JANA EULER Although the Brussels-based German artist Jana Euler could be said to take inspiration from social networks— her practice suggests a cyber-punk aesthetic— she actually works through the decidedly historical genre of painting of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). A series of paintings completed largely in 2009, the year after she completed graduate school, takes…

  EMILY WARDILL British artist Emily Wardill revives the genre of the melodrama in her feature-length video works. In Fulll Firearms, 2011, Wardill introduces us to the life of Imelda, a protagonist convinced that the ghosts of people killed by guns produced by her father’s arms manufacturing company will haunt her for life. Inspired by…

THE TITLE OF Zhou Yilun’s latest exhibition at Platform China, “As There Is Paradise In Heaven,” immediately brings to mind the old proverb, “the heavens above are matched on earth by Suzhou and Hangzhou.” At the entrance to the exhibition hall, a faded painting scroll featuring the beautiful scenery of the West Lake is displayed…

ON OCTOBER 28 at 3 a.m., I prepare to go to Kiev, Ukraine— a city that, thus far in my life, I had not thought about visiting. You should know that when I was a child, I was in love with geography. At the tender age of nine I could recite from memory the capitals…

AS FAR AS art hubs go, why Düsseldorf has not made its way into the global spotlight as spectacularly as New York, London, Berlin, or more recently, Hong Kong, is anyone’s guess. Then again, even this city’s name is misleading. Düsseldorf literally translates as “Village of Düssel”— Düssel being the tributary of the Rhine on…

THE YOUNG ARTIST Li Ran (born 1986) is able to eloquently delineate nearly every facet of his burgeoning artistic practice. This should come as no surprise: in the last two years, his work, through the lens of video, has come to hinge almost entirely on the spoken word and the collation of written text. Li’s…

Indonesian Chinese Budi Tek has lived in China for 17 years. Here he is mostly known for being a collector of contemporary Chinese art. But it is his recent decision to open an art museum in Shanghai that has further triggered LEAP’s interest in this figure. In the beginning of September, we interviewed him in…

ARTISTIC PRODUCTION IN THE POST-HISTORY AGE: HOW IS ART POSSIBLE AMIDST THE SOCIAL REALITIES OF TODAY? DATE: 8.23-25 VENUE: Guangdong Times Museum PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Duan Jianyu, He An, Collin Chinnery, Wang Wei, Wang Yin, Zhang Hui, Zan Jbai, Zhu Yu OBSERVER: Zheng Hongbin “Pulse Reaction—An Exchange Project on Art Practice” at Guangdong Times Museum aims…

JOSH KLINE To the keen eye of a New Yorker, Josh Kline’s work seems very “New York,” but not disdainfully so. Rather, through minimal sculptural works inspired by the aesthetics of the mass-market commodity, Kline highlights and pulls from the idiosyncratic blend of desperation, celebrity, and soul-suckingness that defines what it means to live and…

THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST Hu Xiangqian (b. 1983) is quick to point out that he does not agree with that classification. More appropriate, he claims, would be “performer” or “actor.” For one, his work is rarely prepared for a live audience, and furthermore, although he readily admits to have never studied, say, Jacques Lecoq or Jerzy…

In 2011, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar, and Joseph Grima together proclaimed the establishment of “Posthastism.” In June 2012, their movement arrived to The Pavilion in Beiing in the form of a one-day exhibition titled “Beijing Posthastism.” Alongside film screenings and live performance, the three curators laid out the terms of “The Posthastist Manifesto,” calling…

YOU DON’T KNOW Luo Baobei? Impossible. Those who regularly find themselves in Chaoyang district cannot help but notice the little girl with those neat bangs, those round eyes, that cutesy sneer. Around the CCTV building in the Central Business District, Sanlitun SOHO, the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube… After two or three years of work,…

DONGJING SPRING 东京 · TOKYO Amidst an epic downpour earlier this week, we found ourselves in the back of a ten-seat Toyota van, bound from Shibuya for Tokyo’s western suburbs. Our host and driver, a Ji…

Born in Berlin in 1934, Hilla Becher first started collaborating with Bernd Becher in 1959, taking photographs of the water towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, and other industrial structures that are legacies of Germany’s industrial era. Cataloging them according to type, Hilla and Bernd became pioneers of the field of industrial photography. In the years…

1. EDDIE PEAKE “Everyone just can’t stop talking about Eddie Peake!” was the slightly obnoxious maxim repeatedly uttered around London this past March. Indeed, the young artist’s work was featured in multiple well-known galleries in the British capital, some only blocks away from each other. In March alone, Peake launched a solo exhibition at Cell…

In Michael Lin’s work there is a consistent allusion to the relationship between people and their environment. The departure point is in his observation and intuition towards a particular setting. Gradually the works initiate a dialogue at the conjunction between the institutionalization of art spaces and the environments of the “everyday.” So what does this…

AT UNIVERSITY, GUO Hongwei was obsessed with analyzing the different styles of brushwork techniques corresponding to different periods of art history. But shortly after, he began attempting to abandoning them. From 2005 to 2007, Guo’s oil paintings mostly drew inspiration from his and his relatives’ childhood photographs. Regardless of whether these photos were in color,…

Just as their George Street neighbors had nearly forgotten the fact that the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) was under renovation, at the start of fall the MCA finally reopened after more than one year. Bustling with street performers on a daily basis, the Sydney Harbour celebrated the reopening with a week-long series of…

The artists’ talk that followed GUEST’s recent show at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was more an extension of the exhibition than an explanation thereof. Three group members, Zhao Yao, Xu Qu, and Lu Pingyuan— Li Ming and Lin Ke were absent— spent a good deal of time showing images and videos downloaded from…

APROPOS THE ART world, Dubai in many ways mirrors Hong Kong. Both are post-colonial waterfront cities that boast histories centuries-long, but have only come to full maturation within the last few decades— Dubai after the establishment of the UAE, Hong Kong after Opening and Reform— and for the most part, they have been perceived as…