Last month, a new sake bar opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts: a softly lit tunnel of booze that promises the kind of entrancing conversation one can never quite remember the next morning. A permanent installation designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is furnished...

On the eve of Art Basel in Hong Kong's private view on Wednesday, the Beijing-based artist Huang Rui took to the streets of Central for a paint-splashed performance about the cyclical nature of history. The piece was a tribute to Lee Wen, the pioneering Asian performance artist who died early this month.

Zhao Zhao had formerly been Ai Weiwei's studio assistant for seven years; they had first met in 2004, a year after Zhao had graduated from the Xinjiang Arts Institute. Ai Weiwei's close friendship with Zhao Zhao is very much in evidence in this particular essay that Ai Weiwei wrote for Zhao Zhao; in it, he recounts the various projects that Zhao...

Can Contemporary Chinese art be revived as a tool for social critique? Returning to the traditional medium of painting, Liu Xiaodong, whose solo exhibition '25 Oil Paintings: 1993-2007' was up at Yallay Gallery in Hong Kong in March, makes a renewed case for this question, departing from the legacy of socialist realism that has occupied the medium...

While I was writing this article, in February 2018, the artist Zhao Yao received permission to rent the iconic Workers' Stadium in north-eastern Beijing for one day in May. His intention was to show an abstract composition on fabric, measuring 116 × 86 m, which was produced in 2016 and initially displayed 5,000 m above sea level on a mountainside...

If a 21st birthday "coming of age" observance can be applied to cultural events, 2018 marks the launch into adulthood of the Biennale of Sydney. In some ways Sydney's biennale was a precocious child, turning its back during infancy on mainstream Eurocentric art in favour of exploring its local geographic region, early on including...

In an era where superstar Chinese artist Ai Weiwei feels ubiquitous, this past summer I experienced the full extent of that reality over the course of two months. After attending a New York preview for his new film about migrants, Human Flow (2017), I traveled to Israel to visit a major exhibition of his work at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem,...

When one is new to Jakarta, one makes the mistake of not telling the cab driver to travel via the toll roads. And so it is that while creeping through the city's tight tangled backstreets, the cab finds itself coming head-to-head with another car, both unable to give way because they are simultaneously surrounded by three dozen motorcycles.But if...

Ai Weiwei's proposal for a public art project scheduled to take hold beginning mid-October in high-traffic public environments within Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City has been met with resistance from the Washington Square community.

Chinese collectors have so quickly become a mainstay of the art market that it is easy to forget that wealthy Southeast Asian connoisseurs started buying contemporary art decades earlier.

Canton Express is held at the M+ Pavilion, located at the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, which showcases the collection donated by Chinese collector Guan Yi to M+ in 2013. The show is on view from 23 June to 10 September 2017. In addition to the exhibition, M+ also organised a weekend-long film and video screening, City Limits, held...

Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno—the first major U.S. exhibition about the American poet, artist, activist and muse John Giorno—has opened simultaneously across 13 locations in New York City. I ♥ John Giorno is a work of art by Giorno's husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of John...

I learned early on from the eats, such as Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs—and the Pop artists too—that archives were very important. This was around the late 1950s, or the beginning of the '60s. So, I just saved all of my work. My parents had a house in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, and for fifty years I brought everything I made...

The inaugural ARoS Triennial, The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times, opened in Aarhus, 2017's European Capital of Culture, on the morning that Donald Trump stood in the White House garden and announced his plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. ARoS's director, Erlend Høyersten, promises that this exhibition 'will thematize...

When a local art group lures an international superstar like Ai Weiwei to its birthday celebrations, that's impressive. New York's Public Art Fund (PAF) has done just that to celebrate 40 years of commissioning artists to make site-specific pieces for New Yorkers to enjoy. Returning to the city this month, Ai Weiwei says: 'I never expected this...

Last month, we visited Ai Weiwei and Herzog & De Meuron's exhibition Hansel & Gretel, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Upon entering the neo-Gothic building from the back entrance as directed, we traversed a narrow, poorly lit corridor to eventually make our way into the Armory's expansive central hall.

Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, said Hong Kong has its galleries, while Miami is known for its private collections and Basel for its museums.For all the obvious differences among these cities, when the Art Basel fair visits them each year, it anchors its shows in the same way, with a large showcase of presentations by...

'Everything is art. Everything is politics.' These words of Ai Weiwei, the enigmatic dissident Chinese political artist, loom like a specter over his latest solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Prague, Law of the Journey. The exhibition's title alludes to Walter Benjamin's reading of Franz Kafka's 'law of the journey' as 'a route of...

Well known for his sculptures and paintings made from materials such as bamboo, rattan and burlap sacks, Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich exhibited work at the Institut Français in Phnom Penh this year. Titled Sopheap Pich: de l'atelier à l'oeuvre, the exhibition featured the artist's work alongside selections from his personal collection of art and...

The world-renowned Biennale of Sydney is back next year to celebrate its 45th anniversary exhibition. Set to maintain its status as the largest and best-attended contemporary arts event in Australia, the 21st Biennale of Sydney is anticipated to once again bring an impressive and diverse range of contemporary artists and artworks to the...

Ai Weiwei, the provocative Chinese artist, will build more than 100 fences and installations around New York City this fall for Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, one of his most large-scale public art projects to date.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads (2010) comes to Yorkshire Sculpture Park as part of the organisation's 40th anniversary celebrations. The piece, which comprises a dramatic group of 12 bronze animal heads, has been on a worldwide tour since May 2011 and made a colossal migration through Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The American artist Jenny Holzer, known for challenging texts imposed on urban settings, has been chosen as the next contemporary artist to tackle one of the most privileged spaces in the UK, the baroque splendour of Blenheim Palace.

As far as you look back in history, the arts have always interacted with the power structures of their time. Artists, writers, poets, filmmakers and musicians have been indispensible critical voices, reacting to cultural and political discourse, connecting with social movements. They can be a powerful voice of dissent and transgression to political...