“Illuminated,” curated by artist Guo Hongwei, is the fifth exhibition held at his nonprofit Gland Space. The exhibition, born of the artist’s personal creative experience, embodies the eclectic accumulation of his work as it has evolved over time. This rich, inclusive presentation has a strength of vision that surpasses the effects of his solo work,…

Woman Jumping off Building, 2015, acrylic and pencil on paper, 109.2 x 157.4 cm Liu Yin has realized, like most of us, that she spends far too much time browsing news and advertising images. This tremendous swatch of visual information has long been part of our lives, but its intrusiveness has risen to historic heights…

On the afternoon of June 1, 2006, Li Ming filmed the first Afternoon of June 1. Thereafter, Li Ming, Yang Junling, and Lin Ke, all members of the art collective Double Fly Art Center, formed a pact to get together on June 1 every year and shoot video spontaneously for an afternoon. This year marks…

Performance in Contemporary China The critical performing arts—from theater to performance—reveal the performative elements of everyday life. More often than not, this means exposing the power mechani…

What does one talk about when one talks about performance in art? Across an unmistakable recent wave of conferences, special journal issues, and survey exhibitions, performance frames a near-apocryphal field. It clusters together practices that often have more in common through what they lack than through what they share. Perhaps it is the relative marginality…

Since the 1980s, practices of calligraphy in contemporary art have tended towards a symbolic (and therefore political) presence. In the world of calligraphy, there now seems to be an attempt to liberate the medium from established systems and open up to new modes of writing and visual styles, from the modern approach of Qiu Jian…

In 2013, Korean-born, New York-based artist Anicka Yi began a trilogy of exhibitions entitled “Denial,” “Divorce,” and “Death,” inspired by human emotions attached to love and heartbreak. Presented as a forensic investigation of these affective, illusive, and hardly measurable states, Yi’s work captures the signs, evidence, and residue of these phases embedded in and transmitted…

The theater, once solely the spatial medium of performance on the stage, has slowly become a common part of contemporaryartistic parlance, and has greatly extended its own meaning as well. Gao Shiming…

There is a strain of contemporary art centered around 3D renderings and augmented reality, where the technology itself is reason for the work to exist. Lawrence Lek’s series “Bonus Levels” is a series of site-specific, immersive video game installations. Each section of the project is structured like a novel, based on a real building that…

It’s one thing to pretend to be authentic; it’s another to pretend to be fake. In the space of two years, PC Music has gone from little more than a Soundcloud page to a cult dance music collective followed by those in the know and from there to a legitimate pop culture happening—the loosely-defined label/brand’s…

Artists in many parts of the world spent the 1990s caught up in the historic moment that was the end of the Cold War—what would be claimed as the end of history. Some, like those in the Chinese mainland, were under a prevailing spell as economic as political, which lasted almost to the end of…

Hu Weiyi is known for modularity and unpredictability, but this exhibition is well-planned and strategized. The idea of the convoy was decided on first, then the route from Shanghai to Beijing. Apparently unplanned experiences along this route become the focal point of the project. In the exhibition, however, it seems Hu had no plans to…

Disappointment finally reaches a climax at the end of a journey through the eight cities—Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Hagen, Marl, Mülheim, Recklinghausen—participating in the exhibition “CHINA 8.” Rather than an in-depth overview into the diversity of contemporary art in China, it offers only quantitative superlatives. Among painting, photography, calligraphy, installation, sculpture, and video from established…