The 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times (11 May–24 November 2019), certainly benefitted from low expectations, given the lacklustre curatorial of the previous edition, when different segments of the show were conceptually framed with titles like 'Pavilion of Joys and Fears' and 'Pavilion of Colours'. Add to this the...

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....

PHOTOFAIRS | Shanghai held its fifth edition between 21 and 23 September 2018. As in previous years, the event was held in the Shanghai Exhibition Center—a neoclassical construction dating from 1955, built in the form of a central hall with two curved wings, topped with an ornate and unmissable 110-metre spire. The building is surprisingly...

The Liverpool Biennial, which opened 14 July and runs to 28 October, is celebrating its tenth edition with a question. The show's title, Beautiful world, where are you?, comes from Friedrich Schiller's poetic work invoking the Greek gods, Die Götter Griechenlands, or The Gods of Greece. Written in 1788, Schiller's text was set to music by Franz...

At the entrance of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Art Brussels (19–22 April 2018), Iván Navarro's Sediments (2017) at Galerie Templon's booth offered an appropriate 'welcome' into the bottomless world of an art fair—a world map rendered in lights that infinitely stretch into a void by way of an illusion created with mirrors. At La...

'We are all lichens'. Famously associated with the thinking of feminist theorist Donna Haraway, this declaration—referring to a fungus that grows from algae and cyanobacteria—provided a compelling key to the 2017 Lofoten International Arts Festival (LIAF), I Taste the Future (1 September–1 October 2017), curated by Heidi Ballet and...

Having embarked on his exploration of conceptual photography in the mid-1970s with Dioramas, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums, Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is today best known for his black and white photographs of silent monochromatic seascapes and movie theatres where, with the exposure set to the duration...

Hot on the heels of the Hong Kong International Arts Festival, Hong Kong this week welcomed the fifth edition of Art Basel. You've flown thousands of miles, endured over eight hours of screaming spawn on a long haul flight, paralysing jetlag, and visual and social overload at the Art Basel preview. And now you want to experience more than Hong...

Haroon Mirza experiments with light, sound, electricity and other natural elements to create otherworldly compositions that manifest as kinetic sculptures encompassing installations, and mutable performances. Though Mirza earned his BFA in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (exch and BA in fine art painting at the...

Over 70 artists from 33 countries are represented in the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale, which opened amidst scandal on 9 September 2016. Not included is a work by Ai Weiwei, who was invited to take part alongside other art stars Yoko Ono and Anish Kapoor before being disinvited just weeks before the opening.In a tweet, Ai connects the...

Trevor Yeung is the first Hong Kong-based artist I met when I arrived to live in the city. Having graduated in 2010 from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, he was working at the non-profit Para Site when we were introduced. I would see him from time to time at art events, but it was some time before I saw his work. When I...

Artist Danh Vō brings together fragments—pieces of his life, and of history—to tell stories. He places these objects and works in exhibition spaces with the restraint of a Zen master, creating layers, pauses, and silences between statements. There is space for phantoms and memories to float between the works, creating a dialogue between...

In Vancouver's Chinatown, an area wedged between the gleaming office towers of the city's affluent West End and the city’s poorest neighbourhood, Downtown Eastside, is a gallery showcasing work from one of the world’s leading private collections.Housed in a restored iteration of Chinatown’s oldest building, the...

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...

At the height of its heady sprint towards modernity in the 1990s, Beijing’s urban landscape transformed rapidly, rendering it almost unrecognisable to the generation before. The horizon was crammed with cranes and skeletons of buildings, either in the process of being built, or being destroyed.  To make way for a new modern landscape,...

With an ultra slick website that enables easy navigation of its 400 plus artworks from many of the leading artists of today, the Tiroche DeLeon Collection is unique in its focus and ownership structure. Established in 2011 by Serge Tiroche and Russ DeLeon, the collection is focused on artworks by both recognised masters, and emerging talent from...

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...

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 into...

My first experience of Koki Tanaka’s work was Everything is Everything (2006), an eight-channel video installation in which Tanaka films himself making abrupt gestures with everyday objects: from throwing a broom to the floor so that it lands with a crack, to the dropping of an object into a bucket of water. There is something incredibly...

Two private museums beside the Huangpu River are celebrating their first birthdays this spring. The Long Museum West Bund, which opened in March 2014, is marking the occasion with a Xu Zhen solo show, while the Yuz Museum, which opened last May, has at last launched its second exhibition. Both shows are milestone moments in the...

Duddell’s, the restaurant and bar which has also become one of Hong Kong’s most important art spaces, recently collaborated with London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to present the exhibition, Duddell’s Presents: ICA Off-Site: Hong Kongese. The exhibition, which opened earlier this year to coincide with Art Basel...

Having been largely left to the weeds for the past five years, the former Shanghai World Expo 2010 site is finally being redeveloped. In the forest of scaffolding and cranes, one of the first finished projects is the China Minsheng Banking Corporation’s second art museum, the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum. The M21, as it’s...

Biennials are inherently messy. Gathering hundreds of pieces by international artists working in different mediums creates an exponential number of echoes and dissonances. Their messiness differs, though, in kind and degree, as exemplified in recent Shanghai Biennales.

ART021 takes its name from the Shanghai dialing code. The numbers serve as a synonym for the city, but only for people calling from within China—from outside the country, you’d call +8621. Still, 021 make more sense for this fair. Founded in 2013 by local PR director Bao Yifeng and former gallery director Kelly Ying, ART021’s...