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…

LEAP: « Empires » : telle est la thématique choisie pour cette édition 2016 de Monumenta. Le dossier de presse parle d’ « une installation immersive de grande échelle ». Comment doit-on comprendre ce terme d’immersif? Huang Yong Ping: Cet adjectif souligne le fait que les spectateurs doivent cheminer au sein de l’installation. Ca ne signifie…

Pour être honnête, je ne sais comment s’y prend Guan Xiao. Lorsqu’on se penche sur la manière dont elle s’empare des matériaux et les unit dans son œuvre, on se sent un peu comme dans une séquence de l’émission The Brain (1), où un participant examinait au microscope une centaine de poissons rouges. L’analogie n’est…

To be honest, I don’t know how Guan Xiao does it. Looking at the ways she grabs and synthesizes materials in her work, it’s a bit like watching a contestant on The Brain(1) microscopically examining a thousand goldfish. This isn’t a totally apt analogy, for today it’s nearly impossible to quantify—and to describe, even—just how…

A foam machine gushes a massive cloud of soap lather from a black oil barrel in the courtyard. Plastic flowers stick out from a miniature blue Hanjin shipping container in the foyer. A bucket of murky peanut oil, collected from a trendy local restaurant, sits on the floor in a side room; a few shiny…

How does the body, rationally hijacked by tools, escape the fate of materialization that is such an integral byproduct of modernity? Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa’s exhibition is an announcement that attempts to deconstruct the tale of a western monopoly on technology in the postcolonial world by showcasing Asian, Middle Eastern, and eastern European artists as…

Enough information about war-torn regions and political mayhem circulates through the media; Minouk Lim turns statistics and facts into emotionally intense and beguiling scenarios. This exhibition is full of mythological creatures, dried marine life, rusty shipping containers, cameras, and melting sculptures of mountains. Objects melt into each other, creating a flow of connections that explore…

The M+ Sigg Collection of Chinese contemporary art travels to Hong Kong after two touring exhibitions in Europe over the past two years. Since the 1990s, Hong Kong has acted as a mediator in the institutionalization of Chinese contemporary art in the global system; with the recent creation of this collection, the city has become…

To encounter the paintings of Sascha Braunig is to be confronted with an unsettling, hypnotic world. She creates portraits of figures dissolving within their own borders, moving in and out of corporeality and bending the laws of reality. In her technically brilliant paintings, studio portraiture merges with science fiction, and patterns merge into the skin…

All across Xinjiang, the logograms of the Chinese language sit smugly below the teeth of the Uyghur Arabic script, each pictograph a comfortable caramel morsel in the mouth of the molar abjad. If there is a home for the Turkic languages, a group that extends from the Balkans to the Himalayas, it is not a…

Li Liao’s “Art is Vacuum” starts with a low-ceilinged vestibule housing documentation of a spat between himself, his pregnant girlfriend Yang Jun, and her brother and father. The father virulently rejects their relationship and derides Li’s career prospects by remarking, “You’re living in [a] vacuum.” Their argument is displayed alongside a torn sweater and a…