For those who have been paying attention to or are simply familiar with Jiang Zhi’s artistic practice this past decade, signs and echoes of Jiang’s previous works abound in the exhibition “A Thought Arises,” whether in the exquisite depth of the video installation The Light of Transience or the poetic wisdom expressed in the needles…

THE SUBJECTS OF my paintings are all familiar places and people, and that is because knowing them well, I feel confident in drawing them. Recently I made some small paintings on the streets of Beijing, chatting with the old men and women living in the hutongs, whose accents are so familiar to me. The scenes…

“It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with Conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry.” Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967 Life is full of endless anticipation. Except for blood and flesh, dreams and anticipation have…

NARI WARD IS a Jamaican-born installation artist whose work forges new semiotic possibilities for our relation to objects. Ever since his breakthrough work Amazing Grace (1993), in which he amassed nearly 300 abandoned baby carriages from Harlem streets and bound them together with fire hose in a disused firehouse, the “reinvention” of found materials has…

Chutian Golden Paper 20100520 Fashionable Girl Stands Barefoot in Street for 13 Hours From 10 a.m. on May 18, our staff received calls nonstop from readers, who reported a fashionably dressed pretty young woman motionlessly standing barefoot at the intersection of Jiefanggongyuan Road and Huiji Road. Her abnormal behavior attracted considerable attention until around 1…

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, especially Kantian philosophy, is consistent on one point: the distinction between noumenon— the thing in and of itself— and phenomenon— the thing as perceived. Traditional Chinese philosophy, however, holds no such distinction; if anything, the two are combined in the arching concept of the bengen (literally, the “root” of all things). If one…

Outside an upscale shopping district in the center of Wuhan, following a graffiti-covered wall around an inconspicuous corner, one may find the entrance to Chi K11 Art Space. The small elevator, with only enough elbow room for two people, does not hold a single clue to indicate that there might be an art space upstairs,…

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL, the Thai independent director and artist, has attained widespread international popularity, but in China only his accomplishments as a filmmaker are known. His first solo show in China opened at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in late 2011. The show comprises the exhibition “For Tomorrow For Tonight” as well as screenings of…

The Frac des Pays de la Loire invited the Chinese artists Duan Jianyu, Jiang Pengyi, Yang Xinguang, Yang Guangnan, Huang Xiaopeng, and Kan Xuan to visit the French city of Nantes for a two-month residency program. The outcome of this artistic venture then appeared in the exhibition “Be Natural, Be Yourself,” curated by Hou Hanru….

Amidst the dozens of new buildings that grace the Beijing skyline on a daily basis, one particular construction in Wangjing— which is adjacent to 798 and Caochangdi, and the home of both the Central Academy of Fine Arts and a great number of artists— has received considerable attention in the Weibo-sphere. Officials have called it…

MadeIn Company have released a new set of merchandise in an exhibition that cannot be said to differ from their many and frequent shows in the past. The major works (perhaps better described as products) of “Physique of Consciousness,” held at Long March Space in Beijing earlier this year, consisted of a set of physical…

Wang Haichuan has been very interested in the old Tongyuanju munitions factory in Chongqing’s Nan’an district for several years now. Not only has he researched the buildings within, but he has also interviewed a great number of the people living there. The standard size of factory workers’ dormitories is 16.9 square meters, where for the…

Perhaps not even Tu Hongtao himself anticipated that the transformation of his painting— which he had been repeatedly putting off—  would culminate in this solo exhibition at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art. During the unusually long preparation period for this exhibition, instead of knocking out paintings to fill a large space, as he has was…

INSIDE, OUTSIDE, AND PERIPHERAL “NOW THAT WE’VE finished going through all of the traditional types of painting and the history of art in Hubei, we are definitely going to move in a more modern and contemporary direction.” As he speaks, Hubei Art Museum director Fu Zhongwang is sitting in the museum’s coffee shop, looking out…

In 1986, a 24-year-old youth did two things. First, he changed his name from Ding Rong to Ding Yi. Second, he drew a grid pattern with the letter X on an 84-square-centimeter canvas and called it Taboo. These two seemingly unrelated things, proceeding from the consciousness of this one person, would put into practice the…

WHEN ONE SPEAKS of the strong presence the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (SFAI) has established within the Chinese contemporary art world, it is often in conjunction with the stream of painters who have emerged from it over the past 30 years. Consequently, in the eyes of many, SFAI is a breeding ground for painters who…

Even though the introduction to the exhibition states that the formalization of art and realism have been cautiously formulated as coexisting in relation to each other, there is still a strong whiff of something different from the verb in the English title of this exhibition. In the early 1950s, formalized art and realism in China…

“I CAME TO Wuhan looking for rocks,” announced one young Beijing-based artist in explanation of his presence in Wuhan. Rocks are to be found everywhere; why this city? (Rock and roll? If the conversation were in Chinglish, he could have been mistaken for referring to local punk rock. Sadly, the slippage does not exist in…

In Chinese medicine they say that those who won’t make it through the following year tend to leave for good in the winter. It’s a theory that may sound folksy but that this winter was borne out by a string of monumental passings that seemed never to end. And no sooner had Christopher Hitchens, Václav…

                  1. NINA BEIER Take Danish artist Nina Beier’s sculpture series, “The Demonstrators”: posters of stock images, such as of a light bulb or rope, are dipped in glue and draped upon various found objects, which sometimes hang from the ceiling. The slick, color-blocked industrialism of the…