Art students are a familiar sight in Xiaozhou Village: as the bus conductor calls out “Xiaozhou Village Entrance,” the bus, which starts out empty from the university town, is met with an influx of students. As a rule, they are tourists, or art academy students who have gathered together to prepare for exams. Lugging backpacks,…

There is something about Hong Kong’s urban landscape that invokes the dystopian future envisioned in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?— a sci-fi tale of the android bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his chase for murderous, thinking robots set in a consumer-saturated city. Perhaps this is why curator Qinyi Lim chose…

HISTORY LESSONS: REFLECTIONS ON OCAT PUBLISHING ALTERNATIVES TO RITUAL: A CASE STUDY OF SHENZHEN OCT CONTEMPORARY ART TERMINAL On January 26, two exhibitions opened to mark OCAT’s eighth anniversary: “History Lessons: Reflections on OCAT Publishing,” curated by Fang Lihua and Li Rongwei, and “Alternatives to Ritual: A Case Study of Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Art Terminal,”…

In years past, the work of Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985) has allowed itself to wear many loose-fitting forms. She has held a bar of wet soap in her hands for a prolonged period (One Day With A Soap, 2011); “directed” a “play” (Secondhand Stabilization, 2011); filmed the interactions between actors she has prompted but who…