According to historian Philip A. Kuhn, China’s “modern” emigration began in the early sixteenth century, the start of what he labels as the four eras of Chinese emigration: the early colonial age (six…

THE ART FAIR as we know it is no longer free to exist in and of itself. Come vernissage or even earlier, local arts and culture organizations are now bound like lemmings to organize their own spinoff ordeals. An art fair is not a proper art fair without a full roster of ancillary events and…

ART BASEL MIAMI Beach is the winter destination for the art world’s global players, who descend on the city for what is essentially a high-end popup shop the scale of the Burj Khalifa. It is a place where the art world can come together in one place for a short length of time with the…

TEN YEARS AGO, when Frieze magazine’s Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp first floated the idea for a fair, London was still dominated by the same scene that had earmarked “young” as an attribute for those aging all-too-quickly, while casually dismissing East End upstarts as good time galleries, too messy to be taken seriously. The inaugural…

APROPOS THE ART world, Dubai in many ways mirrors Hong Kong. Both are post-colonial waterfront cities that boast histories centuries-long, but have only come to full maturation within the last few decades— Dubai after the establishment of the UAE, Hong Kong after Opening and Reform— and for the most part, they have been perceived as…

ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING IN the Middle East may be big news at the moment, it remained necessary to explain to everyone, on the eve of a visit to Sharjah, exactly what Sharjah is. The vast majority of my Beijing friends— both foreign and Chinese— reacted the same way to hearing these two syllables: they were completely…

MID-MAY IN Hong Kong— the arrival of another art fair left everyone dizzy amid the humidity and unseasonable rain. The highly-anticipated new visual culture museum, M+, contributed to the season’s loaded slate its first large-scale public exhibition project: “Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei.” In recent years art and culture in Hong Kong has expanded at…

LEAP: Art Beijing is already in its sixth edition, which is hard to believe. Seems like just yesterday you were preparing the inaugural version. DMY: When it all got started, there wasn’t much else for me to do. I couldn’t find other jobs, you know, I was too old. So I had to make something…

Since 2006, Beijing has been blessed— or cursed, depending on your perspective— with two art fairs, opening within ten days of one another. In the leadup to the dueling expos in late April and early May, LEAP sat down with Wang Yihan, Director of the China International Gallery Exposition. LEAP: This must be the busiest…