The telling and re-telling of fables, tall tales, and mythologies can conjure visions at once delightful and terrifying. Too often the fantastic becomes grotesque, the mystical monstrous, and the everyday surreal. Wu Junyong’s recent show dips into the horrible pleasures of the misread idiom, deploying image-symbols of downtrodden clowns, cranes, textless books, flutes, and pointed…

In “The Seduction of Village” some new ideas arise that are worthy of attention. Due to Duan Jianyu’s bias towards text and narration, general commentary may liken her work to contemporary rhetoric—which, in some respects, it embodies. In one narrative series, Duan depicts a village woman nursing—a simple image that reappears before three separate backgrounds:…

At once meticulous and good-humored, David Diao’s twelve boldly colored canvases on view in Antwerp presented a succinct midcareer synopsis, bookended by references to the American painter Robert Motherwell. The works on view date from 1986 through 2010, beginning with two excerpts from Diao’s mid-1980s “Little Suprematist Prisons” series, whose hard-edged geometric compositions stage an…

Chen Wenji’s solo exhibition, held by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, is divided into two parts; the main gallery features his most recent work, while the secondary space displays his early works. It is clear that the curator chose this layout in order to linearly showcase the evolution of Chen Wenji’s comprehensive body of…

Nadim Abbas, in his first complete solo exhibition, brilliantly composes a scene that so resists interpretation that the viewer defaults into passive observation, submitting to a flaccid presentation of spectacle in the absence of any plausible guiding narrative. Several of the artist’s earlier projects fall into the category of conceptual assemblage, consisting of fragments of…

Liu Chuang is skilled at unearthing what is hidden beneath the surface of life’s quotidian systems. In doing so, he unmasks these systems as an apparatus that controls the perception of time, ensures the production of history, and protects the perpetuation of the species. And the moment they are questioned or doubted, their institutionalized essence…

Walking up the grand staircase of the China Club in Hong Kong offers a crash course in contemporary art in China. One after another appear works by artists now seen as key protagonists in a story that was only starting to unfold when the place first opened in 1991. And there, inserted among all the…

The first iteration of “Liu Ding’s Store” was conceived in the project “Take Home and Create Whatever Is the Priceless Image in Your Heart,” exhibited in 2008 at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, England. Liu Ding commissioned artists from the Dafen oil painting village outside Shenzhen to recreate a floating visual motif on a blank…

Remember when you were a little kid and you’d take out all your toys and create fantastic stories about their relationships, pitting them against each other in epic battles? Chen Wenling certainly does. His recent exhibition is a highly emotional narrative on themes of conflict and domination, rich (as titularly promised) with the suspension of…

Artists organizing events around the disparate interests of people outside the art world proper can lead to some fascinating convergences of concerns. (Of course, a deft hand is needed to satisfy the demands of such varied constituencies.) Emi Uemura’s “Country Fair,” initiated last year in Beijing with Vitamin Creative Space, is a successful example. A…

“One Project. Two Sites.” Curator Josef Ng warned viewers at the start that Lin Yilin’s project, carried out in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, would present two utterly different sides of itself. And in the end, he was right. In the Chiang Mai countryside, Lin Yilin highlights the utopian connotations of the “Land Project,” guiding his…

In October 2009, Shenzhen-based photographer Bai Xiaoci began an expedition. He sought out public buildings built in major construction projects led by local governments—“government edifices”—around China and shot large-scale frontal portraits of them. He visited more than half of China’s provinces, traveling north to Hohhot, south to Shenzhen, east to Shanghai, and west to Chengdu,…

The 2008 Guangzhou Triennial’s “Farewell to Post-Colonialism” initiated discourse on a potential conclusion to the post-colonial epoch. “Days of Our Lives,” Wong Hoy Cheong’s solo exhibition at Taipei Eslite Gallery, was thus a kind of farewell ceremony, yet one with a strong sense of irony. In the video work Dog Hole (2010), Wong Hoy Cheong…

Beginning on October 19, 1981, a four-day conference for the sixth Aga Khan Award for Architecture was held in Beijing. The topic of discussion was “The Changing Rural Habitat,” which remains a meaningful and relevant topic to this day. The conference was divided into two components. The first presented case studies: “Rural Architecture in the…

Starting with its title, Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov’s recent outing at Continua bespoke a dubious ambivalence toward a bygone system. Spread across the entire two-floor space, Solakov’s noncommittal stance is effectively revealed in the wide range of media presented— video, painting, graffiti, and writing—through which the artist filters his convoluted if honest ideas about art…

Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui have been close friends since they were first acquainted in Yunnan in the late 1970s. Early on, their artistic practices and trajectories in life overlapped considerably. Around the time of the ’85 New Wave, the “New Figurative Art” exhibition was born, and later the “Southwest Art Group.” Even after Zhang’s…

I hire models for nearly all my paintings, but sometimes I also find subjects through friends or acquaintances. A few days ago I was at a Prada party, and I saw a very pretty woman, so I took her photo. I collect these materials, but I don’t use everything. Some remain just as ideas. When…

We find in Hong Kong something of a curatorial anxiety: there are very few makers of exhibitions active in the local art scene, and, though this is entirely in keeping with the small scale and number of available exhibition spaces, intimate connections between institutional academic research and critical writing in the territory lead to a…

As curator of one of the world’s premier collections of classical Chinese art outside of China, Hao Sheng’s responsibility is to explain a visual culture that, more often than not, alienates its viewers. Sheng recently invited ten artists to make contemporary responses to works from the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston….

After a decade producing experimental music through his label Subjam, sound artist Yan Jun spent 2010 organizing a monthly performance series at UCCA in 798. When I met with him a few days before the final event in the series, he spoke with a mix of disappointment and mischievous anticipation. Over the course of the…