THE ART FAIR as we know it is no longer free to exist in and of itself. Come vernissage or even earlier, local arts and culture organizations are now bound like lemmings to organize their own spinoff ordeals. An art fair is not a proper art fair without a full roster of ancillary events and…

Although “Wang Peng: A Crowd of One” is billed as a retrospective of the artist’s 30-year career, one has difficulty placing the exhibition inside an existing art historical framework. Many a typical retrospective would have the artist carefully select the works shown, exhibition approach, and the venue. The artist would pay close attention to the…

This Su Wenxiang-curated exhibition possesses a title that immediately conjures an atmosphere of political opposition. Yet the title seems dissociated from the exhibition itself, lingering instead by the gallery entrance, or drifting like a soft cloud above the visitor’s head. During its travels between the mouths of its visitors, it is soon simplified into an…

In 2011, Guo Hongwei created three collage works, Shadow in Shadows, The Sunshine Behind the Sunshine, and Highlight of Highlights. His practice fragmented somewhat, and he engaged in various different projects; in a collaboration with an art and fashion magazine, Guo again employed manual, cut-and-paste collage techniques, transforming advertisements into a formal structure, illusory in…

When put forward as a philosophical concept, “the multitude” must find a way for its subjectivity— in the context of new capitalist constructs, like cognitive capitalism, which carry such potential for conspired action and integration—to realize true diversity and differentiation in the “decision” to sustain itself. As compared to the way in which the notion…

In Claes Oldenburg’s 1960 statement “I am for an Art,” the artist gives his written phrases the same vivid palette and wily elasticity as his genre-defying artwork. The piece would soon be hailed not only as the artist’s personal manifesto, but also a mantra for American Pop Art, which at that moment was busy chipping…

Relationships start with a choice: to open up to a stranger or recoil. That choice, common as it is in encounters between individuals, is just as relevant when thinking about cultures coming into contact with one another—when friendship becomes a matter of war and peace. These meetings might produce a cacophonous event: like the 2011…

“Un art de la guerre”—this is the subtitle of the spring 2013 Guy Debord (1931-1994) documentary exhibition at the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF). An iconoclastic thinker, artist, and political activist, Debord scorned honors and organs of authority throughout his life and attacked what he called “the Society of the Spectacle.” Today, his manuscripts have…

Ten years ago, when we talked about Chinese performance art, one would typically refer to controversial actions like eating a fetus. However, one should not forget that there were also Xiamen Dada’s burning of artworks after exhibition (1986), Xiao Lu and Tang Song’s shooting incident at the “China Modern Art Exhibition” (1989), the Beijing East…

The art world’s increasing interest in Southeast Asia in recent years is indisputable. Last year’s Art Dubai welcomed Alia Swastika to curate its Southeast Asian-focused “Marker” section. In late May, Christie’s Hong Kong offered up its largest-ever lot of contemporary wares from the region. Perhaps most tellingly, this year also witnessed the Guggenheim hold “No…

The openness of contemporary art with regard to medium and context allows for a wider range of formal possibilities, and its social orientation also serves to consistently expand the limits of these. …

Performance art, as a formal concept, has been in China for about three decades now. Over these past 30 years, people have been using the term “behavioral art” (Chinese: xingwei yishu) to describe the concept. In fact, around the time of the ’85 New Wave, performance art began entering mainstream consciousness along with Chinese Modernism….

Collectors from all over the world descended upon Berlin in the dwindling days of April for the ninth edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin. While the German capital, a city with less than four million inhabitants, is home to countless galleries—the number varies, depending on whom you ask, though accounts of the current number tend to…

The President’s Young Talents (PYT), inaugurated in 2001 and organized by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Istana, aspires to “nurture a developmental platform for promising local artists under the age of 35 working with emerging contemporary art practices.” PYT began to adopt a new format in 2009, with members from the curatorial committee—…

The exiled knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. — Edward Said Anida Yoeu Ali’s “Buddhist Bug Project” offers a particularly unique perspective on dis- placement:…

For the art audience in Jakarta, Yuz Museum has its particular position, which is quite different from other spaces in the city. Yuz Museum has a focus on showing Chinese contemporary art, especially from its collection, which is quite distanced from Indonesian audiences. In the beginning of its establishment, Yuz Museum had shown important figures…

“Let’s get lost, lost in each other’s arms / Let’s get lost, let them send out alarms,” Chet Baker praises the romantic mystique and disruptive force in letting go of orientation. This lust of wandering reflects the mood of “Urban Synesthesia,” a five-person group exhibition curated by Wang Chun-Chi. The usual highways to understanding an…

Showcasing Song Dong’s work from the mid-1990s to the present, “Doing Nothing” occupies two out of three of Pace’s 25th Street galleries. Pace’s larger space, 534 W 25th, surveys Song’s performance-based work from 1994-2012 through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, while the smaller space at 510 W 25th St presents new, mostly sculptural works expanding…

For his first solo show in the United States, Liu Wei fashions reclaimed wood from domestic interiors into a soaring, architectural ensemble, transforming the gallery space into a curious amalgam of Gothic cathedral and country home. A version of this body of work first debuted in the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, where the improbable title— Merely…

What can Andy Warhol do for us? At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, situated by Victoria Harbour, “15 Minutes Eternal” features over 400 works brought from the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, on the streets surrounding the museum, tourists from all over the world are busy racking up their credit…