Filmmaker, artist, activist and organizer Wu Tsang describes herself as “multi-multi”(1)—a description she deploys in order to explain a position predicated on hybridity and contradiction. This approach to identity, and the refusal to be categorized in normative terms, has been somewhat of a constant in Tsang’s life. Born in Massachusetts, USA, in 1982 to a…
Read More“They all look the same,” Europeans used to say about Chinese people; now, it’s what first-tier citizens say about third-tier cities. Whether it is Jixi in Heilongjiang, Dongguan in Guangdong, or Tangshan in Hebei, lieux de memoires associated with critical moments in China’s history have become apparently faceless collections of buildings interchangeable with each other….
Read More“Real things are not absolute things. Real things are the embodiments of a dictatorial system of coercion which maintains that they are real.”(1) In the paranoid milieu of the post-war order, Akasegawa Genpei’s “Thesis on Capitalist Realism” made sense: for many, discovering that the televisions, coffee tables, advertisements—the entire world—around them were a construction could…
Read MoreContemporary Chinese artists and the worker’s experience In 1972, a 16-year-old Sui Jianguo took the place of his mother as a worker at the Tongyao Workshop of Qingdao National Cotton Mill No. 2; in 1977, a 20-year-old Wang Guangyi left a farm in Heilongjiang province, where he had worked as a sent-down youth, to become…
Read MoreAlthough Lee Kit’s work seems, on the surface, to deal with everyday objects, these things actually tend to serve as material support for his private emotions and as backdrop for projected illustratio…
Read MoreIf Heman Chong’s show were a book, it would feel like a limited edition paperback. In Chong’s most alluring work, books, as a medium for words, are the metaphors for his creation—works of art each mad…
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