“2009-05-02” was the last series of work produced by Gu Dexin before he chose to retire from the art world completely. The title of the work came straight from the designated time frame for the exhibition at Galleria Continua Beijing— Gu frequently implements this policy, naming his works after simple external circumstances in order to…

MU XIN, WHOM we had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing in December 2010, was one of the world’s greatest artists. He made a profound impact on anyone who had such good fortune. For many others, who knew him through his writings and art, his impact was equally as powerful. Throughout his creative life,…

In Taiwan, clues to the Tehching Hsieh legend could originally only be found in fragments amongst brief, incomplete scatterings of text. As of 1986, after the artist’s year-long performance No Art Piece (or One Year Performance 1985-1986, New York, during which he made no art and abstained from discussing or viewing art of any kind),…

PHOTOGRAPHY: Liang Yue STYLIST: Moni MAKEUP AND HAIR: May STYLIST ASSISTANT: Mayble PRODUCER: Aimee Lin MODEL: Sisi

IN ACCORDANCE WITH the auction house pattern of holding major sales in the spring and autumn, the Chinese art market saw a succession of major auctions throughout the fourth quarter of 2011. The crowded schedule spanned autumn and winter, and as the schedule progressed, the season seemed symbolic of the state of the art market,…

FOR HER MOST recent work Charwei Tsai has amassed a large pile of white feathers. The pile is placed on a circular mirror and heaped up to about half a meter high and one meter across. Down is mixed with wing feathers to make the whole pile seem fluffy and insubstantial. Were this not inside…

“It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with Conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry.” Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967 Life is full of endless anticipation. Except for blood and flesh, dreams and anticipation have…

Chutian Golden Paper 20100520 Fashionable Girl Stands Barefoot in Street for 13 Hours From 10 a.m. on May 18, our staff received calls nonstop from readers, who reported a fashionably dressed pretty young woman motionlessly standing barefoot at the intersection of Jiefanggongyuan Road and Huiji Road. Her abnormal behavior attracted considerable attention until around 1…

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL, the Thai independent director and artist, has attained widespread international popularity, but in China only his accomplishments as a filmmaker are known. His first solo show in China opened at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in late 2011. The show comprises the exhibition “For Tomorrow For Tonight” as well as screenings of…

Wang Haichuan has been very interested in the old Tongyuanju munitions factory in Chongqing’s Nan’an district for several years now. Not only has he researched the buildings within, but he has also interviewed a great number of the people living there. The standard size of factory workers’ dormitories is 16.9 square meters, where for the…

In 2006, Hong Kong billionaire Joseph Lau purchased an Andy Warhol silkscreen portrait of Mao Zedong for USD 17.4 million at a Christie’s auction. The following year, the real estate tycoon acquired Paul Gauguin’s Te Poipoi for upwards of USD 39 million at a Sotheby’s auction. In 2010, a purportedly Chinese buyer took home Picasso’s…

DOMAIN WHEN IN THE summer of 2010 Gao Shiming invited Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir to design the logo for the China Academy of Arts’ then newly-established School of Inter Media Art, his hope was that the logo would have a narrative quality, and not the minimalist style popular today— something similar to more…

The countdown to the opening of the solo exhibition has already begun, but Lin Tianmiao’s basement studio in Tongzhou, just east of Beijing proper, remains extremely quiet. Recently and nearly completed artworks render the huge space crowded, and the workers quietly attending to their tasks heighten the tension within the white walls. The moment of…

The “Little Movements” research— launched by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei— takes Wang Guangyi’s verbal recollection of the seminal 1986 Zhuhai Symposium as a case study. The researchers claim that the chief aim of “Little Movements” is to emphasize the self-construction of dominant trends within contemporary art. Using this stated aim as…

ARTIST: Liu Ding PHOTOGRAPHY: Chai Lizeng MAKE-UP: Daniel Zhang (Tony Studio) HAIR: He Zhiguo (Tony Studio, Sebastian) STYLIST ASSISTANT: Chiu PRODUCER: Aimee Lin PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Bian Jiaojiao MODEL: Anna

FORGET ART IS an independent organization established in 2009 by the artist Ma Yongfeng. Doubling as a loosely defined creative collective, it came to notice after engineering the project “Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse” in September 2010. For this project, participating artists adopted a strategy of “microintervention”— launching artfully insinuated threats and acts of resistance against…

The founding aspiration of the local and regional “Cultural Assets and Equity Exchanges” now popping up around China was to create an adjoined service platform between culture and capital: providing cultural industries with a wider range of access to funding and implementing a system of convenient, standardized, and efficient service and support for investors. Set…

One can almost imagine Bishan in its heyday. On the evening of August 26, 2011 the village’s daytime enthusiasm gushes towards the Yi County Cinema. It’s the kind of movie theater almost every small town has had, but Bishan’s has somehow managed to hang on to a 1980s or 90s feel. Above both the exits,…

FINISHING FIRST IS a dubious honor. Zhang Peili plays down his unshakable title as the “godfather of Chinese video art” by emphasizing the contingent nature of the situation in which he won it. But the fact remains: Zhang was the first artist to bring a piece of completed video work to a high-profile gathering of…

Giving visual form to body language, Jiang Zhi reveals the silliness and entanglement of everyday life .