Huang Yao (1917-1987) at the Shanghai Art Museum earlier this year, curated by the author, showed a cartoonist working in Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s who possessed a spirit of…

Under the current set of social circumstances, the need for monuments is as pressing as ever. In Wuhan, birthplace the Xinhai Revolution— the uprising, named for its year in the Chinese calendrical system, which overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911— architects and planners think about how to commemorate and look forward. IN AN AGE where…

Looking back, it is hard not to recognize the prescience of Shanghai’s early amusement parks. In the decades that followed, this festive mode of consumption rapidly spread throughout the world, becoming the anthem of entertainment for the urban middle classes. THE SETTING SUN spread over the broad, flat asphalt road. Flocks of cars and people…