The philosophy of Karl Popper, Dadaism, and the visual codes of China’s Cultural Revolution converge in Wu Shanzhuan’s abstruse conceptual work, a poetic anomaly that well represents the spirit of the experimental art circle in China in the 1980s. Wu developed his set of theories about readymades based on his reading in the 1980s of…
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…
The year 2014 may come to be known as the year of Asian Biennials. During the second half of 2014, no fewer than six major exhibitions of international contemporary art were staged in Asia: the Yokohama Triennale (August 1–November 3) opened towards the end of the summer, followed by Media City Seoul (September 2–November 23),…
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…
At what moment did artists in Korea show work that was considered experimental, underground, and contemporary? How are the first Korean Happenings, from the late 1960s, seen from today’s perspective? These questions were addressed by Kim Mikyung at a C-MAP presentation at The Museum of Modern Art in April 2014. Her talk, published below, surveys…
Milan Knížák was a key figure in the development of action art and performance in Prague in the 1960s. His Performance Files, now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and published here in their entirety, constitute a tremendous resource, as they bring together images and texts related to many of the artist’s independent…
Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.”
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…
This story starts with a photograph of the young Marina Abramović sitting beside Joseph Beuys, smoking a cigarette. The year was 1974, and Beuys was in Belgrade to participate in April Encounters. This story starts with a photograph of the young Marina Abramović sitting beside Joseph Beuys, smoking a cigarette. The year was 1974, and…
As MoMA prepares to open the exhibition Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, the exhibition’s curator Pedro Gadanho lays out the active curatorial model of the exhibition. He calls for a renovation in the ways that audiences engage with the crucial issues of uneven urban growth, reflecting on the outcomes and potentials of extended collaborations…
