GIORGIO AGAMBEN Born in 1942, Giorgio Agamben currently teaches at the Università Iuav di Venezia, the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In works including Homo Sacer and The State of Exception he furthered Foucault’s and Arendt’s explorations of political philosophy, while his…

The earliest encounter between Tony Cragg and Chinese audiences was in 2005 during the second Beijing International Art Biennale, where the British sculptor won First Prize. Perplexingly— especially as this exhibition functioned also on the diplomatic level, as part of the British Council’s UK Now festival, but also because Cragg himself often cites it alongside…

Apart from housing ShanghART Taopu Warehouse and artist studios, the Taopu art district has also served as the setting for two major exhibitions by local artists: “Future Festival,” and “TOP Contemporary Art Events.” The former was the brainchild of artists Ding Li, Jin Feng, Shi Qing, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, and Zhou Xiaohu, among others,…

Sui Jianguo’s solo exhibition at Pace Beijing mounted the representative works of his various phases from the 1980s on, the earliest of which is a plaster cast sculpture from 1987, when Sui was still a student working toward his MA. The most recent of works on display is 2011’s bronze cast, The Blind. As it…

THE 30 SHORT years since the advent of Chinese contemporary art have also seen wave upon wave of interest in Western theory, beginning with the popularity of existentialism in the 1980s. The impact of these trends is readily apparent within artworks such as Zhong Ming’s He Is Himself—Sartre. Later, following the entrée of postmodern theory,…

“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981” (“UBBS”) is a sprawling exhibition that hinges on a bold claim and a stubborn refusal. The claim, made by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, is that the unruly, anything-goes pluralism of California art during this period had far-reaching consequences that are “just beginning to be understood.”¹ America…

Ever since the ‘85 New Wave, discussions about theory have been part of the progress of contemporary art in China, and on multiple occasions theoretical debates have taken center stage. In the 1980s, translations of Sartre and the existentialist writers, of varying quality and accuracy, found their way into the country, as did a great…

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…

                  1. KLARA LIDÉN Klara Lidén, a Berlin-based Swede working through installation, architectural interventions, and video, suffuses her practice with both the unbridled energy of a young urban adventurer and the resourcefulness of a hardened street urchin. Her work, resolutely, is “street”: via the reallocation of scavenged…

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. At the New Museum’s second Triennial “The Ungovernables,” however, visitors often find themselves needing to trudge through lengthy, jargonistic labels in order to make sense of the many artworks and projects on display. While this seems to have become the norm these days for contemporary art…

In Taiwan, clues to the Tehching Hsieh legend could originally only be found in fragments amongst brief, incomplete scatterings of text. As of 1986, after the artist’s year-long performance No Art Piece (or One Year Performance 1985-1986, New York, during which he made no art and abstained from discussing or viewing art of any kind),…

“AMONG COMRADES” Philosophy (theory) is often abstruse. Even when reading the works of celebrity philosophers like Žižek, it is impossible to avoid the obscure (specialized) element of philosophy. Strip out the Hitchcock references, political jokes and raunchy remarks, and what remains of a Žižek essay is a specialized text interlaced with all kinds of concepts….