Seldom do we get this close to the sun. Unexpectedly, a glowing red surface appears in the dark; it’s the sun in Katharina Sieverding’s film Looking at the Sun at Midnight (2011–12). The mesmerizing close-up of the giant fireball is made from animated data gathered by NASA, which is condensed into a dynamic portrait of…

Michael Lin has always aspired to beauty. From his repeated use of the floral print cloth to the installation Model Home, his work never fails to capture a sense of space and form. This is again the case with his latest solo exhibition “A Tale of Today.” For this show, he has arranged nine brand-new…

For the increasingly urbanized Chinese population, web and mobile apps like Taobao expedite various social and monetary transactions, whether to schedule wakeup calls from fictitious boyfriends and girlfriends or seek a graphic designer for a company logo at 3:00 AM. It is against this social backdrop that we can come to understand the power in…

Against all odds, the much-maligned genre of the China show seems to be making a comeback, some decade since it largely disappeared from major international museum programs. In addition to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Bentu,” comparable projects on the docket for the next two years include both an historical exhibition and a thematic group show…

In 2013, Edward Snowden sent an encrypted file containing evidence of the United States government’s mass surveillance of civilians to Laura Poitras. The file was named Astro Noise, a reference to the thermal radiation left from the Big Bang. In her current exhibition, Poitras traces the echoes of September 11, 2001, around the globe. Poitras…

Headless is a multimedia, long-term project by Goldin+Senneby (Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby) initiated in 2007. It has been realized through a number of contracted collaborators, including a private investigator, filmmakers, a mystery novelist, a curator, a scenographer, and a scholar of economic geography, to name a few, in order to explore how jurisdiction constructs…

Shenyang, a representative industrial city built during the socialist era, is one of eight Chinese cities with a major art institute. The pace of life is relatively slow, the pressures of daily life relatively light, and, even if the city is, in many respects, somewhat backwards compared to first tier cities, it is not particularly…

Filmmaker, artist, activist and organizer Wu Tsang describes herself as “multi-multi”(1)—a description she deploys in order to explain a position predicated on hybridity and contradiction. This approach to identity, and the refusal to be categorized in normative terms, has been somewhat of a constant in Tsang’s life. Born in Massachusetts, USA, in 1982 to a…

“They all look the same,” Europeans used to say about Chinese people; now, it’s what first-tier citizens say about third-tier cities. Whether it is Jixi in Heilongjiang, Dongguan in Guangdong, or Tangshan in Hebei, lieux de memoires associated with critical moments in China’s history have become apparently faceless collections of buildings interchangeable with each other….

“Real things are not absolute things. Real things are the embodiments of a dictatorial system of coercion which maintains that they are real.”(1) In the paranoid milieu of the post-war order, Akasegawa Genpei’s “Thesis on Capitalist Realism” made sense: for many, discovering that the televisions, coffee tables, advertisements—the entire world—around them were a construction could…

Contemporary Chinese artists and the worker’s experience In 1972, a 16-year-old Sui Jianguo took the place of his mother as a worker at the Tongyao Workshop of Qingdao National Cotton Mill No. 2; in 1977, a 20-year-old Wang Guangyi left a farm in Heilongjiang province, where he had worked as a sent-down youth, to become…

Although Lee Kit’s work seems, on the surface, to deal with everyday objects, these things actually tend to serve as material support for his private emotions and as backdrop for projected illustratio…

Despite the torrential rains that stuttered throughout the week, the fourth edition of Art Basel Hong Kong still managed to break record by attracting more than 70,000 collectors, artists, and industry professionals to gather for a week-long celebration of art. Nor did the weather deter LEAP’s participation in this year’s Basel, presenting a variety of…

If Heman Chong’s show were a book, it would feel like a limited edition paperback. In Chong’s most alluring work, books, as a medium for words, are the metaphors for his creation—works of art each mad…

Apart from the need to hide in the shade of art during the hot vernissage of the Venice Biennale, it is always with anticipation that one enters the Arsenale and Giardini. The possibilities are neverending, but are also trapped within the walls of buildings, not to mention the town of Venice itself. During these opening…