MANILA, Philippines — As is so often said about Chongqing, you’ve never heard of it, but with 30 million people and rising, it’s one of the largest municipalities in the world (for perspective, all of New York state has some 20 million people). Located in the heart of southwest China, a former city in Sichuan Province but now independent, Chongqing also hosts the country’s largest graffiti street, and perhaps the world’s.
After having been released on bail in June, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei received a notice today from Chinese authorities that indicates he owes $2.3 million (15 million yuan) for “tax evasion.”
MÉRIDA, MEXICO — Over the past two years planet art has born witness to a drastic metamorphosis. The mental apparition of “Asian Art,” inhabiting its blanket concept, was once as innocuous as Casper the friendly ghost. Westerners were at leisure to muse and amuse themselves with its mysteries and exoticisms, with the fleeting attentions of a visitor into another lord’s cabinet of curiosities.
Today our imaginations and anticipations have fed it to megalithic proportions. And the economic boom of contemporary art in the 21st Century continues to relentlessly close the gap between the world’s cultures of expression, to the point where the bedsheets of West and East have begun to rub up against one another — sometimes roughly. There is even talk of the voracious appetite of the Yellow Peril of Asian Art, positioning its markets and state-ordained “cultural industries” to consume planet art altogether.
The Arsenale and its Corderie (Rope Walk) compose the remainder of the curatorial effort of the Biennale’s director. It is the sprawling nasty sibling of the Padiglione Centrale, and is somewhat of a chore to tackle. The entire layout of the Arsenale this year feels disjointed. On a whole, I felt like there was a dearth of strong work. I believe Curiger had aspirations to move beyond the trends of participatory art and ostentatious work seen everywhere else in Venice and other art fairs.
“…Chinese press…reported that that a painting, ‘Put Down Your Whip’ by Xu Beihong…which sold last year at auction in Beijing for 14 million dollars, is claimed to have been painted by an art student in the 1980s.Ten former students signed an open letter…stating that the painting had been ‘a class exercise from one of us.’” [Telegraph]
PROVIDENCE, RI — Cai Guo-Qiang’s Move Along, Nothing to See Here opened last Friday at the Cohen Gallery at Brown University in Rhode Island. The inaugural event for Brown’s “Year of China,” the exhibit includes work common to Cai’s oeuvre. The main sculptural work of the show, “Moving Along Nothing to See Here” (2006), has a title comprised of a phrase hear commonly used by policemen at a crime scene. It consists of two life-sized crocodiles, supported by wooden stills, their jaws wide open and writhing in pain.
I’m not really sure what to think of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s new post on the Daily Beast. It feels like the work of a frustrated artist who is coming to terms with the notion of exile.
BEIJING — I arrived at Dongfeng Art District one afternoon, a 20-minute drive east of the more famous 798 and Caochangdi arts districts in northeast Beijing. It’s a short but somewhat winding drive away from the shinier parts of Chaoyang District, Beijing’s most economically-developed area. “Dongfeng” means ”East Wind,” and the area hosts a number of arts studios and makeshift galleries.…
Just a few days after I wrote posts on the state of cosplay in China and the street art-like responses to the Wenzhou train collision on Sina Weibo, I found this image circulating around Weibo. What’s striking about it is how quickly it leapt from the online world into the offline world. I’m used to to thinking of Internet memes, political or not, as restricted to online space.
The Chinese Xinhua news agency points out the hypocrisy of the UK PM lecturing the world about web freedom and then talking about curbing his own.
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