Alvin Li

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  print September 2020

  Where we’re at: Beijing, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, New Delhi

  VICTOR WANG
  BEIJING
  

  BLACK MAOISM was a real thing. Recently I’ve been thinking about what that means in China today.

  Radical histories of Blackness in China are rarely part of mainstream discussions on Afro-Asian solidarity on either side of the Pacific, yet those very legacies explain why Shirley Graham Du Bois is buried in Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, China’s illustrious burial ground for its national heroes.

  I’ve recently found access to these histories through the Department of Xenogenesis, a series of pedagogical dialogues organized on Zoom by the Otolith Group. Kodwo Eshun

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  diary January 24, 2020

  Wanderer’s Love

  LANDING AT TPE ON JANUARY 16, just five days after Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen’s triumphant reelection, I was ready for a jollier mood than what had loomed over the capital during my last trip. That was during the Taipei Biennial two years ago, when I witnessed the Democratic Progressive Party’s defeat in the local elections, followed by Tsai’s resignation as the party leader. Now, on my ride to the hotel, I immersed myself in the view outside. The beauty of Taipei’s built environment—rows of slightly worn office buildings elbowing restaurants, Japanese lettering against the backdrop of a

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  diary December 05, 2019

  Love of Siam

  I LANDED IN BANGKOK in the midst of an identity crisis: Having lost my Chinese ID just before the Singapore Biennial, I realized my original itinerary was out the window. I had planned to travel from Shanghai to Thailand via Singapore, but now I could no longer apply for a tourist visa to enter the Lion City at all. And so I vacationed through the more visa-lenient nations of Indonesia and the Philippines, finally touching down in Bangkok the night before the opening of the second “Spectrosynthesis”—a queer art exhibition series initiated by the Hong Kong–based Sunpride Foundation, this time

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  diary November 18, 2019

  Happy Together

  THERE’S AN OLD CHINESE SAYING, “Food is the heaven of the people.” As it happens, one of the things I most look forward to during art week, anywhere in the world, is the immoderate free dinners. This time, the slew of feasts in Shanghai kicked off with a private dinner put on by Hyundai to celebrate their partnership with the Yuz Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This, I was told, would be the only meal all week to have both LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan and Yuz Museum founder Budi Tek in attendance.

  Monday, 7:30 PM sharp: I arrived at Bloom, a chic open-kitchen bistro known

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  diary January 22, 2019

  Smize Demise

  ONCE UPON A TIME, for most of the art cognoscenti, Hong Kong resembled a Wong Kar-wai film still. Then Art Basel happened. So it was all the more exciting to visit the city for a brand-new occasion: the inaugural edition of Booked, launched by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Since officially opening its doors to the public this past June, Tai Kwun, which is housed in the Tai Kwun Center for Heritage and Arts—a major redevelopment project in the former Central Police Station backed by the Hong Kong Jockey Club—has welcomed more than a million people. According to the museum’s statistics, one-fifth

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  diary November 16, 2018

  Play Safe

  THE WARDROBE OF SMALL TALK must be continually refreshed; this year, during Shanghai’s unofficial art week, the once voguish ice-breaker of comparing Shanghai to Beijing proved suddenly démodé. China’s capital came up only once, during a dinner with artists Margaret Lee and Allison Katz: Margaret had just returned from a trip there, while Allison was anticipating her first visit. Symbolically, Beijing-based Philip Tinari didn’t come to Shanghai. Despite his sensible reasoning (“to attend the opening of the China show at SFMOMA and the David Diao catalogue launch in New York,” he told me two

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  picks November 14, 2018

  “Crush”

  Gathering works by seventeen artists and groups, “Crush” reckons with the social forces that keep us hooked on love’s ambivalence, and reconsiders the place of negative emotions often associated with love in contemporary life. In the paintings Rave On and Demonstration, both 2015, Sarah Lai pictures celebrity tattoos and retouched skin on skin-toned wallpapers made of blown-up Instagram screenshots and beauty tutorial stills to call attention to the plasticity of intimacy in our hyper-mediatized culture. Elsewhere, the exhibition relates pathologized passions to the persecution of disenfranchised