On the sweltering July evening of this exhibition’s opening, the artist who goes by the name of Puppies Puppies was planted on the sidewalk sporting a Statue of Liberty costume for the performance Liberté (all works cited, 2016). Draped in cheap sea-foam-green cloth, face concealed behind a rubbery mask, fake torch held aloft, the artist’s green-painted skin became streaked with sweat, staining the costume’s polyester stola. Lady Liberty marked a slight departure from Puppies’s growing pantheon of pop-cultural characters whose creaturely or monstrous bodies make them objects of disgust or

Huang Rui’s pictorial abstraction is rooted in Chinese tradition, as this exhibition made clear. The architecture of old Beijing is the first model for his work—its courtyards and hutongs (narrow alleys), the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, the gardens of Suzhou and the cave temples of Dunhuang. The artist included three works from his “Space Structures” series, begun in 1984, in which he represents the urban plan of the city’s historic quarters. The transition from architecture to painting is visible in earthy colors that recall the fortifications of the Imperial City, and these