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…

Every periodic exhibition is ultimately, institutionally, about something. And just as Gwangju is a memorial to the Korean democratic movement and Singapore is a government creativity scheme, Yokohama is a remedy to a very specific national cultural situation, one that in suitably Japanese terms cannot be easily described but that has something to do with…

One can almost imagine Bishan in its heyday. On the evening of August 26, 2011 the village’s daytime enthusiasm gushes towards the Yi County Cinema. It’s the kind of movie theater almost every small town has had, but Bishan’s has somehow managed to hang on to a 1980s or 90s feel. Above both the exits,…

Once he discovered the professional and artistic work of one Raymond Fung, LEAP Contributing Editor Hans Ulrich Obrist took immediate interest. In Fung, Obrist saw a practitioner who had made real on the longtime crossover between art and architecture in a practice divided somewhat uncharacteristically into a “day job” as a municipal architect and a…

“VAMPIRE” MAY MARK the first time Pace Beijing has held a Western artist’s solo exhibition, but this is not Sterling Ruby’s first show in China, he having also made an appearance in UCCA’s 2008 group exhibition, “Stray Alchemists.” In that show, his piece, a nine-meter-tall monument, took up almost the entirety of UCCA’s central hall….

Following on her magnanimous portrait series of migrant workers in Beijing, Substructure, Beijing-based Korean-American photographer Cindy Hwang, a.k.a. CYJO, published this hefty collection of 237 portraits of fellow kyopo (people of Korean ethnicity living outside of Korea), and their survey-response texts to a set of standardized questions. However much the focus is placed on the…

TAIPEI Twenty-four hours after the Art Taipei vernissage, we who had flocked and converged on the Ilha Formosa for the weekend found ourselves flocking and converging on a savvy little street a ten-minute cab ride from the fair itself. The destination was Rudy’s thing, the opening of “Documented, Doubted, and Imagined Realities,” a boasting of…

WE WRITE THIS article but three days before the opening of “Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art” at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal. Our expectations are high. With OCAT’s support, we began our research for “Little Movements” nearly a year ago. This past year, in artist studios, art spaces, and other places of artistic practice, we…

FINISHING FIRST IS a dubious honor. Zhang Peili plays down his unshakable title as the “godfather of Chinese video art” by emphasizing the contingent nature of the situation in which he won it. But the fact remains: Zhang was the first artist to bring a piece of completed video work to a high-profile gathering of…

LUIS CHAN WAS born in Panama in 1905, moved to Hong Kong in 1910, and stayed there until his death in 1995. His artistic career spans nearly the entire twentieth century, and he is widely regarded as Hong Kong’s pioneer of modern art. He never received formal art training, but he showed an early interest…

LUIS CHAN: A STRANGE LITTLE ISLAND No matter whether to a Western or a Chinese audience, nearly all of Luis Chan’s paintings have the mystical, illusory quality of a foreign place. But to true Hong Kongers, they possess a familiarity that is as aesthetically pleasing as it is difficult to articulate. A DISTANT SPIRIT OF…

Photography, as a tool for representation, is always entangled with time and memory. The figures in a photograph appear before the audience as would actors on a stage; there are roles to be played, all an indication of some absent “other.” In the quiet gap that exists between the space and time at which a…

At its most elemental, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s ongoing collaborative project “The Way of Chopsticks” is a simple binary: as with husband and wife, one chopstick needs the other in order to properly function. As with the previous two installments, also shown at Chambers in 2002 and 2006, “The Way of Chopsticks III” finds…

There will always be artists who move from private dwelling to town square, from self to public: artists who make speeches, who show their works, who focus on the public dimension of art. This phenomenon is not limited by generation, as evidenced by the work of three young artists participating in “The Personal Is Public.”…

“The Stock Exchange, Weather and Sex” may sound borrowed from a Hollywood classic, but the implied drama and tension between these three disparate yet quotidian symbols finds scant response in the artist’s new collection of paintings. Instead, the audience encounters a series of color paintings made of lines and checkered patterns, their anticipation mercilessly flattened…

There is no denying the distinctiveness of Yao Lu’s photomontages. Looking at the 31 works grouped together in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern, uniformity amongst the various scenes evokes a contradictory sense of security and insecurity that persists long after the images have been digested. The sharply rendered photomontages express the continuous…

The great Australian-born critic Robert Hughes noted in the documentary Mona Lisa Curse that the role of art is to “make us feel more clearly and intelligently” about the world we live in; to provide “a place outside ourselves that tells us that there’s more to life than our everyday concerns and needs.” Many artists…

The artist Wim Delvoye is notorious for his penchant for depraving the human experience with either subtle or otherwise extremely crude humor. In his 1999 work Anal Kisses, he used red lipstick on hotel stationery, producing the puckering of an anus; in another 2000-2001 series he used an X-ray to record sexual activity, and unabashedly…

I went to see this new installation by Yves Netzhammer with a lawyer friend. At one point he turned to me and asked, “What’s this guy actually trying to say?” This question has been asked numerous times in art galleries, and will surely continue to be. Always likely to draw a slightly patronizing smile, its…