SIXTEEN YEARS HAVE passed since the Hong Kong handover in 1997. The writer Yesi, whose real name is Leung Pingkwan, was born in Guangdong in 1949 and grew up in Hong Kong. Over the past 16 years, he has mentioned his desire to “write about Hong Kong in earnest” on more than one occasion. This…

IN A BRIEF History of Curating, Hans-Ulrich Obrist speaks candidly with Lucy Lippard about the most significant motivation for the creation of his oral history: the lack of documentation in the history of exhibition and curation. Hence the term “Brief History” rather than “Interviews” appearing in the title. In this book, Obrist interviews 11 veteran…

ART STUDENTS ARE a familiar sight in Xiaozhou Village: as the bus conductor calls out “Xiaozhou Village Entrance,” the bus, which starts out empty from the university town, is met with an influx of students. As a rule, they are tourists, or art academy students who have gathered together to prepare for exams. Lugging backpacks,…

OFTEN REFERRED TO as the pioneer of conceptualism in the Philippines, Roberto Chabet (b. 1937, Manila) is known for his cerebral, elusive compositions of readymades and everyday materials to include mirrors, plywood, neon lights, drawings, rubber tires, indigenous wood, maps, strings, envelopes, paper, and so on. Chabet’s play on form and meaning, process-oriented, anti-monumental practices…

Art students are a familiar sight in Xiaozhou Village: as the bus conductor calls out “Xiaozhou Village Entrance,” the bus, which starts out empty from the university town, is met with an influx of students. As a rule, they are tourists, or art academy students who have gathered together to prepare for exams. Lugging backpacks,…

In years past, the work of Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985) has allowed itself to wear many loose-fitting forms. She has held a bar of wet soap in her hands for a prolonged period (One Day With A Soap, 2011); “directed” a “play” (Secondhand Stabilization, 2011); filmed the interactions between actors she has prompted but who…

BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE seems to be something of a sage. She has not left her hometown of Ghent for more than 20 years; she was born there, grew up there, got married and started a family there, all the while creating new artworks at her studio in the harbor district. She chose to open her…

OVER THE PAST 30 years, Xia Xiaowan has painted countless images that are better described as deities, devils, or souls than as people. These images seem like those of gods in temples, vivid and lifelike, but nothing like in the natural world. In fact, in the 1980s and 90s, Xia studied the colors and brushwork…

THIS JANUARY, AN exhibition of Damien Hirst’s “spin paintings” opened in Istanbul. Naturally, the news did not come lacking in controversy. The first solo show of one of contemporary art’s greatest heavyweights in Turkey was held not in a museum, but in the exhibition space of a local auction house— these were secondary works up…

Visitors to this year’s inaugural “Future” exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, should they have ascended the rampway between the third and fourth floors, could not have missed a several meter long array of hand drawings haphazardly strewn along the wall: a detailed outline of all employees of a southern Guangdong municipal…

ONE COULD SAY that Li Songsong’s The One is a major work, one that seeks purity by way of refining the understanding of the language of oil painting, or by way of the conceptual. The work itself, roughly speaking, is a cylindrical silver tunnel, the inner walls of which are covered with 91 monochromatic paintings…

The DSL Collection, founded by Sylvain and Dominique Levy, ranks among the most comprehensive holdings of Chinese contemporary art in the world. Sylvain sat down with LEAP to discuss the art of collection and the digital channels through which they have chosen to display their findings. LEAP How did you start collecting Chinese contemporary art?…

AT A VERY young age, Chen Zhe has already widely been touted as one of the most compelling Chinese photographers practicing today. In 2011 alone, she was the recipient of the Inga Morath Award, the Three Shadows Photography Award, and the Lianzhou Photographer of the Year award. These accolades are due, not in small part,…

WHY RETHINK RELATIONALITY now? The recent surge of relational practice and community-oriented art in China seems to be finally subsiding even as critical interest in such work is transferred into the scope of nouveau institutional critique. Indeed, editor of this volume and curator of the attendant exhibition Bea Leanza notes early on in her introductory…

Director of Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain is the largest non-profit institutional collector of contemporary art in France. Its mission is to promote contemporary art and discover outstanding works from around the world. Chinese artists such as Huang Yong ping, Cai Guo-Qiang, Liang Yue, and the three Luo brot

KANG WANHUA—THIS name draws a big blank for most people in China’s contemporary art scene. From 1976 to 1979, he served as a political prisoner of the Chinese government. During those four years, he secretly painted more than 400 richly colored and vibrant works. Even though these paintings are, for the most part, only the…

THE FUTURE IS Now: Art, Technology, and Consciousness is a collection of essays and lectures by British media art pioneer Roy Ascott. The book contains his writings from 1964 to 2011, presented in chronological order. What is odd is that writings from each period are all grouped under the same subject heading— as though over…

ART BASEL MIAMI Beach is the winter destination for the art world’s global players, who descend on the city for what is essentially a high-end popup shop the scale of the Burj Khalifa. It is a place where the art world can come together in one place for a short length of time with the…

TEN YEARS AGO, when Frieze magazine’s Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp first floated the idea for a fair, London was still dominated by the same scene that had earmarked “young” as an attribute for those aging all-too-quickly, while casually dismissing East End upstarts as good time galleries, too messy to be taken seriously. The inaugural…

WHAT IS COMMONLY accepted within the industry as independent Chinese animation has only been in existence for about seven or eight years. If we include the earlier days of Flash animation, it would maybe grow to a dozen or so years. I had a conversation with a young independent animation director once. He said that…