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…

Dubai On the press bus bound for the Madinat Jumeirah and Art Dubai one late March morning, it was impossible not to overhear a healthy chorus of eight or nine Mandarin voices; perusing the materials distributed a few minutes later, names like Zhang Huan, Melissa Chiu, Richard Chang, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Carol Yinghua Lu jumped…

In Chinese medicine they say that those who won’t make it through the following year tend to leave for good in the winter. It’s a theory that may sound folksy but that this winter was borne out by a string of monumental passings that seemed never to end. And no sooner had Christopher Hitchens, Václav…

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…

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,…

JOURNEY OF (NO) REDRESS Beijing Anyone who ever bemoaned the Beijing art world’s lack of a power lunch scene was more or less vindicated when Fennel opened in the Yi House, a boutique hotel in 798, last spring. One year later, on the first Saturday of April and the beginning of the Grave Sweeping Festival,…

EVENT HORIZON 迈阿密·MIAMI THE DAYS OF China exuberance in the U.S. are over, as everyone knows, and as the recent edition of Art Basel Miami Beach testifies. Where in 2007 you had a glitzy Sotheby’s sel…