THE TITLE OF Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition at the Long Museum West Bund, “Nothingness is not nothing at all,” was cleverly translated as “Wu Xiang Wan Xiang,” a riff on Chinese philosophical perspectives on nature and the universe. Uniting two homophonic versions of xiang, the former referring to appearance or form and the latter to a manifestation of nature, the Chinese version thus read: “Assuming no appearance is (to embrace) every manifestation of nature”—ironic, given that there was nothing natural in this exhibition, which marked the artist’s most comprehensive presentation in China

In Li Ran’s new exhibition “Same Old Crowd,” the city of Singapore has been rendered almost entirely abstract. The Beijing-based artist, who spent three months in residence last year at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art, takes a “participant observer” approach—using the tourist map as a starting point to craft a dehistoricized, flattened visual model of his subject. The two-channel video It Is Not Complicated, A Guidebook (all work, 2016) presents footage Li shot during a preplanned route through the city’s Gardens by the Bay while accompanied by an