The decision by Ma Qiusha to call her new solo exhibition “Static Electricity” was not one born of careful deliberation. It was made after accidentally coming across the term in a book during an anxious search for a title for her new exhibition. The objects and experiences implied by the term “static electricity” themselves bear…
Read MoreThe artist He Xiangyu (born 1986) has made a quick name for himself in the contemporary art world. His reputation, for the most part, owes itself to the scale and grandeur his work has taken on, both uncommon for an artist his age. The huge, post-apocalyptic landscape mountains of black crystalline residue seen in his…
Read MoreHeman Chong’s practice, concisely stated on his website, “… involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future.” Presented at the NUS museum in Singapore, “Calendars (2020-2096)” is a full embodiment of this credo. Consisting of 1,001 color images of public interior spaces in Singapore he visited over…
Read MoreStretching from photography to video and installation, WAZA’s latest multimedia work Social Youth divides three spaces into different layers of depth. First, the audience notices small posters of photography works arranged in line in a hallway. Immediately after, a pitch-black screening room resembling the video halls popular in China in the 1980s follows, while the…
Read MoreIn 1949, as he was boarding a plane to leave China, David Diao saw a sign that read “One suitcase per person.” He later made a painting bearing those words, which provide the inspiration for the title of this exhibition. The simple phrase evokes travel, baggage and the individual. It is the starting point for…
Read MoreXu Qu gained a certain degree of recognition after his contribution to “51m²” at Taikang Space: the single-channel video work Upstream, in which the artist and a friend navigate a rubber dinghy along Beijing canals starting outside of the city center and ending in the vicinity of the central government’s headquarters in Zhongnanhai, where they…
Read MoreContextually underpinning Leung Chi Wo’s first solo exhibition in London, “We Must Construct as Well as Destroy,” is Aston Webb, an architect whose text published in the book London of the Future (1921) forms the exhibition title. In Aston Webb’s Prophecy (2011), a photograph of the Webb-designed Hong Kong Legislative Council (LEGCO) Building is presented…
Read More“2009-05-02” was the last series of work produced by Gu Dexin before he chose to retire from the art world completely. The title of the work came straight from the designated time frame for the exhibition at Galleria Continua Beijing— Gu frequently implements this policy, naming his works after simple external circumstances in order to…
Read MoreTokyo has long been known for its cultural exports, and the present is no exception. However, in terms of contemporary art, the city’s galleries are faced with the decision to either move ahead into a truly cosmopolitan future, or remain behind in an antiquated past. Japanese art is at an international high just now. Yayoi…
Read MoreThe critic and scholar Boris Groys is a household name in the international contemporary art world, including in China, where his writings have found a great number of faithful readers. Before these readers get a chance to see his work as co-curator of this year’s Shanghai Biennale, however, LEAP made sure to sit down for…
Read MoreGIORGIO AGAMBEN Born in 1942, Giorgio Agamben currently teaches at the Università Iuav di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In works including Homo Sacer and The State of Exception he furthered Foucault’s and Arendt’s explorations of political philosophy, while his…
Read MoreThe earliest encounter between Tony Cragg and Chinese audiences was in 2005 during the second Beijing International Art Biennale, where the British sculptor won First Prize. Perplexingly— especially as this exhibition functioned also on the diplomatic level, as part of the British Council’s UK Now festival, but also because Cragg himself often cites it alongside…
Read MoreApart from housing ShanghART Taopu Warehouse and artist studios, the Taopu art district has also served as the setting for two major exhibitions by local artists: “Future Festival,” and “TOP Contemporary Art Events.” The former was the brainchild of artists Ding Li, Jin Feng, Shi Qing, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, and Zhou Xiaohu, among others,…
Read MoreSui Jianguo’s solo exhibition at Pace Beijing mounted the representative works of his various phases from the 1980s on, the earliest of which is a plaster cast sculpture from 1987, when Sui was still a student working toward his MA. The most recent of works on display is 2011’s bronze cast, The Blind. As it…
Read MoreTHE 30 SHORT years since the advent of Chinese contemporary art have also seen wave upon wave of interest in Western theory, beginning with the popularity of existentialism in the 1980s. The impact of these trends is readily apparent within artworks such as Zhong Ming’s He Is Himself—Sartre. Later, following the entrée of postmodern theory,…
Read More“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981” (“UBBS”) is a sprawling exhibition that hinges on a bold claim and a stubborn refusal. The claim, made by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, is that the unruly, anything-goes pluralism of California art during this period had far-reaching consequences that are “just beginning to be understood.”¹ America…
Read MoreEver since the ‘85 New Wave, discussions about theory have been part of the progress of contemporary art in China, and on multiple occasions theoretical debates have taken center stage. In the 1980s, translations of Sartre and the existentialist writers, of varying quality and accuracy, found their way into the country, as did a great…
Read MoreDubai On the press bus bound for the Madinat Jumeirah and Art Dubai one late March morning, it was impossible not to overhear a healthy chorus of eight or nine Mandarin voices; perusing the materials distributed a few minutes later, names like Zhang Huan, Melissa Chiu, Richard Chang, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Carol Yinghua Lu jumped…
Read More1. KLARA LIDÉN Klara Lidén, a Berlin-based Swede working through installation, architectural interventions, and video, suffuses her practice with both the unbridled energy of a young urban adventurer and the resourcefulness of a hardened street urchin. Her work, resolutely, is “street”: via the reallocation of scavenged…
Read MoreThey say a picture is worth a thousand words. At the New Museum’s second Triennial “The Ungovernables,” however, visitors often find themselves needing to trudge through lengthy, jargonistic labels in order to make sense of the many artworks and projects on display. While this seems to have become the norm these days for contemporary art…
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