THE AUSTERELY MINIMALIST interior of Chicago’s Josef Paul Kleihues–designed Museum of Contemporary Art may never have looked so good as when lit by the fluorescent hues of Dan Flavin’s neon retrospective in 2005, but until now—that is, until the arrival of Rudolf Stingel’s current installation—it had never been put to such good use. For this, his first large-scale survey exhibition in the United States, Stingel seems intent on emphasizing the distinction between the logics of appearance and purpose. (It is precisely this dialectic that has motivated his twenty-year investigation into

For thousands of years, the trade routes of the Silk Road have linked China and the West. It was almost exclusively the cultures at either end that benefited economically from these routes, and the vast but sparsely populated regions of Central Asia that they traversed came to develop a fascinating quasi-parasitical relationship to the exotic riches that moved through them. The former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan (independent since 1991), a landlocked nation directly west of China, was and is such a place. It is also home to artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, who use photography