As someone who has personally spent too much time in too many art fairs over the past decade or so, I have become acclimated to a certain kind of art-fair art-viewing experience. Neon signs vie for attention with massive dayglo paintings, holograms in pristine plexiglass vitrines strive to out-wow the virtual reality experiences offered in Oculus...

The stark white room is punctuated by abstract black forms — jagged, organic, dramatic and playful — that sprout up from the floor or dangle languidly from the ceiling. Glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, they shift ever so slightly as you walk down the long gallery space, a former bank building. Around each corner, a new...

Last Friday, Fondazione Furla unveiled Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow, a new exhibition by Korean artist Haegue Yang at the La Triennale di Milano, one of the biggest design museums in Milan.Created in 2008 by Furla, the Milan-based accessories manufacturer, Fondazione Furla is meant to showcase the company's relation with the art...

It is one the first ever experimental art games ever made and for the past decade, Bill Viola's The Night Journey has been exhibited in venues around the world as a work in progress. Now, Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab have launched the award-winning game worldwide on Mac and Windows PC (and on PlayStation in the US), marking the...

The Golden Ratio might summon memories from an early art history or biology course: the geometric rubric for natural symmetry printed over photographs of a fern leaf or the face of a marble kouros figure.

It is not uncommon among contemporary Korean artists to find the same title used repeatedly for different paintings, often over a period of several years. Although one might find a number sequence to differentiate one painting from the next, for the most part the repetition of the title is perennial.

'I have a strong credo that an exhibition must embody real objects,' says curator Matthieu Poirier prefacing a walkthrough of The Brutal Play, in which works from Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris occupy the Fondation CAB in Brussels. 'These objects remind the viewers of their own bodies.'

In 2017, the National Rifle Association in the US broadcast a controversial video advertisement, 'The Clenched Fist of Truth', which warns of liberal America's threat to freedom. In it, a brief scene details Anish Kapoor's 2004 steel doughnut-like sculpture Cloud Gate at Chicago's Millennium Park. Now the artist has released an open letter in which...

Last year, the National Rifle Association released its now infamous 'The Clenched Fist of Truth' video in which a brief clip of Anish Kapoor's sculpture 'Cloud Gate' appeared as a stand-in for Chicago and the city's most famous recent resident, Barack Obama. As NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch chanted in a hypnotically angry voice, 'they use their...

In 1989, British author JG Ballard published The Enormous Space, a short story about Gerald Ballantyne, a man who withdraws from the world and fortifies himself in his abode, not due to agoraphobia but to 'experiment' with reducing his immediate environment to nothing but his house, committing what is in effect a slow suicide. OCAT Shenzhen's...

Minouk Lim's first solo exhibition in New York introduces the South Korean artist's equally haunting and inquisitive practice with three bodies of work intertwined into a eulogy on loss and the consequential search for the missing. The Hole-In-Chest Nation (2014), Running on Empty (2014), and The Possibility of the Half (2012) occupy separate,...

Not having a story to tell from the beginning or possibly starting from the middle is how Taoism describes time: continuity without a starting point. Stories abbreviate and expand in "intensiveness," a term Haegue Yang uses, in dialogue with Jimmie Durham, to describe a mode that, similarly to belief, can exist beyond linear narrative...

Kim Yong-Ik is known as the artist who sought to define his own trajectory beyond the two movements that dominated South Korean artistic thought throughout the 1980s—Dansaekhwa ('monochrome' painting) and the opposing, populist Minjung misul ('people's art'). Kim was also an activist who protested Park Chung-Hee's dictatorship in the 1960s...

The first ever museum show celebrating queer Asian art opened this weekend at the state-run Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. Spectrosynthesis: Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now (until 5 November) presents 51 works by 22 artists and is organised by the Taiwanese curator Sean Hu and backed by the Hong Kong collector Patrick Sun's Sunpride Foundation....

Seoul-born, Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang has been announced as the winner of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst (Society for Modern Art) at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. She is the second Asian artist to be bestowed the prize, following Huang Yong Ping in 2016. Since 1994, the award has been presented to...

Last spring, in central London, the Science Museum exhibited a face that no one could see. This was not a prank, or some form of psychological concept writ large, but an actual face, a bust around 20cm high and 8cm wide that didn't much look like a face, because it didn't much look like anything at all. Sitting in a glass box, in a space that sat...

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...

When the Guggenheim Bilbao first opened its doors on 19 October 1997, it presented an ambitious 300-piece survey of 20th-century art. One such work was Bill Viola's The Messenger (1996), a looped video installation in which a naked man slowly materialises from a vat of electric blue water. Upon surfacing, he takes a breath, only to descend again...

A major Bill Viola retrospective opening today (30 June) at the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao marks the US video artist's 'special connection' to the museum, says its director Juan Ignacio Vidarte. He describes the show, which runs until 9 November, as a highlight of the year-long programme of exhibitions and events honouring the 20th anniversary of the...

Though at present the concept of 'media' is almost wholly equated with communication technologies, throughout the modern period this notion extended beyond the technological field, to include aesthetic and spiritual registers. In the late nineteenth century, a medium was someone with the alleged ability to act as a psychic conduit or transmitter,...

A paradox: In an age when privacy has dwindled, public space seems to be atrophying too. Your phone tracks your every move, your most intimate data are logged for eternity, and yet increasingly, the civic squares in which you snap your selfie—and which define urban life—are not precisely public after all. In New York, more than 500...

Video art and the Renaissance don't normally go hand in hand, but in Bill Viola's work they are inseparable. Born in 1951, Viola is part of a generation of artists who grew up with television, although he was one of the first to make videos without dabbling in other art forms beforehand. His highly symbolic, spiritual, and elaborately orchestrated...

Currently on view at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is Bill Viola's Electronic Renaissance. The exhibition includes work from throughout Viola's career, interacting with the unique architecture of Palazzo Strassi as well as several masterpieces from the Renaissance.

Bill Viola (b. 1951, United States) is internationally recognised as one of the leading artists of our time, an acknowledged pioneer in the medium of video art. For over 40 years he has been making work that explores a series of humanistic and spiritual issues. His works include room-size video installations, sound environments, electronic music...