Guo Juan
slant October 07, 2022
Peace and Quiet
WHEN CONFRONTED by a Japanese journalist about the scandal that haunted the previous Aichi Triennale, artistic director Kataoka Mami responded with: "This has been asked too many times," and "Let the [current] exhibition speak for itself." Leaving us "outsiders" stunned, these statements seemed calibrated to banish from our minds that now-distant conflict, when outrage over a sculpture commemorating Korean women enlisted into sexual slavery by the Japanese military forced the closure an entire section of the exhibition (ironically titled "After Freedom of Expression?"), let alone the myriad
Zhang Hui
It seemed surprisingly pertinent to think of Pokémon Go, the popular mobile game app, when standing in front of Zhang Hui's large new painting Overgrown (Happy New Year), 2016, which looks like a postcard landscape with a handwritten New Year's greeting on the upper left—an impression the artist undermines by adding a floating yet very tangible blue line at the top, casting a shadow that clearly indicates a three-dimensional space. One branch that sticks out from the greenish background scenery is painted dark green, while two other similarly shaped green forms are imposed across the canvas
picks November 24, 2015
Liu Chuang
Liu Chuang's recent interest in object-oriented ontology is illustrated best by What Is a Screen?, 2015. Dominating the Magician Space entrance, the work is a more than six-foot-wide square void in a wall filled with iron window bars fashioned into patterns found on medieval textiles and metalwork. Both the space and the iron bars are illuminated, casting shadows on a billowing, faintly printed cloth. Along with the video work BBR1 (No.1 of Blossom Bud Restrainer, No. 2), 2015—which features content culled from the Internet, such as viral footage captured by mobile phones—What Is a Screen?
picks May 10, 2015
Zhu Yu
Though Beijing-based artist Zhu Yu is known for his extremely controversial performance pieces involving human remains in the early 2000s, his retrospective second solo show, "Separation" at Long March Space, focuses on his canvases from over the past ten years.
The chronological layout of the paintings draws viewers into an encounter with the artist's entire career and provokes them to consider possible trajectories, perhaps involving both accident and intent, that led from his early performance and conceptual works to today's clean, delicate, and quiet images. If we believe the artist's claim