For his recent paintings, presented by Ota Fine Arts at Condo Shanghai, Singaporean painter Guo-Liang Tan chose an aeronautical fabric as his canvas. A bizarre choice, given that the fabric is water-resistant and would therefore not absorb paint. In order to even begin painting, Tan had to first seal the fabric with acrylic. In…

  Curators of contemporary Chinese art abroad often face many challenges. The third installment of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, the theme of One Hand Clapping is …

The figures and elements that populate Fu’s paintings are easily recognizable ones, but Fu renders them in a simplistic and at times unfinished manner—most are only silhouettes—which makes them nebulous and creates a dearth of information that can be gleaned.

These frontiers are critically investigated and presented in their complexity, and these aesthetic forms refuse to subjugate to existing and dominant apparatus of the sensible. It exemplifies what Vivian Ziherl raised as a frontier formalism: “frontier formalism is strongly invested in aesthetic tactics of representation through rebellious images; images that chafe against existing arrangements and that posit undeniable demands for another shape and sound of the global symphony.”

“Wetland” exists in the ambiguity between wet and dry states. Within the designated five-hour duration of the exhibition, its temporary state mirrors a constantly changing wetland; it can disappear at any time but contains the possibility to exist in other forms.

Jes Fan, Mother Is A Woman, 2018, video, sound, color, 4 min 44 sec. Videographer: Asa Westcott.   What is a body made of, and how does that impact the way it is perceived? Does an impression of a body reflect its constitution? Artist Jes Fan posits these queries by investigating how the material science of…

Wong Kit Yi, Uploading Consciousness to a Lotus Root, 2018, single channel HD Video, 20 min. I made a promise that expires in 99 years [1]. At the Golden Computer Centre [2], I transferred my body’s lease on life to the Emperor. Filled out the form: red hair, pale skin, female. Couldn’t remember my birthdate….

To invoke the notion of the muse around Juliana Huxtable seems out of fashion. After all, the title was tirelessly anointed to the 28-year-old artist, poet, and DJ as she gradually emerged from various sites across New York’s cultural landscape. The most recent case-in-point: the 2015 New Museum Triennial, in which the audience was confronted with Juliana, a life-size sculpture of Huxtable’s naked body by Frank Benson, exhibited alongside Huxtable’s own poetry and photographic portraiture. Media sensationalism sugarcoated her with the muse appellation and infected almost all of the popular websites and magazines.

We live in a state of the perpetual present. With the revolving door of exhibitions in more and more venues, commercial and scholarly alike, thousands of artists appear on a relatively flat plane of aesthetics. This is good for a lot of things—fair art criticism among them—but it tends to hurt our understanding, as viewers,…

LEAP: The VIP lounge in The Well Fair is a locked door with nothing behind it; among other works, this emphasizes the quality of “denial.” I wonder why this attracts you more than, say, “complicity.” Elmgreen & Dragset: A lot of things in our society have to do with accessibility. You are only allowed to…

The sixth installment of the Tokyo Art Meeting series, “TOKYO: Sensing the Cultural Magma of the Metropolis,” surveys the creative forces lurking beneath the city’s notoriously digitalized and commercialized culture. While admitting that Tokyo resembles “a flat wasteland: a refined, yet cold glacier,” head curators Yuko Hasegawa and Sachiko Namba crack a hole in this…

We often feel that we intimately know the places where we reside and work, yet, through different modes of engagement, “Urban Synesthesia” reveals the idiosyncratic elements and characters of cities that can otherwise go unnoticed. The offspring of the Benjaminian flâneur works spontaneously by means of field research, looking to unveil the façade. The exhibition tries to allow the visitor to become more sensitive, becoming aware that simple objects and landscapes are not always as they seem.

In late 2015, Dajuin Yao brought the “Schizophonia” sound art exhibition to OCAT Shenzhen. The project was a spectacle of sound art in three parts: archival listening, an exhibition of sound installat…

In the 1960s, German contemporary music master Karlheinz Stockhausen noted that “the distinction between sound and music disappears.” Perhaps we can open up a discussion of the subtle relationship between sound art and the plastic arts. For a long time, their differences have flaked away through level after level of conceptual framing. But the gap…

Conceived as a response to changes to what might be called the unsympathetically hyper-kinetic city par excellence, the group show “Lost City 3” picks up some seven years after its previous edition, the series as a whole spanning just over ten years. During this period, Singapore’s built environment has seen startlingly rapid changes, with whole…

A search for the conditions which construct our reality lies at the center of Alicja Kwade’s work as a sculptor. With consistency, yet a great variety of methods and often traditional materials such as metal, stone, wood, copper, aluminum, glass and everyday objects like clocks, mirrors, lamps, or doors she creates fascinating artworks about the…

The thing about the denim painter’s universe is that, once you get sucked in, it’s hard to climb back out. Korakrit Arunanondchai imbues his work with a charisma that is massively seductive, and speaks directly to the viewer in a call and response of interpellation: “I am a machine / boosting energy into the universe…

Artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s New Theater originates from, amongst other things, the desire to reimagine relational art in the particular context of a niche American art world in Berlin, whose ecosystem is already under the gentrifying influence of the city’s increasing popularity as a destination for creative transplants. The twenty-something Cooper Union graduates’…

October 31 through November 1, 2015 marked the beginning of the tenth annual New York Asian Contemporary Art Week. With it came the three-day “FIELD MEETING Take 3: Thinking Performance,” a series of performances, lecture-performance, artist talks, and symposia. Central to these meetings was an attempt to look at how artists in Asia have used…

Tucked away in the serene creative space of Pure Collective on Yuqing Road in Shanghai, Chi Peng’s solo exhibition “I am a Little Nervous Towards a World that is Hidden” is sensitively explicated by the show’s curator Enrico Polato. The objects ensconced in their pristine curio cabinets, as well as the black and white pencil…