Angie Baecker
“Rural North China, 1947–1948”
March 2013
In today’s People’s Republic of China, little is explicitly Communist, save perhaps the Chinese Communist Party itself. The country’s socialist period is rife with thorny, unprobed complexities, a legacy so fraught and out of step with… READ ON
IN PRINT March 2013 [TOC]
“ON | OFF”
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art | 尤伦斯当代艺术中心
February 2013
“ON | OFF” gathers fifty mainland Chinese artists born after 1976, a watershed year marked in the collective consciousness by Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Similar to the New Museum’s Generational, this vast … READ ON
PICKS
Yung Ho Chang
February 2013
When Yung Ho Chang returned to his native Beijing in 1993 after more than a decade of architectural training and practice in the United States, he was confronted by a society in dramatic flux. He found urban conditions and forms of development… READ ON
IN PRINT February 2013 [TOC]
“On | Off”
January 2013
Curated by Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong Titled after the interface of a virtual private network used to access websites blocked in China, this survey aims to show the ways in which mainland artists born after 1975 address the binaries that … READ ON
PREVIEWS
Angie Baecker
December 2012
IN A YEAR OF major political transition across the whole of Asia, contemporary art programming was defined by a trend toward metanarrative. In Taiwan, the 2012 edition of the Taipei Biennial was an intellectually exuberant affair that confronted… READ ON
SLANT
Paula Tsai
Paula Tsai discusses “SEE/SAW: Collective Practice in China Now”
December 2012
Paula Tsai is curator of “SEE/SAW: Collective Practice in China Now,” an exhibition on view at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art until December 30. “SEE/SAW” features fourteen different emerging Chinese collectives that are rotating… READ ON
500 WORDS
Taipei Biennial 2012
December 2012
In The Monster That Is History, literary scholar David Der-wei Wang considers the taowu, an ancient Chinese monster described as “like a tiger with a human face.” This fiendish beast was made all the more ominous by its divinatory ability… READ ON
IN PRINT December 2012 [TOC]
The First Five-Year Plan
The 5th anniversary gala for the UCCA in Beijing
November 2012 BEIJING
DIVINING HIERARCHY AND POLITICAL WILL from ceremonial detail is an art, and nowhere more so than in China, where the political system is opaque and lives have literally hung in the balance of imperial banquet seating arrangements. So it was… READ ON
DIARY
Feng Mengbo
Chambers Fine Art Beijing 前波画廊
October 2012
The title piece of “Not Too Late: Recent Works by Feng Mengbo” is a single-channel video piece accompanied by traditional Chinese music. Its design takes as its starting point the classic multiplayer first-person shooter video game Quake… READ ON
PICKS
Liu Xiaodong
Liu Xiaodong talks about his Hotan Project
September 2012
Last May, Liu Xiaodong and a team of assistants traveled to Hotan, a town in the Xinjiang region of China, where he painted monumental portraits of local Uyghur jade miners while a documentarian filmed the entire process. The project is on … READ ON