Welcome to the new LEAP.
I find myself writing this phrase often, and certainly LEAP goes through more wholesale transformations than most art magazines. It isn’t easy keeping up with the pace of change in China’s art world, or with the shifting ways our art world fits into the grand scheme of things. But we’re committed to it, and we couldn’t imagine a world in which a standardized format birthed a decade ago could possibly keep up. When LEAP first came into being, its mission was to take art in China seriously on its own terms. Now, we are focused more on a global concept of China—we take at face value the assumption that China is a player in the global culture. Following our readers’ interests, we began covering a higher proportion of art without any direct connection to China several years ago. At the end of the day, after all, there’s nothing that isn’t connected somehow.
This issue of LEAP, more than any issue before it, is a magazine for readers. We see the printed matter now in your hands as one aspect of a sustained commitment to reading and writing art criticism, paired also with a website, social media, streaming video, offline readings and screenings, and an exhibition space. The essays contained here are intended to retain their currency for years; this is a magazine that should be kept around and referred to often, an entry in the running archive of contemporary art and China. For exhibition reviews and short takes on what’s happening now, turn to WeChat or your email inbox, where LEAP joins a diverse chorus of voices. To track the artists with whom critics, curators, collectors, and institutions will sustain a lifelong engagement, keep reading: you will find six packages about five artists and an art dealer, plus one more about artists working between Asia and Latin America. Each package covers biography, personality, history, criticism, market, studio, and exhibition. We have you surrounded.
As our digital editorial coverage becomes more independent from this seasonal magazine, print becomes free to embrace its print-ness. I hope that reading this issue is a pleasure, until it is my pleasure once again to welcome you to the next new LEAP.
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Editors’ Columns
021
Artist Books
023
Art as a Popular Culture
025
CULTURE™
Zhang Enli
038
Out of an Ordinary Life: A Notebook on the Work of Zhang Enli
Arthur Solway
054
Experience is a Trap: a Conversation with Zhang Enli
067
Iwan Wirth: What’s Missing in the Communication is There in the Work
073
The Uncommercial Traveler
Jacob Dreyer
077
Trees
Liu Chuang
Laura Owens
081
Laura Owens: A Minor Heavens
Jo-ey Tang
091
Laura Owens: Ten Paintings
095
I Dream of Los Angeles
Star Montana
098
Ooga Booga: An Appreciation
Samantha Culp
101
A Report from Boyle Heights
Danielle Shang
Takashi Murakami
106
Takashi Murakami: the Prophet of Superflat
Liz Heise-Glass
117
Trance Chaotic State: a Conversation with Murakami
124
The Pleasure of Intense Labor: a Conversation with Katya Inozemtseva
126
Otaku Philosophy: On Hiroki Azuma
McKenzie Wark
132
Lingua Franca
Charles Munka
136
Sending Drawings Back and Forth: a Conversation with Perrotin
140
An Understanding of the Painterly—in Conversation with Michael Darling
142
GEISAI: Murakami’s Bid to Shape Japan’s Art World
Orion Martin
146
Art-Historical Refinement Coupled with Sheer Pleasure: a Conversation with Tim Blum
148
The Contemporary Eighteenth Century: a Conversation with Anne Nishimura Morse
150
From Superflat to Superpot? Takashi Murakami and His Quest for
Japanese Ceramics
Alexandra Seno
152
Menacing and Creating at the Same Time: a Conversation with Nick Simunovic
Yu Ji
156
Space, Space, Space, Space
Qu Chang
165
Wild Grass: a Conversation with Yu Ji
173
In the Studio with Yu Ji
179
A Voice from the Natural World
Josh Feola
Isabella Bortolozzi
184
My Desire is to Question, and to Question My Desire: a Conversation with Isabella Bortolozzi
199
The Anxiety of the Alien: Anne Imhof in Venice
Marc Yu-Chieh Chan
208
Impossible to Sell but really Big and Important: a Conversation with William Zhao
210
Seth Price: The Early Years
Karen Archey
212
Oscar Murillo: Blockage Situation
Simon Frank
215
James Richards: Image Mining
Billy Tang
Jean-Michel Basquiat
220
Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Deliberate Enigma
Stephanie Bailey
232
Basquiat in Shanghai: a Conversation with Biljana Ciric
237
Alexis Adler’s Photos of Basquiat
242
Asian Speculations: a Conversation with Nick Simunovic
244
A Young Black Man in History: a Conversation with Jeffrey Deitch
246
Echoes and Inversions: Basquiat in Beijing
Josh Feola
Pacific Standard Time LA/LA
252
Memories of Underdevelopment: Asia and Latin America, Constructing a Common Ground
Jacob Dreyer
263
Winds from Fusang
266
Circles and Circuits
270
Transpacific Borderlands
275
Happy Together
Simon Frank
277
“Mundos Alternos” on the Map of Global South Futurism
Samantha Culp
281
The Geopoetic of Co-Suffering
Patrick D. Flores
284
Gala Porras-Kim: Politics of Alterity
Danielle Shang
287
Institution as Mask
Kit Hammonds
291
Out of Many, One Music
Christina Xu
294
Art as Nature’s Competitor
Lucy Chinen
296
The Low Seas
Hera Chan
