An important member of the “Post-Sense Sensibility” group of the 1990s, Zhang Hui has worked in media including installation, theater, and performance art. And then, five or six years ago, he turned the larger part of his attention to painting. Zhang shares some thoughts with LEAP about this shift in his practice. I’ve told this…

The question of art education in China, like just about every question in China, is a complicated one, tied to the myriad issues facing a society in the throes of a massive transition. There is no easy solution, and acknowledging the obstacles is a prerequisite to solving the issues. To this end, we interviewed eight…

RIDING THE 938 bus out of Beijing’s Guomao station, the Central Business District gradually dissolves on the hour-long journey east to Songzhuang, giving way to a landscape not unlike that found in hundreds of county-level towns across China. An artist community on the city’s periphery, Songzhuang was formed largely under the auspices of Li Xianting,…

For China’s art cram schools, things heat up just before the Lunar New Year and keep going until the fireworks have stopped. Many a hopeful art academy entrant, scared by the duo of provincial exams and school-specific art exams just around the corner, spends China’s highest holidays in the classroom. This is the tensest period…

I spent the 1970s in a factory. That decade, when I was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, was an era severely lacking in books, but it was also the era during which I read the most. Every day after work, I buried myself in books, reading myself into states of both ecstasy and…

Creation myths are all more or less the same, but this one is better than most. In 1998, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert buy a piece of land in Sanpatong, a village twenty minutes by car outside Chiang Mai. It has no water or electricity. They intend to use it to bypass the concept of…

Set against the distinct uproar of modern Chinese history, Hoo Mojong’s works betray a unified, unadorned quiet. Many of her paintings are still-lifes, usually depicting everyday objects such as trees, bananas, bread, vegetables, and the like, crudely composed in rough lines. Her figures also seem cumbersome, with simplistic or omitted facial features and unusually robust…

Like a white lotus in full bloom on a pond’s surface, the ArtScience Museum glitters under the clear Singaporean skies. Situated in front of the three towers of Marina Bay Sands and next to the winding silvery strands of the Helix Bridge, the museum adds to an already striking skyline in the new waterfront area…

In 2006, Sun Xun founded π Animation Studio in Hangzhou. The 2005 graduate of the China Academy of Art was anxious to build his own studio so that he could begin work on a high-quality animated film. The 27-minute, 50-scene film— entitled 21 Grams and featured in the “Orizzonti” section of the 2010 Venice International…

Hong Kong-based art historian Frank Vigneron titles his highly personal account of contemporary art in the city after the infamous song “Kowloon, Hong Kong,” written and performed by a 1960s English-language local pop group called the Reynettes; juxtaposed on the cover of the book over a sketch of the bauhinia blossom that graces the Hong…

With four daily non-stops from Beijing to Taipei, twenty-four hour border crossings between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and steady jetfoil service between Macau and cities along the Pearl River Delta, we find constant movement throughout “Greater China” today. Yet while the idea of “Greater China” carries with it a set series of associations— commercial, cultural,…

Ruan Qianrui transports the visual and sonic landscapes of Beijing’s experimental music scene to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This January, I heard that Ruan Qianrui was coming to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for a collaborative exhibition with Experimenter En Couleur, a member of the London-based Audio Architecture collective. In…

In Beijing’s 798 Art District, abutting Originality Square and just across from the Danish-owned Galleri Faurschou and New York powerhouse Pace Beijing, there sits a beige pedestal. Thick and wide, th…

LEAP: Art Beijing is already in its sixth edition, which is hard to believe. Seems like just yesterday you were preparing the inaugural version. DMY: When it all got started, there wasn’t much else for me to do. I couldn’t find other jobs, you know, I was too old. So I had to make something…

Since 2006, Beijing has been blessed— or cursed, depending on your perspective— with two art fairs, opening within ten days of one another. In the leadup to the dueling expos in late April and early May, LEAP sat down with Wang Yihan, Director of the China International Gallery Exposition. LEAP: This must be the busiest…

Zaha Hadid passed through town a few weeks ago, for meetings with her clients at SOHO China and a highly publicized “first lecture in Beijing” just after the opening festivities for her latest creation, the Guangzhou Opera House. LEAP correspondent Jian Cui got a chance to sit down with her after outmaneuvering the SOHO public-relations…

Two bulky television sets atop a second-hand writing desk greet visitors to this highly staged exhibition of historic video art, backs turned toward each other. On the first runs a 1985 loop of performance clips from Shanghai’s M Group, in which artists Song Haidong and Qian Weikang do things like burn self-portraits and turn a…

“Against Easy Listening” is New York-based curator Steven Lam’s second of two exhibitions for 1a Space as part of his curatorial residency with the nonprofit organization. The title of the show, which includes artists from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, lays out the premise clearly: it’s an opposition to simple or passive…

Jin Shan’s solo exhibition at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute is a live demonstration of a long-term plan. “One Man’s Island” is comprised of two component parts: fifty video “diaries” shot by Jin Shan in his studio, and a manuscript containing tens of thousands of words written during the same period. The project played out,…

For their Beijing debut, the Indian duo of Thukral & Tagra transformed the UCCA’s middle hall into a spectacle in their signature style of “Punjabi Baroque.” With white retro furniture, warm family photos, glass crystal ornaments, and cheap kitschy artificial flowers meticulously arranged; red safflowers blooming against a blue wall-paper background; Kabbadi (a form of…