Illustration by Vanilla.Specially made for the latest issue's feature article "Accent Trilogy: Like Dew, or a Lightning".
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More than ever, our bodily senses are affected by technology around us. As technology gets better and better at stimulating and simulating sensory experiences, our perceptions of the external world are increasingly mediated by and dependent on digital and mechanical devices. The two seemingly contrasting concepts of “techno” and “sensual” become one and the same…

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More than once I have asked Xie Nanxing to explain the secret magic behind his painting. When we struggle to find some guiding principle behind the variations of his imagery in his work, are the materials he uses important? By way of response, Xie points out that my curiosity points to a false proposition. This…

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In the ubiquitous three-dimensional modeling and rendering software 3ds Max, the humble teapot is among about a dozen built-in objects, standing out rather awkwardly among other geometrical shapes due…

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When the Taipei Biennial and Shanghai Biennale announced that their present editions would be curated, respectively, by Nicolas Bourriaud and Anselm Franke, there were strong echoes of theoretical discourse and cultural internationalism shared between the two regions. Further east on the Pacific rim, the Yokohama Triennale boldly appointed artist Yasumasa Morimura artistic directer (the Triennale…

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Taobao is China’s largest online shopping site. Similar to eBay, Taobao facilitates consumer-to-consumer retail, and is known for listing practically everything there is to buy. Launched just 12 years…

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In 1915, the American Modernist magazine 291 published a collection of Francis Picabia’s portraits mécaniques, tongue-in-cheek drawings imagining the proto-Dadaist’s fellow artists as machinery. At the center of the spread was Portrait d’une Jeune Fille Américaine dans l’État de Nudité (“Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity”), an exactingly rendered image…

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Shanzhai is neither an Instagram geotag nor a city in China hosting a biennial— despite our multiple efforts to make this the case. As co-president of the Shanzhai Biennial (with Avena Gallagher and B…

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Against all odds, life-size dolls have become a repeating theme in popular culture. In a globalized market for capital permeated by neoliberalism, beautiful (and quiet) dolls could easily triumph over annoying women in the f lesh—as we have seen in the American film Lars and the Real Girl and the Korean Air Doll. Hundreds of…

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Koki Tanaka is Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year, an award that favors artists “who connect their aesthetic concerns to social issues,” a fitting description of Tanaka’s work. “A Vulnerable Narrator” includes numerous realized, failed, and unrealized projects from the past decade. Each project starts with writing, and the texts on craft paper pasted on…

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The selfie is more than just a photograph of the face or body—it is a body of information, and of idealized self-realization. The selfie allows for the quick and easy actualization of the self in the world, which, when disseminated on WeChat or Weibo, forms part of a social self-portrait— a window into issues of…

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Considering social media her sketchbook and GIFs a material, Jeanette Hayes has a particular penchant for Sailor Moon, whose image she superimposes onto her own recreations of high Modernist works, as in her “DeMooning” series and the stand-alone painting Les Demoiselles de’Animeme. Stating that “all portraiture is fan art,” Hayes also sends her work to…

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One of the best-known creatives to emerge from the turmoil of postwar Japan—a time marked by leftist resentment of capitalism as well as increasing openness with American aid and occupation—was Osamu Tezuka, who made manga into a modern product fashionable with young people. Although Japanese comics had already appeared in embryonic form before the Second…

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American technology company iRobot launched its cleaning robot, the Roomba, in 2002; by 2012, more than ten million units had been sold, and the brand name has become a synonym for similar robots. Owners don’t expect their Roombas to develop emotional relationships with human beings like The Bicentennial Man, but their artificial intelligence does differentiate…

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In a brightly decorated bedroom, a man and a woman are having intercourse on a narrow single bed. The woman is bent over and the man is half-kneeling behind her. Dressed in neon green stockings, both …

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Nail art has a long history in China. As early as 3000 BCE, royals combined gum arabic, gelatin, beeswax, egg whites, and crushed flower petals to lacquer their digits—so it’s fitting that two new projects innovating the medium have sprung up here. Beijing artist Ye Funa’s “Curated Nails” is an ongoing platform considering the nail…

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A latex or rubber fetish—in Beijing often called “catfish” after a particular brand—is a tool of restraint; depending on the area and degree of restraint, these smooth suits can highlight the sexual o…

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Every two years, the Guggenheim Museum administers the Hugo Boss Prize. Funded by the eponymous German clothing company, the prize is presented to an artist “whose oeuvre constitutes an outstanding co…

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Primitivism is a product of modernity. Modern master Pablo Picasso’s work between 1906 and 1909 drew on African tribal masks, Paul Gauguin obsessively depicted the natives of Tahiti, and Max Ernst’s s…

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