It may seem odd that among the highlights of this year’s Beijing Design Week (September 26 to October 3) will be the goings-on in a handful of empty, run-down spaces in Dashilar. Many have asked why we would focus on an historic neighborhood known more for its kitschy tourist attractions and overall shabbiness than the…

[portfolio_slideshow timeout=7000 exclude=””] The body of “The Face of Facebook” is made up of more than sixty “unit works,” each different in size and form (painting, photography, video, and installation all are accounted for). Zhu Jia asked artists and public figures for their reactions to a famous profile photo of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg which…

By the end of the twentieth century, nearly every commodity in this world had been made available for purchase online, and it wasn’t long before the opportunity to acquire art in cyberspace arose as well. Of course, nothing much came of early attempts to sell art over the Internet— the first online dealers quickly found…

IN 2000, WANG GUANGLE had just graduated from the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He spent a short time working at a publishing house, and then quit, because he hated the working stiff’s lifestyle, but also because artist and CAFA professor Liu Xiaodong had connected him to a collector who…

A CHINESE SINGAPOREAN man in an emerald green dress looks into a mirror. He tremblingly tells his character’s black mother— here played by an Indian-Singaporean actor— “I’m white. White. White!” On a dual screen, another Indian Singaporean actor simultaneously delivers the same lines, this time to a Malay Singaporean actor playing his character’s black mother….

PHOTOGRAPHY: Birdhead STYLIST: Clément Buyi Z. (CLÉMENT & CLÉMENT PRODUCTION) HAIR & MAKE-UP: Kevin Long (MANWOMAN_management) PRODUCER: Aimee Lin PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Zinn Zhou STYLIST ASSISTANT: Daqian Yongko Leslie MODELS: Lilac H(PARAS) LOCATION: KEE Shanghai

Chinese ink and brush painting is in a strange place. On the one hand, quality works are in short supply, and a “lack of methodology” has rendered the field, as art critic Gao Minglu critiques it, “unsalvageable.” Yet on the other, strong attendance at recent exhibitions speaks to an uptick in interest in the genre,…

SONART First of all, the idea of SONART is not at all limited to sound art or experimental music performance. The concept of a series of cutting-edge live performances and audio-visual publications was proposed by Gao Shiming, Executive Director of School of Intermedia Art, and I am the one responsible for its realization. SONART stands…

CREATION MYTHS IN CHINESE ART academies, there is no clear divide between traditional art education and “contemporary” art education. There have always been teachers who imbue the curricula of the traditional departments of Chinese painting, oil painting, printmaking, and sculpture (collectively known as “COPS”) with ideas from contemporary art, holding experimental classes or even establishing…

PHOTOGRAPHY: HUANG RAN STYLIST: LUCIA LIU MAKE-UP: QIQI HAIR: CHEN FENG PRODUCER: AIMEE LIN PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: BIAN JIAOJIAO STYLIST ASSISTANT: GIGI PENG MODELS: KIKI KANG, EVAN

THESE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE made on and around US military bases in Japan, Korea and Guam, a part of the world designated by the Pentagon as “PACOM,” the U.S. Pacific Command. The Pentagon divides the world into six separate regional commands and PACOM is the largest, covering half the surface of the world. The military component…

Artist Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994) spoke little but saw far. Unknown in his native China and largely forgotten in his adoptive Taiwan, his journey took him to Italy and later to England where he worked tirelessly for over three decades. A little understood and remarkably subtle artistic innovator, he worked first to incorporate Eastern philosophy into…

THE FIRST TIME I encountered Luo Dan’s “Simple Songs” was in the small city of Lianzhou, in Guangdong’s mountainous north. He had just finished taking this group of photos, first driving from western Yunnan’s Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture back to Chengdu, then flying on to Guangzhou, then traveling by bus to Lianzhou, to serve as…

Creation myths are all more or less the same, but this one is better than most. In 1998, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert buy a piece of land in Sanpatong, a village twenty minutes by car outside Chiang Mai. It has no water or electricity. They intend to use it to bypass the concept of…

In 2006, Sun Xun founded π Animation Studio in Hangzhou. The 2005 graduate of the China Academy of Art was anxious to build his own studio so that he could begin work on a high-quality animated film. The 27-minute, 50-scene film— entitled 21 Grams and featured in the “Orizzonti” section of the 2010 Venice International…

Walking up the grand staircase of the China Club in Hong Kong offers a crash course in contemporary art in China. One after another appear works by artists now seen as key protagonists in a story that was only starting to unfold when the place first opened in 1991. And there, inserted among all the…

In October 2009, Shenzhen-based photographer Bai Xiaoci began an expedition. He sought out public buildings built in major construction projects led by local governments—“government edifices”—around China and shot large-scale frontal portraits of them. He visited more than half of China’s provinces, traveling north to Hohhot, south to Shenzhen, east to Shanghai, and west to Chengdu,…

Chen Chieh-Jen’s works Empire’s Borders I (2008-09) and Empire’s Borders II (2010) use images to address the modern critical construct that is “empire.” Modern leftist thinkers’ sustained consideration of “empire” seeks to excavate its internal contradictions. And just as Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek posits, the true problems of empire lie with the world police: the…

How to begin? It feels like it was just earlier this evening that the artist Chen Xiaoyun called out of the blue. The preamble you’ve always dreaded, for a moment you’re at a loss. A rush of adrenalin…

For Huang Weikai, truth will always be stranger than fiction, and reality will always be unstable and fragmented. His films Floating and Disorder isolate and unearth powerful pieces of the everyday in Guangzhou, pushing the thresholds of so-called “documentary realism” in pursuit of a more surrealist documentary aesthetic.