Chen Zhen’s death in 2000 did not stop his art from living on, thanks to the hard work of Xu Min—Chen Zhen’s widow, who continues to organize his solo shows and also to restore his artworks. Xu was trained as an artist in Shanghai, but she has dedicated herself to supporting Chen’s art since the couple…
Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
Renowned Chilean art critic, Adriana Valdés, visited MoMA to talk about the works of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she not only thoroughly discussed the importance and semantic weight of Dittborn’s Airmail Paintings, but she also described the peculiarities of the Chilean art scene, one that Dittborn himself has identified as “a sort of small…
Huang Yong Ping talks about how the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989) in Paris changed his artistic practices and life trajectory in this conversation with Sarah Suzuki, Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Yu-Chieh Li, Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow, at Le Hangar à Bananes gallery in Nantes, France, in June 2014. Huang identifies Reptile (1989), a…
Rachel Weiss, curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver (who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor,…
What can “tactical urbanism” offer cities under extreme stress from rapid population growth, intensifying industrial restructuring, inadequate social and physical infrastructures, rising levels of class polarization, insufficiently resourced public institutions, proliferating environmental disasters, and growing popular alienation, dispossession, and social unrest? The current MoMA exhibition Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities aims to explore this question…
Armin Linke (Italian, born 1966) is a traveler in search of strange, yet familiar frontiers; his photographs spring from a peripatetic practice that has taken him from the slopes of the massive infrastructural transformations rent by the Three Gorges Dam in China, to the technologically crafted snow-globe winters of Ski Dubai’s interiors. Each photograph forms…
Beijing was home to high-energy experimental art practices, including Beijing East Village performances and apartment art, in the 1990s. The practices that were critical of their socio-political context are often referred to today as underground art. How did underground networks function, and how did censorship affect their operation and production? In this conversation, the artists Lin…
Scroll down to see an annotated short list with a main focus on English-language texts on experimental music in 1960s Japan. This list is intended as a starting point from which we hope to develop a growing list of sources on experimental music in postwar Japan. This list is not an authoritative bibliography. It can…
The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the…
When Xu Zhen established MadeIn Company in 2009, he announced the dissolution of his own artistic identity; later he asserted that Xu had become a corporate brand. In the six chapters of this videotaped conversation with Yu-Chieh Li, Xu discusses his practices in relation to MadeIn’s operations, which, from research and production through marketing and…
Last updated on Jun 3, 2014. First published on December 19, 2013. Deconstructing the past was the main concern of Chinese artists in the 1980s. Firmly believing that they could distance themselves from traditional and official art by studying Western art movements, artists participated in discussions, of Dada, Pop art, and other major currents, in art…
