IN HIS ESSAY “From Image to Media File: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” art critic, media theorist, and philosopher Boris Groys describes the notion of “original” for digital photographs as no longer accurate.[1] In today’s world of digitized images and virtual means of distribution, digital pictures have rather become copies, often absorbed into…

CAMILLE HENROT QUESTIONS where history begins, often incorporating indigenous cultures and anthropological research into her practice. Her most recent exhibition, “The Pale Fox” (2014), is an architectural display integrating found objects, sculpture, drawing, and digital images. The title is taken from a 1965 anthropological study of the West African Dogon people, whose mythology synthesizes the…

IN AN ART WORLD that often seems to elevate style over substance and rewards gloss and flashiness, Kwok Mang-ho, a.k.a. “Frog King” (b.1947), is a welcome antidote. He is easy to place and hard to pigeon-hole, a persona that is a mixture of childish adornment, joy, and serious long-term commitment. Frog King, by his own…

LIU WENTAO’S PAINTING may be consistently monochrome, but it’s anything but monotonous. For nearly a decade, the artist has resisted using color in his work, obsessively reusing two materi…

WEB EXCLUSIVE Former punk musician Wendy Yao is the founder of Ooga Booga, an indie store in L.A.’s Chinatown that carries everything ranging from artist’s books to crochet platform sandals. Since Ooga Booga was founded in 2004, it has been a nexus of creativity in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Asia Art Achive’s Chantal…

GUO HONGWEI (b. 1982) moves beyond his signature watercolor paintings in his latest show at Chambers Fine Art Beijing, “The Great Metamorphist.” At first glance, you might question disbeli…

By today’s standards, Musique Concrète seems like idealist fundamentalism, attempting as it does to provide a morphology and paradigm for sound art. Yet can this paradigm once again initiate revolution? Though war has been, is now, and will always be a catastrophe for art and culture globally, in the wake of the flames of the…

Joseph Beuys’ theory of social sculpture is a philosophical touchstone for Marko Daniel, curator of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. As he sees it, social sculpture expands the concept of sculpture beyond physical form and into the realm of social relations. It also anticipates the interactive, cooperative, and participatory paradigm in which“everyone is an artist.”…

The golden rule of communication studies is that new media is necessarily born of new culture. The artist may have no business in pre-empting these changes, but when it comes to new media in art in practice, the important question lies in the extent to which a work can alter modes of presenting art and…

THE PRIVATE ART museums appearing on the outskirts of Chinese cities in recent years are like vast fairy tale castles flung down from the sky—they bear no relation to their surroundings. Forging the ambitious myth of art in the wilderness, after all, is a great way to catch our attention. It is actually quite fitting…

In the 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud became one of the most influential authors of contemporary art criticism thanks to his work Relational Aesthetics . From 1999 to 2006, he served as co-director of Palai…

MOSCOW UNIVERSITY, 1953 Riverside. The sense of waking up in a silvery shower of leaves; lying on a cool bed of brambles in a forest. Water trickles by my sides all around; screeches and hoots periodically emanate from the greenblue light twinkling. My presence emerged from the wrinkled hands of a man in a foreign…

LEAP LABS, in collaboration with Beijing’s time-honored LGBT club Destination, presents “Conditions,” an exhibition that explores the anonymity and anxiety of desire experienced in the self-recognitio…

“Film Directors in Correspondence” is a series of film-related exhibition events, each of which explores the work of an outstanding director from different perspectives, and also features the work of another in order to establish a dialogue. The solo exhibition of Chinese director Wang Bing is one of such exhibition, and Wang chose his longtime…

In trade and economics, the term “positive” is perhaps even more undesirable than its antonym—within the art industry, constantly high on “positivism” (which is essentially no different to fetishism),…

Light, sound, space, and time effectuate four dimensions inseparable from the fulfilled human sensory experience. The quotidian, however, tends to overlook their existence. Art tends to emphasize it; herein lies art’s ontological value. The more illuminating an artist’s delineations of the contours of these dimensions, the more lauded the artist. Zhang Peili is a very…

2007 was a busy year for Chinese contemporary art. Looking back, many events of that year resonate today. It was the year that Forbes published an analysis of the five hottest collectible commodities;…

It is perhaps more appropriate to discuss Hao Liang’s practice within the context of traditional Chinese painting than within ink discourse. Of course, the term “traditional Chinese painting” suggests a national identity that itself originates in cultural anxiety. This anxiety, in both the present globalized context and the history of China’s modernist path as a nation-state, in fact exists…

When I first mentioned the idea of making a queer cover feature to friends and colleagues, their most common reaction was “you’re going to write about that beverage?” The beverage in question is Qoo, a Coca-Cola product aimed at kids and teenagers originally from Japan and introduced to the Chinese market in the early 2000s….