In 1967, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage, a slim paperback that quickly became an icon of pop-culture criticism and cemented his reputation as its high priest. A collaboration with the designer Quentin Fiore “coordinated” by Jerome Agel, the book uses bold layouts, striking graphics, and eclectic samples from art…

1 No matter how you approach him—whether in the imagination, in memory, or in reality—he still seems like an island in the sea: a little dot floating as if at home in an eternally turbulent world. Can I say this? To check, I replay them in my mind, over and over again—all of the real…

I had just returned home to Los Angeles from a month-and-a-half-long European trip filled with exhibitions, readings, and parties. Two months earlier, I had proposed to the artist Rachel LaBine, my girlfriend of four years. I hadn’t written an essay or short story in what seemed to me a long time. A few months before…

Conceived as a response to changes to what might be called the unsympathetically hyper-kinetic city par excellence, the group show “Lost City 3” picks up some seven years after its previous edition, the series as a whole spanning just over ten years. During this period, Singapore’s built environment has seen startlingly rapid changes, with whole…

The moment we arrive at a threshold, we often already know what to expect. The senses distill for us where we are and what we’re supposed to do: as when entering a coffee shop. Increasingly ubiquitous, these houses of high culture appeal through a blending of aromas and symbols; we feel comfortable, worldly, and know…

Zheng Bo: The Open Drawer Artist Zheng Bo collects, organizes, and records information about public art projects through the website AWallProject.net. He has uploaded six projects to the site so far, …

“Illuminated,” curated by artist Guo Hongwei, is the fifth exhibition held at his nonprofit Gland Space. The exhibition, born of the artist’s personal creative experience, embodies the eclectic accumulation of his work as it has evolved over time. This rich, inclusive presentation has a strength of vision that surpasses the effects of his solo work,…

Woman Jumping off Building, 2015, acrylic and pencil on paper, 109.2 x 157.4 cm Liu Yin has realized, like most of us, that she spends far too much time browsing news and advertising images. This tremendous swatch of visual information has long been part of our lives, but its intrusiveness has risen to historic heights…

On the afternoon of June 1, 2006, Li Ming filmed the first Afternoon of June 1. Thereafter, Li Ming, Yang Junling, and Lin Ke, all members of the art collective Double Fly Art Center, formed a pact to get together on June 1 every year and shoot video spontaneously for an afternoon. This year marks…

Performance in Contemporary China The critical performing arts—from theater to performance—reveal the performative elements of everyday life. More often than not, this means exposing the power mechani…

What does one talk about when one talks about performance in art? Across an unmistakable recent wave of conferences, special journal issues, and survey exhibitions, performance frames a near-apocryphal field. It clusters together practices that often have more in common through what they lack than through what they share. Perhaps it is the relative marginality…

Since the 1980s, practices of calligraphy in contemporary art have tended towards a symbolic (and therefore political) presence. In the world of calligraphy, there now seems to be an attempt to liberate the medium from established systems and open up to new modes of writing and visual styles, from the modern approach of Qiu Jian…

In 2013, Korean-born, New York-based artist Anicka Yi began a trilogy of exhibitions entitled “Denial,” “Divorce,” and “Death,” inspired by human emotions attached to love and heartbreak. Presented as a forensic investigation of these affective, illusive, and hardly measurable states, Yi’s work captures the signs, evidence, and residue of these phases embedded in and transmitted…

A search for the conditions which construct our reality lies at the center of Alicja Kwade’s work as a sculptor. With consistency, yet a great variety of methods and often traditional materials such as metal, stone, wood, copper, aluminum, glass and everyday objects like clocks, mirrors, lamps, or doors she creates fascinating artworks about the…

The theater, once solely the spatial medium of performance on the stage, has slowly become a common part of contemporaryartistic parlance, and has greatly extended its own meaning as well. Gao Shiming…

“Entropy Wrangler,” Ian Cheng’s 2013 exhibition at Off Vendome in Dusseldorf, was an excellent introduction to the logic behind this artist’s practice. The centerpiece was a large projection in the gallery’s basement described as “a live computer simulation that changes and evolves, forever.” Like all of Cheng’s simulations, it was programmed with motion capture techniques…

There is a strain of contemporary art centered around 3D renderings and augmented reality, where the technology itself is reason for the work to exist. Lawrence Lek’s series “Bonus Levels” is a series of site-specific, immersive video game installations. Each section of the project is structured like a novel, based on a real building that…

It’s one thing to pretend to be authentic; it’s another to pretend to be fake. In the space of two years, PC Music has gone from little more than a Soundcloud page to a cult dance music collective followed by those in the know and from there to a legitimate pop culture happening—the loosely-defined label/brand’s…

The thing about the denim painter’s universe is that, once you get sucked in, it’s hard to climb back out. Korakrit Arunanondchai imbues his work with a charisma that is massively seductive, and speaks directly to the viewer in a call and response of interpellation: “I am a machine / boosting energy into the universe…

The Big Bang After the immense success of Grosse Fatigue, which caused a sensation at the 2013 Venice Biennale and brought Camille Henrot the Silver Lion, the French artist, born in 1978, has become one of the most sought-after names for curators and institutions. The Venice exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, was fittingly titled “The…