East Asia

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds.

From August 2022 to June 2023, artists and friends Julie Tolentino and Kang Seung Lee reflected on their decades-long practices in kinship, politics, performance, and queer history.

Temptations to pronounce a politics of ecology and technology are incisively moderated in this essay on Tetsumi Kudo’s multimedia installation, presented in MoMA’s Gallery 420 through the fall, prompting a broader critical commentary on the negotiations of cultural typification and belonging in the artist’s oeuvre.

Okamoto Tarō recollects his experiences in Paris between 1929 and 1940, discusses the Abstraction-Création movement and reflects on his time at the Sorbonne and Musée de l’Homme.

This source is an English translation by Stephanie M. Hohlios of a compelling 1971 memoir-essay by Japanese artist Okamoto Tarō—“Watashi to jinruigaku: pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro (Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology)”. Okamoto’s essay “Anthropology and I” sheds light on a widely recognized but little understood…

Song Dong’s 1996 Breathing—a work that zeroes in on the act of breathing in two charged public spaces in Beijing—speaks to art as intertwined with the practice of living, resistance as well as futility.

In Xu Bing’s Cropland, part of the Series of Five Repetitions (1987-88), Chinese characters double as landscape depiction, creating a liminal work that resonates between word and image, representation and abstraction.

Hamaya Hiroshi’s Composition of December 1953 becomes a marker of US occupation and the climate of post-war Japan.

A look at the history of the modern house suggests that domestic living takes shape in the intermediate, and sometimes contentious, space between the aspirations of the dweller and architect.

Following the opening event in which Xiao Lu’s shot at her own installation, Dialogue (1989), which caused the exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing to close, the work has paradoxically become both iconic and obscured. Initially conceived to address gendered violence, the piece was later absorbed into the history of violence of Tiananmen…

As the Guggenheim prepared to open its exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World on October 6, 2017, post collaborated with the Guggenheim’s Checklist blog to reflect on works by Yang Fudong and Zhang Peili, two important contemporary artists from China.

Since 1960, the North Korean government has constructed many buildings, monuments, and statues in Africa. These architectural structures have been covered by the international press since 2010, when the African Renaissance Monument was inaugurated in Senegal.