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…
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…
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…
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…
What country is Hong Kong? Hong Kong was an island. Hong Kong will become part of China. MAP Office has decided to present Hong Kong is, with the intention of clearly addressing the specific characteristics of this unique city/territory, which is in a state of perpetual transition. Offering a platform to reveal a hidden urbanity, breaking…
A close examination of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC)’s 1964 stop in Tokyo allows for a better understanding of how mutually significant this encounter was for the Japanese avant-garde and Cunningham and his close collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. John now feels that the time is propitious for Merce to undertake not only…
In this interview, the artist Anna Bella Geiger explores the development of her production from early neo-figuration and her “visceral” works, to more experimental tendencies from the late 1960s onward. She talks about photographs taken on the subway during her time in New York City, works that engage unusual mediums such as bread bags and…
“Would you have participated in this activity if it was truly revolutionary?” The Poema Colectivo 2014 project invited a group of artists from Mexico to create a new “collective poem” for today based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución. Each invited artist was asked to nominate another friend to join the project. With many thanks…
“American art that lost its glory” was the way Shinohara Ushio summed up Twenty Years of American Painting, an exhibition sent to Tokyo by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Just two years earlier, Shinohara had been an enthusiastic “imitator” of American artists, copying works by the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and…
Was Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 visit to Tokyo a case of cultural exchange or of cross-cultural discommunication? The question is central to this account of Gold Standard, a “combine” that Rauschenberg created during an event at Tokyo’s Sōgetsu Art Center in November of that year. Originally planned by the critic Tōno Yoshiaki as a public interview…
