Consider the travelogue. Some sensitive soul alights in a part of the world somehow different from their home, and they enact a traversal of this space, accruing images and relating experiences in a r…

The opening of “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in December, 2013, was met with both cheers and disgust by the Chinese ink painting community. …

Dada is not at all modern; it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. —Tristan Tzara Conference in Weimar, Germany, 1922 As often pointed out by modern art historians, notably…

Without the aid of mirrors, artists seem to be incapable of self-reflection. Their images and works are constructed and processed in the face of the many peers surrounding them, one orbiting another l…

Taiwanese artist Yin-ju Chen often places herself in a position both perilous and challenging: by means of an approach based on mysticism, she deduces and infers narrative relations between mankind an…

In the past few years, there has been a move towards art and writing that abandons irony completely in favor of sincerity. “New sincerity” has been a buzzword for the art and literary world since the mid-1990s. It was the name of a literary movement sparked by David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” where…

I fell in love with the idea of Jaakko Pallasvuo after watching Vanilla (2011) on Vimeo. The shaky forty-second clip features the artist rubbing ice cream onto his face, hair, and body at an exhibition opening. Dancing erratically to “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” onlookers clap and cheer the artist on in the background. This…

There are those who say that if an artist not of the ‘West’ engages with abstraction, conceptual practices, and other approaches generally perceived as descending from the European tradition, they are abandoning their cultural heritage, merely aping the ‘West’ in some sort of cultural cringe, or colonial hangover. Conversely, especially with regard to China, there…

“You know the way animals are… They’re run by instincts. You can’t expect them to behave morally. It likes to eat, it likes to have sex… Don’t expect too much from a thing like that. Just take it for what it is.” —Scarlet Droppings (1990), George Kuchar Cinema has historically been a fecund site of…

To invoke the notion of the muse around Juliana Huxtable seems out of fashion. After all, the title was tirelessly anointed to the 28-year-old artist, poet, and DJ as she gradually emerged from various sites across New York’s cultural landscape. The most recent case-in-point: the 2015 New Museum Triennial, in which the audience was confronted with Juliana, a life-size sculpture of Huxtable’s naked body by Frank Benson, exhibited alongside Huxtable’s own poetry and photographic portraiture. Media sensationalism sugarcoated her with the muse appellation and infected almost all of the popular websites and magazines.

The basic premise of the Lovelace test, created to determine intelligence within the cognitive sciences, is that a machine must originate an idea on its own. Ada Lovelace, for whom the test is named, argued that this was the marker of true intelligence. In distinction to the Turing test—which tests the ability of a machine…

En mars dernier, alors qu’Art Basel venait d’ouvrir ses portes à Hong Kong, nous apprîmes qu’Oscar Murillo avait été placé en détention puis expulsé du territoire australien, après avoir déchiré son passeport britannique sur la route qui le menait à la Biennale de Sydney. Quelques jours plus tard, lors du colloque « Futurs fluides :…

The question of the muse is, first and foremost, one of etymology. Our wispy shadows still draw us into the deep and blinding morass of history. The many gods of Mount Olympus are assumed to be older than history, which begins with their actions to protect humanity. Yet still more ancient than the Olympian gods…

It often feels like the 1990s are an undigested pellet in the gut of artistic culture. Presented with the aesthetics of that era, it’s still unclear quite how to deal with them. Appropriate and critique? Wax nostalgic? Gag? Since then, technology has become so frictionless that we often ignore it rather than revel in its…

Entering the former prison of Miguelete is like entering a temple. The striking exhibition “Teetering at the Edge of the World,” curated by Zandie Brockett and Uruguayan artist Sebastian Alonso, was unexpected for the Montevideo cultural world, pushing the audience immediately into the fast track of urbanization processes in China and elsewhere. The exhibition starts…

While it’s hard to imagine anything more idyllic than a clear, blue sky, the general willingness to accept that the sky could be either clear or blue—impressions caused by the scattering of the sun’s light by molecules in the atmosphere—is disturbing, in that it speaks to our compliance in accepting what we observe on a…

In Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition, a pyramid hangs down from a height of 20 meters. The Open Pyramid (2016), created to a scale almost as alarming as that of the Egyptian pyramids, fills a stretch of space from wall to wall. Propped up by walls on either side, the bottom four corners of the pyramid are…

My first encounter with Tromarama was through the video Ting* in 2008. I was captivated by their stop-motion animation of a group of cups, mugs, and dishes moving along, looking for adventure on an ordinary day in the kitchen cupboards, with the rhythm of clinking porcelain as music. The ease and speed of information technology…

“Emerging Other” brings together seven Korean artists who participated in the renowned Rijksakademie residency program in the Netherlands. An archive lounge presents interviews, catalogues, and images…

Leap, revue internationale sur l’art contemporain chinois et asiatique, première édition française :« Chine : les communautés flottantes » (édition bilingue français-mandarin, Beijing-Paris, 2015, 220 pages, 12 € – www.leapleapleap.com) Leap – entendez « Le bond » ou « Le saut »– est une revue internationale sur l’art contemporain chinois et asiatique. Elle paraît depuis…