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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

Comfort is a high priority, though it’s easy to parody. Many artists, in dialogue with the generic aesthetic of the contemporary, take the experience of everyday life and the bland, tranquil surfaces …

In a recent Guardian article about the fundamental chemical weirdness of water, science correspondent Alok Jha writes, “Water is not only attracted to itself but will stick to almost anything else it …

Click to play the internet rap playlist specially commissioned for the issue Two years ago a video surfaced online of a not-entirely-confident-looking Scandinavian teenager in a bucket hat and windbreaker rapping about “peeing on old people’s houses” over a loop of new-age singing and rattling drum machine beats. Now boasting more than four million YouTube…

With “South by Southeast,” Filipino curator Patrick Flores and Romanian curator Anca Mihuleţ propose the new interpretive dimension of “southeasternness” by looking at generalized geographic concepts …

Last year, when the pseudonymous French street artist Invader touched down in Hong Kong, his iconic tile minions appeared on several dozen facades throughout the city. Many were removed overnight, and the rest were invariably scrapped and sandblasted away within the week. Then, in May this year, documentation of the covert operation was exhibited at…

Hong Kong artists Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong’s “Museum of the Lost” features an ongoing archive of anonymous figures drawn from various mass media sources. Wong and Leung isolate individuals found in photographs with their backs turned or faces obscured and write stories about them, imagining what they might have been doing at the…

In 1995, Japan’s legendary Nobuyoshi Araki awarded a prize to a 17-year-old photographer, a rising star who called herself Hiromix. He praised her work: “Girls tend to hold nothing back, and don’t think too much. Without thinking too much, they let their feelings rule their actions.” This was likely meant as a compliment, but it…

IN 1906, NATIONAL Geographic published a series of 70 black-and-white photographs titled “Hunting Wild Game with Flashlight and Camera,” depicting scenes of deer congregating, hopping about, and resti…