The title “Twin Tracks,” originating in a Chinese proverb, usually refers to the difficulty of reaching a goal when one is heading in the wrong direction. Yang Fudong’s exhibition guides the audience …

Yang Fudong’s New Women premiered at a special exhibition during the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Shown in black and white on five screens arranged in a row on one gallery wall, New Women stood in contrast to its surroundings, an intense installation by Christopher Doyle called Away with Words. One of the most important…

Yang Fudong’s film noir aesthetics have been employed in both his monumental arthouse epic Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003-2007), and in his exuberant foray into advertising for Prada’s First Spring (2010). Considering this, it is difficult to know where this artist stands and for what. The answer may be clearly developed in his…

Yang Fudong’s recent outing at Marian Goodman’s Paris outpost showcases two works: the multichannel video installation Fifth Night and the photographic series “International Hotel,” both of which were debuted in Shanghart Gallery’s “Useful Life” exhibition last year. But while “Useful Life” (named after an exhibition by Yang, Xu Zhen, and Yang Zhenzhong in 2000) looked…

The original story of Yugongyishan (Moving Moutains), the legend of the old man who moved the mountain, is actually a rather romantic one. The story goes that an elderly man of over seventy, driven by…

LEAP 43 | TINY TIMES In the early days of 2017, during his allocution at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Xi Jinping called for an “open, win-win and cooperative” model of globalization. Donald Trump, however, declared in his inauguration speech his preference for “buying American and hiring American.” In these strikingly dissonant signals…

Against all odds, the much-maligned genre of the China show seems to be making a comeback, some decade since it largely disappeared from major international museum programs. In addition to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Bentu,” comparable projects on the docket for the next two years include both an historical exhibition and a thematic group show…

Against all odds, the much-maligned genre of the China show seems to be making a comeback, some decade since it largely disappeared from major international museum programs. In addition to the Fondati…

The theater, once solely the spatial medium of performance on the stage, has slowly become a common part of contemporaryartistic parlance, and has greatly extended its own meaning as well. Gao Shiming…

This autumn has been one of spectacles. While the Victory Day Parade, countless art fairs and exhibitions compete for attention, new energies are in the air. LEAP is trying something new with this issue; for the first time, we have dedicated our thematic cover feature to the work of a single man—Chen Tong, the storied,…

This summer seems to welcome a flood of performance, but we are more interested in the social space of the theater, and how artists have begun to adapt this institution to their own needs. Curating seems to be more and more an act of choreography, organizing interventions and other processes that interact with collections and…

Gauzy and alluring maidens sparkle across the screen in Yang Fudong’s new film; The Colored Sky: New Women II begs the question of what happened to the old women. It’s already part of a series, like Lacan’s understanding of male sexuality structured as an infinite series of individual encounters that never feels repetitive but appears…

WEB EXCLUSIVE  ShanghArt Beijing’s latest group exhibition, “V&P,” is ambitious in scale and content, juxtaposing still with time-based works, established with emerging artists, and realism with fantasy. Because the exhibition, whose title stands for “video and photography,” features over a dozen artists and 20-plus artworks, it runs the risk of being a cursory overview of…

The two Chinese characters ku er are owed to the playful transliteration of the word “queer,” attributed to Taiwanese writer and scholar Chi Ta-wei in the 1994 special queer issue for Isle Margin, then the most important publication dedicated to cultural movements in Taiwan. Twenty years later, LEAP is dedicating an issue to queer art and…

FROM AT LEAST the time of Nixon’s visit in 1972, the United States has had a love-hate relationship with China. Opening relations with the People’s Republic did not stop Americans from calling it “Red China,” nor did it change their love for fortune cookies. This attitude—a combination of political paranoia, economic competitiveness and cultural nostalgia—spilled…

The Met, which has never before mounted a major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art, ambitiously frames this first attempt as an exploration of how contemporary works from a non-Western culture could be displayed in an encyclopedic art museum. Shown in the museum’s large galleries of Chinese art, “Ink Art” is the epitome of a missed…

Around 30 years ago, Italo Calvino used a story from the Boccaccio classic The Decameron in a lecture as a prime illustration of the concept of “lightness.” Boccaccio paints the portrait of a hermetic Florentine poet in Guido Cavalcanti, the refined and solemn philosopher who is distrusted and cast out by Florence’s profligate socialites and…

Relationships start with a choice: to open up to a stranger or recoil. That choice, common as it is in encounters between individuals, is just as relevant when thinking about cultures coming into contact with one another—when friendship becomes a matter of war and peace. These meetings might produce a cacophonous event: like the 2011…

ART FAIRS PRESENT perfect opportunities to observe the local economy and art ecology. Already in its third year, Art Stage Singapore has again chosen the country’s most luxurious locale, the Marina Bay Sands conference center, as the exhibition venue. A total of 131 galleries from 25 countries participated in this year’s fair. Seventy-five percent of…

Only a couple of years since the ZKM first fell for globalization, we step again onto the terrain of global reality as soon as we enter “Move on Asia,” an exhibition imported from Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul. Here, more than 140 works are gathered under the “Asian” label, with artists from China, Hong Kong,…