We live in a world filled with images that are captured, edited, and published at hyper speeds, images referring to images. Our political, ethical, and intimate lives are constructed around images, through images, and in images. In situations of war and mass violations of human rights, it is our hyper-mediatized world that creates the typical…
Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination. The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting…
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The name Ding Yi is associated with the cross, a symbol the artist, designer, and educator has used since the late 1980s in his investigation of abstraction. Ding’s allover painting fields are built from the manual, systematic repetition of horizontal and vertical strokes across a flat, canvas surface. Ding grew up during the Cultural Revolution,…
Did 1993 mark a watershed for “contemporary Chinese art” in the then increasingly globalized art world? In this essay Peggy Wang discusses exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art held overseas in the year 1993, notably China Avant-Garde in Berlin, China’s New Art, Post-1989 in Hong Kong, and the Venice Biennale. Analyzing various readings of works by artists such as Wang…
We live in a world of unedited images. Pictures are present in our most private chambers and on the most public social-media platforms. Photography is without question the lingua franca of our time, even if the nature and ubiquity of photographs have been marked by a turn toward digital means of capturing and storing images.…
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…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
As museums move to put more geographically inclusive displays on view, a tension in emphasis–between cross-geographic correspondences and local particularities–is necessarily at stake. We convened a conversation between art historian, Alexander Alberro; curator, Doryun Chong; and museum director, Edit Sasvári, each with their own regional focus, to discuss the possibility of “the global museum,” what…
Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), a performance collective active in the 1960s in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan, has only recently become better known in the international art world through the following exhibitions and content: Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012–13) with screenings of the group’s performance documents; Great Crescent: Art and Agitation…
This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…
