Consisting of artists Song Dong, Xiao Yu, Hong Hao, and Liu Jianhua, and critic/curator/gallerist Leng Lin, Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) was originally charted to seek out “collective form.” This book chronicles this six-year search, and in a very detailed manner: in a nod to the absurdist connotations the name PSFO holds in Chinese (translated literally, the…

Yan Xing adores Hans Belting. He doubts so-called “innovation” in contemporary art. He prefers his work to be visually pure in classic black and white, and as beautiful as possible, as sharp as a knife. He might not even object to being called less an artist than a raconteur, a carefully voiced plurality of the…

In October, artist Zhang Huan’s exhibition “Q Confucius” will draw back the curtain on the newly renovated Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The exhibition comes courtesy of Nanjo Fumio, noted Japanese critic, curator and director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. We caught up with him after a recent press conference for Zhang Huan’s…

SIX YEARS AFTER the completion of its building, Guangdong’s Times Museum welcomed its first self-planned exhibition “SHIFT: Exhibition on young American artists creating on-site artwork in China.” (Cumbersome English title theirs.) The gallery space is situated on the top floor of a residential building that Rem Koolhaas designed for Times Real Estate. To get to…

IN 2002 OKWUI ENWEZOR curated Documenta XI. As exhibitions go, it was a sort of Bretton Woods moment, setting the parameters of a conversation about the relationship between art and global geopolitics that stayed in place for over a decade. It also coined a format for large-scale exhibitions in an implicitly global age, including a…

Once he discovered the professional and artistic work of one Raymond Fung, LEAP Contributing Editor Hans Ulrich Obrist took immediate interest. In Fung, Obrist saw a practitioner who had made real on the longtime crossover between art and architecture in a practice divided somewhat uncharacteristically into a “day job” as a municipal architect and a…

“VAMPIRE” MAY MARK the first time Pace Beijing has held a Western artist’s solo exhibition, but this is not Sterling Ruby’s first show in China, he having also made an appearance in UCCA’s 2008 group exhibition, “Stray Alchemists.” In that show, his piece, a nine-meter-tall monument, took up almost the entirety of UCCA’s central hall….

Following on her magnanimous portrait series of migrant workers in Beijing, Substructure, Beijing-based Korean-American photographer Cindy Hwang, a.k.a. CYJO, published this hefty collection of 237 portraits of fellow kyopo (people of Korean ethnicity living outside of Korea), and their survey-response texts to a set of standardized questions. However much the focus is placed on the…

TAIPEI Twenty-four hours after the Art Taipei vernissage, we who had flocked and converged on the Ilha Formosa for the weekend found ourselves flocking and converging on a savvy little street a ten-minute cab ride from the fair itself. The destination was Rudy’s thing, the opening of “Documented, Doubted, and Imagined Realities,” a boasting of…

WE WRITE THIS article but three days before the opening of “Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art” at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal. Our expectations are high. With OCAT’s support, we began our research for “Little Movements” nearly a year ago. This past year, in artist studios, art spaces, and other places of artistic practice, we…

“THE LIGHTING’S ALL wrong! I have been to all of the world’s major art museums, and I know, paintings like this need to be lit from directly above!” June 11, 2011. The opening ceremony for the exhibit “Jin Shangyi: Compliments to Vermeer” at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM) in Beijing. After the…

We met Qiu Xichun and Tang Xin at the company’s head-office near Fuxingmen, Beijing. The differing appearance and manner of these two gives a true impression of the double-life of this extraordinary and an experimental contemporary art space. Taikang has been collecting art since the 1990s; on August 20, it will open “Image/History/Existence: A Celebration…

One need look no further than de Sade’s salacious masterpiece Justine (1791) to see that his philosophy posits God as a mercilessly evil being. In it, the hapless twelve-yearold protagonist naïvely places faith in the virtuous magnanimity of strangers, all of whom end up either raping, beating, robbing, or otherwise enslaving her. Morality thus bows…

Landing on the occasion of Berlin-based Korean-born artist Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition at the Zumthor-designed Kunsthaus Bergenz (KUB) in Austria, Arrivals expands beyond solo exhibition catalogue to stand as a catalogue raissoné, a printed compilation of Yang’s creative output from 1994 onward. It is this that forms the bulk of this hefty publication, as a…

ACCORDING TO THE official documentation that initiated the “Binder HQ” project— dated December 29, 2006 and directed at the artists of Kunming— the tenets of “Project Binder” were as follows: participating artists would pay a small fee of RMB 100 and contribute content in the form of 101 sets of four to ten pages, bearing…

Launched in 1994, Pots was Taiwan’s original alt-weekly. Aside from a brief hiatus in 1997, it has been publishing now for over 15 years, with a mandate to “break taboos and remove barriers,” reporting on a wide range of controversial social and cultural topics. AT ITS FOUNDING, Pots Weekly was originally introduced as the Sunday…

On May 5th, 2011, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in conjunction with the China Art Foundation, hosted Strategies of Contemporary Art: Past and Present, East and West, inviting American master of abstraction Frank Stella and preeminent Chinese avant-gardist Huang Yong Ping to bump heads on a mélange of topics, ranging from education to inspiration and…

A LIBRARY IS a place full of curiosities, both concrete and abstract. It provides storage for knowledge, yet it is also a site where different groups of people meet. In the urban life of Beijing, the symbolic significance of libraries has long surpassed their actual function. The National Library of China, located in the university…

Trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and based between there and Calcutta, Praneet Soi is an artist for a hybrid moment. His first major monograph, with texts by leading curators Charles Esche and Ranjit Hoskote (who showcased him prominently at the India pavilion of the recent Venice Biennale), outlines a practice that hinges on a…

Four years ago this summer, a thousand Chinese descended on the quiet German city of Kassel for an art project titled “Fairytale,” specimens in the world’s leading periodic exhibition, Documenta. A few weeks ago, what felt like another thousand descended on another quiet German-speaking city— Basel— for the world’s leading art fair. Magazine- organized groups,…