Inside Xiao Longhua's studio. Photo: REN2 
Check out our studio visit with Xiao Longhua in LEAP S/S 2024 "Play Time"
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“When the conversation goes astray, and the language stops functioning, you and I still share the same moment. In the final dialogue, people stopped using grand words and started sharing each other’s food. As exotic fruits and spices entered the gut, the bellies rounded, and the terrain of the body was quietly changing. “

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Recent art exhibitions in Shanghai––Wang Jianwei’s solo “Treading in Sludge” at MadeIn Gallery and Michael Wang’s “Lake Tai” at Prada Rong Zhai––both consider humanity’s bond with the Earth. The artists’ senses of place and planet are not mere chance encounters; although they differ in research methodologies and their rationales are manifested in different artistic practices and media, they both invite the audience to contemplate the ecological issues conveyed by these paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations, and to destabilize the anthropocentric obsession with determining Earth’s fate.

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In their respective long-term practices, the artists Wang Tuo and Vajiko Chachkhiani both focus on the microscopic traumatic experiences of a specific subject that speaks cryptically for a particular history. In their artistic expression, reconstructed life experiences synergize with concern for the structural issues and the suspended matters of history that lie behind the rhetorical curtain, and which are intertwined with scenes of violence, mourning, and surreally tinted day-to-day life.

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Perhaps Trinh T. Minh-ha’s world of art is just like how the exhibition space is designed on the fifth floor of RAM, filled with poetic and theoretical phrases. The words printed on transparent plastics seemingly form a solid invisible wall that separates her art from life and physical experience, while the poeticism she instills in these words conjures an illusion of life.

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The loose, fluid “sand” and the meandering, shifting “paths” seem to conjure two divergent images that eventually converge. As the special formatting of the Chinese title suggests, this parallel relationship between “sand” and “paths” is made evident in Hu Xiaoyuan’s subtly distanced juxtaposition of the two elements. Through their latent tension, she searches for the traces of individual existence.

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In the article “Oral History: Geng Jianyi of the ‘85 New Wave of Art’: Seeing the World Differently Through Art,” published in Art World in 2006, the artist claimed that “incomplete materials combined with personal imagination equal history,” and the presentation of this exhibition reflects on this statement.

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Indeed, you might say that the curator has constructed this show as a (definitely European-style) theater through which to criticise the contemporary through the old, reality through imagination, the local through the alien. Because, ultimately, what’s going on right now is so hard to grasp in and of itself. In this formula, the title “I Imagine Angels” comes with a subtext: ‘I can’t believe the reality’.

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It wouldn’t matter if you had heard of the Gazimestan speech or its political significance. You might certainly recall the huge backdrop containing the insignia and dating the beginning and end of the battle of Kosovo, as well as this large-scale acrylic framed photograph suspended on the wall of the museum.

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The radical semiotics of the object contrived by the advent of modernity and technological optimism is fleeting and brittle. Cumulating a plenitude of displays that have endured the dispute between the world of aesthetics and commodity/material objects, the exhibition tugs the once quiet setting and elicits our perception of the ecology of “objects” hidden in art.

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That flawless world is dead, and has left no bones. Nothing but burnt stumps, drifting surfaces, formless fight, and the blue water of a tiny well, guarded by my silent Friend.

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May the revolution end soon and may the victory return to the people.

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Food can bring satiation, joy, and the gratification of generosity and hospitality, but when the many layers of the surface are peeled away, we are forced to reflect on the “common sense” of ordinary life, and dig out the roots of the pain that others or we collectively experience. 

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Jonnie To’s films, on the other hand, address something that reaches deeper than perceptible phenomena—the tension between the aforementioned ideologies and certain preconceived beliefs. Perhaps such a tension is the true core of the “Hong Kong perspective”—it encompasses an alternative understanding of fate and acknowledgement of esoteric knowledge, and even praises of the spirit of Xia.

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It is late April in Shanghai; any “normalcy” has spiraled into abstraction, owing to its protracted absence from life’s routines. My daily existence consists of humdrum cycles of hunger, sleep, and em…

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When we see the history of film through the figure of the bianshi, the influence of vernacular drama (kabuki, glove puppetry, and pansori) is always immanent, that the birth of film is not simply a rupture with the legacy of the theater. In this vein, we can use Chen Chieh-jen’s idea of yaoyan film to ex-scribe a birthdate for yaoyan-style film. The year is 1926, in the moment in which Taiwan’s bianshi started to create countless anti-colonial film memories for audiences.

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