On the opening day of the Shanghai Biennale, young artist Simon Fujiwara explained his contribution, titled Rebekka (2012), to me and another artist couple: around 20 full-body casts stationed together, occupying half of a stairway that leads into the exhibition hall. Pointing at the face of one of these clay models, he tells us that…

THE TITLE OF Zhou Yilun’s latest exhibition at Platform China, “As There Is Paradise In Heaven,” immediately brings to mind the old proverb, “the heavens above are matched on earth by Suzhou and Hangzhou.” At the entrance to the exhibition hall, a faded painting scroll featuring the beautiful scenery of the West Lake is displayed…

Here, we cull from art history three examples of artist interaction with the museum. In the mid to late 1980s, three works by Huang Yong ping and Xiamen Dada adopted a destructive attitude to directly challenge the establishment, burning artworks and even planning to “tow” away a museum. after the turn of the century, artist…

Media attention to this year’s Gwangju Biennale has for the most part been directed at its curatorial team, made up of six female curators from Mumbai, Qatar, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and Jakarta respectively. The cities and countries in which these curators live and work roughly cover the most active economic regions, as well as the…

ON OCTOBER 28 at 3 a.m., I prepare to go to Kiev, Ukraine— a city that, thus far in my life, I had not thought about visiting. You should know that when I was a child, I was in love with geography. At the tender age of nine I could recite from memory the capitals…

IN THE INTERNATIONAL context, the art museum is usually an academic institution of collection, centered on twentieth-century art historical research and open to the public. If the art museum did not establish this basic objective in its work, it would not be able to provide the scholars and students of the world with such a…

The 2012 Taipei Biennial, “Modern Monsters/Death and Life of Fiction,” is the latest large-scale international art exhibition making a re-examination of modernity. Its mouthful of a title— especially in Chinese— originates from Taiwanese-American scholar David Der-Wei Wang’s book, The Monster That is History. In it, Wang explores the profound relationship between historical violence and literary…

AS FAR AS art hubs go, why Düsseldorf has not made its way into the global spotlight as spectacularly as New York, London, Berlin, or more recently, Hong Kong, is anyone’s guess. Then again, even this city’s name is misleading. Düsseldorf literally translates as “Village of Düssel”— Düssel being the tributary of the Rhine on…

BREEDING ZOOS OF PEOPLE AN INEVITABLE COMBINATION of charm and disenchantment coexists in virtually every culturally-implicated entity. The museums that rose to prominence in late-twentieth century China are no exception. People are always trying to provide unequivocal definitions of what a museum is. But as carefully constructed cultural destinations, museums serve not merely to assert…