In Taipei, the artwork that said most about the contemporary art market's fraught situation in East Asia was not at the 26th Art Taipei (18–21 October 2019), but across town at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a publicly funded art park established in Taiwan's former Air Force Command Headquarters in 2018. Chin Cheng-Te's Tender Soul –...

Between 30 August and 1 September 2019, the 11th edition of Art Jakarta will take place at its new home at the Jakarta Convention Center following its rebranding, with collector Tom Tandio as director, and Enin Supriyanto as artistic director. At the fair, viewers can encounter large-scale exhibitions as part of the 'Spot' sector, including...

Get Up Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House in London (12 June–15 September 2019) surveys more than half a century of black creativity in Britain and beyond across the fields of art, film, photography, music, design, fashion, and literature. Curated by Zak Ové, works by approximately 100 intergenerational...

China's post-80s artists are no longer all that 'young', nor do they much need that moniker. With the oldest of that generation fast approaching 40, to call them young would be misleading given how rapidly many of them rose to prominence during the tail-end of China's foreign collector-powered art boom and subsequent influx of domestic collectors....

Ocula contributor Diana d'Arenberg gives her annual post-mortem of Hong Kong's Art Basel week, running through some of the highs and lows of the fair's seventh edition, which opened to the public from 29 to 31 March 2019.

At 53, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye continues to employ the shock factor with abandon. Moving between the sacred and the profane, inflections of gothic drama and high technology imbue the artist's drawings, sculptures, and installations. He frequently swings from fine art to the decorative, applying Belgian ornamental elements such as coats of...

A selection of this week's most searched artists on Ocula.com 

When Sydney art dealer Ray Hughes visited Swiss collector Uli Sigg at his Mauensee residence near Lucerne some years ago, a mutual friend asked the dealer how the visit went. ‘Did you feel comfortable and find a place to kick your feet up and read?’ ‘No, to both,’ answered Hughes, ‘it seems there was only art...

Nowadays, Korean-born artist Lee Ufan needs little introduction. The combination of the opening of his own Tadao Ando-designed museum at the Benesse Art Site, Japan in 2010; his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and his major show at the Château de Versailles in 2014, have all meant that in recent years Lee Ufan has...

Few people were all that rich when China finally officially opened its borders in 1978, but Zhang Huan was poorer than most. He was born in Anyang, Henan Province, in 1965, just before Mao initiated the decade-long calamity of the Cultural Revolution. Living hardscrabble with his grandparents in the remote countryside, his early childhood...

'I begin with an idea, but as I work the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life.'—Georg Baselitz. Struggle, along with the human condition and a smattering of controversy: this is what sits at the heart of work by painter, sculptor and printmaker, Georg...

Ocula correspondent Stephanie Bailey reports on top exhibitions around the city during Art Week

Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s history....

When Australian collectors and philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman moved from South Africa to Australia in 1976, Gene says they instantly recognised a “buzz about Asia” that they weren’t expecting. As an academic teaching French literature, the push towards Asian languages also put her out of a job. “I went...

Both shows are milestone moments in the institutions’ development. The massive museums—each with about 10,000 square metres of space—are learning to stand.

Gwangju is only the sixth largest city in Korea but its history has become well-known to art audiences around the world through its provocative biennale, now a fixed event in the international art calendar. The Gwangju Biennale began twenty years ago specifically to commemorate the historic fight for democracy that took place in the city, known...

At the height of McCarthyism, American writer Ray Bradbury published his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 which describes life in a near future where all books are burned on the orders of the state. Extrapolating from the situation of censorship that he felt pervaded 1950s America, Bradbury imagined a fleet of ‘firemen’ who ignite...

Doryun Chong is Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong’s super museum for visual culture. Prior to joining M+, Chong was Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and prior to that, he was a curator in the visual arts department at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center from 2003 to 2009. At MoMA, Chong...

Doryun Chong is Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong’s super museum for visual culture. Prior to joining M+, Chong was Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and prior to that, he was a curator in the visual arts department at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center from 2003 to 2009. At MoMA, Chong...

The last decade has seen an extraordinary interest in the art of China, yet Hong Kong artists have been significantly overlooked in this bubbling and frothing phenomena. It is timely therefore that Ai Weiwei, arguably the most well-known of the Chinese artists, has chosen to curate an exhibition in Hong Kong featuring only Hong Kong artists; and...

In 1983, Dakis Joannou, along with curators Adelina Von Furstenberg and Efi Strousa, founded the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. DESTE has staged exhibitions that include  Cultural Geometry (1988), Psychological Abstraction (1989), Artificial Nature (1990), Post Human (1992-1993); four shows artist Andreas Angelidakis describes...

Active in promoting art and design in Hong Kong, Alan Lo is the Chairman of Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design, sits on the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and was a member of Art HK’s advisory group.  Lo is also a co-founder and director of Hong Kong-based Press Room Group, owner and operator of various well-known restaurants and...