The artists’ talk that followed GUEST’s recent show at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was more an extension of the exhibition than an explanation thereof. Three group members, Zhao Yao, Xu Qu, and Lu Pingyuan— Li Ming and Lin Ke were absent— spent a good deal of time showing images and videos downloaded from…

The greatness of Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, according to Georges Bataille, lies exactly in its relationship to the original— Francisco Goya’s El Tres de Mayo 1808— or its inheritance of resistance: the regard for and expression of indifference. “There is no essential difference between him painting the scene of an execution or painting…

Following a performance of the now iconic Gutai work Electric Dress (1956), Atsuko Tanaka laid down the garment’s 200 colored light bulbs to rest on a piece of fabric. Still hot, the light bulbs scorched the material, leaving behind an ad hoc composition of black circles loosely marking out a figure. This figurative index, both…

THE BOSTON EXHIBITION— 12 abstract paintings, in context with 58 figurative paintings showing 200 years of American art— jolted the Chinese public and artists out of the Soviet and Socialist Realism then permeating the academies in the period following the Cultural Revolution. The artists had no frame of reference to absorb these new art forms,…

APROPOS THE ART world, Dubai in many ways mirrors Hong Kong. Both are post-colonial waterfront cities that boast histories centuries-long, but have only come to full maturation within the last few decades— Dubai after the establishment of the UAE, Hong Kong after Opening and Reform— and for the most part, they have been perceived as…

ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING IN the Middle East may be big news at the moment, it remained necessary to explain to everyone, on the eve of a visit to Sharjah, exactly what Sharjah is. The vast majority of my Beijing friends— both foreign and Chinese— reacted the same way to hearing these two syllables: they were completely…

MID-MAY IN Hong Kong— the arrival of another art fair left everyone dizzy amid the humidity and unseasonable rain. The highly-anticipated new visual culture museum, M+, contributed to the season’s loaded slate its first large-scale public exhibition project: “Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei.” In recent years art and culture in Hong Kong has expanded at…

In 1942, Mao Zedong spoke to the encampment of a burgeoning Communist Party of China in Shaanxi province, in what would later be heralded as the “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art.” At the time, the American scholar Joseph Nye was five years old. Half a century would pass before he, as dean of Harvard’s…

Boers-Li Gallery has ventured into discourses of ideological hegemony and its propagation in the new group show, “Ministry of Truth.” The modest collection of works seeks to challenge narratives that sustain both political and personal power structures, featuring artists working in and across North America, Europe, and Asia. But if the exhibition’s goal is to…

For Mainland Chinese viewers who are new to Sun Xun’s work, Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet In The Revolution offers an unforgettable experience, akin to a waking dream. Coursing through the film’s narrative is the logic of dreams, its landscape a torrent of ineffable, dark emotions. The soundtrack— created by Jin Shan— only…

Imagine the French Revolution hadn’t come until 1949. Suppose also that the Academy established in the late seventeenth century had continued to guide art education. Assume, in addition, that when political change finally arrived, an artist trained in these old master traditions had to suddenly adapt to a new ideological climate. Instead of depicting scenes…

In his later years, the Sui-dynasty Emperor Yang built a labyrinthine palace (“mi lou”), with “winding yards and twisting halls, each one leading to the next; hearths and rooms in the tens of thousands, all adorned with shining jade.” A place this beautiful was also a place meant to render its guests lost within its…

ARTISTIC PHARMACOLOGY At last year’s Venice Biennale, five Chinese artists set out to represent their country through the olfactory. Visitors to the state-sponsored China Pavilion were confronted with a country abstracted into tea, baijiu, lotus, medicinal herbs, and incense. Even by the standards of contemporary art’s very own Olympics, this reliance on cultural signifiers was…

The title of this exhibition,“Boy: A Contemporary Portrait,” connotes something provocative. The combination of “boy” and “contemporary” deserves particular mention, opening up the kind of discussion that could either become elevated and abstract, or be summed up briefly and succinctly. The exhibition “politely refused” the participation of female artists, thereupon automatically presenting itself as some…

There is quite a bit of overlap between Yang Mian’s “CMYK” and He Sen’s “Conversing with The Moon,” two solo exhibitions separated by the Chinese New Year. Both artists are graduates of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, both invited Lü Peng to act as curator, both opted for similar publication formats (each providing one exhibition…

For thousands of years, the book has been a vehicle for the unbounded exploration of objective knowledge and experience and subjective feeling and imagination. Often books convey truths or tenets that, although they cannot be proven, come to the author in a flash of insight. Seen this way, the concept of an “artist’s book” might…

In 1957, the filmmaker Agnès Varda assumed the role of photographer during a two-month journey around both urban and rural China with a delegation of French dignitaries. Fifty-five years later, Varda resolved to display the photographs she took during that trip as part of the exhibition “The Beaches of Agnès Varda in China,” and in…

In the past couple of years, performance art has seen a resurgence in popularity on the international art scene, at the same time igniting in China renewed enthusiasm for theoretical writings, especially translated texts. Li Ran’s recent solo exhibition stands at the crossroads of these two trends. The exhibition’s title is directly borrowed from Cézanne’s…

Honest, upright, at ease, strolling everywhere as he pleased, In the urban noise, applying brush to walls, electrical boxes, and lampposts, He surpassed them all, writing the epic of Kowloon. Sweat and ink, a jumble of fonts large and small, With steady smile from start to finish, He loved nothing more than an ice-cold coke….