Modern Media X Culture Chanel special forum On January 18, LEAP magazine hosted “Encounters: Community” at the Guangdong Art Museum, part the exhibition “Culture Chanel.” The forum, chaired by LEAP executive publisher Ms. Cao Dan and featuring artists Wang Jian-wei, Cao Fei, and Artforum online editor Yang Beichen, opened with a discussion on Picasso’s Le…

Artists stand at the edge of society. Few ever dare to hope they might create an image or representation that actually affects or change society. This is because the task of artists, which is to pull …

TWO SEEDS WERE planted in Hong Kong back at the time of its inception: a seed of prosperity and a seed of subjectivity. The meaning of prosperity requires no elaboration here. Subjectivity, in this context, means self-awareness in culture and identity. Back in the late nineteenth century, Hong Kong’s prosperity endured fits and starts, but…

The LEAP + Art Basel Hong Kong special supplement is tailored to meet the demands of both art world insiders and outsiders during their visit to this year’s art fair. Beyond exhibition listings and recommendations, introductions to the local creative ecology, and interviews with collectors, the publication also brings with it the fashion-focused “Art Basel…

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…

Taipei’s Hong-Gah Museum has long been the home of video art in Taiwan. The role that its modestly-sized biennial serves is akin to an observation tower. The first two editions, titled “Dwelling Place” and “Eattopia,” were jointly curated by Chen Yung-Hsien and Sean C. S. Hu, and chose as their starting points the material world…

At Gasworks in London, three video works made by Lana Lin between the 1990s and the early 2000s explore the artist’s Taiwanese heritage— and her Western influences— both materially and thematically, in work that explores the complex feeling that comes from existing between multiple cultural frameworks. The exhibition begins with Taiwan Video Club (1999), in…

Huang Yong Ping’s “Circus” presents a herd of beheaded taxidermied beasts posed amongst an oversized bamboo cage in Gladstone Gallery’s southernmost Chelsea space. The dome-shaped cage dons a monumental, wooden marionette hand, its strings connected to the skeleton of a robe-clad monkey puppeteering the bones of a smaller monkey— a reference to the trickster monkey…

An islet named Pulau Sejahat, or “Evil Island,” once sat along the northeastern coastline of Singapore. According to folklore, a fierce battle broke out between the Acehnese and the Portuguese in the waters surrounding Pulau Sejahat in the eighteenth century. Despite the staggering size of the Sumatran Acehnese army, their arrows and spears were no…

German curator Alfons Hug has served as Director of the Goethe-Institut in many cities since the 1980s, including Lagos, Medellín, Brasilia, Caracas, Moscow, and currently Rio de Janeiro. Of the five BRICS countries, Hug is familiar with three. Two years ago, he began to plan BRICS-related programs, the starting point for which is an exhibition…

If Heman Chong had dedicated himself entirely to writing, by now he would most likely be stuck in its tight and unmarketable shackles, hanging around dingy dive bars bemoaning his plight to a bunch of good-for-nothings. Luckily, there are plenty of readymade forms beyond the written word able to bear the weight of his intense…