Beijing Before the Olympis: Business As Usual?
By Angie Baecker and Graham Webster
In early May, Guo Xiaoyan, the newly appointed chief curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), posed against a towering hibiscus-purple wall inside the recently established institution’s industrial-chic factory space. Behind her, young men perched atop ladders as they filled out the floral patterns on the wall, using stencils churned out by a dozen art students chatting quietly below them. Guo explained that the wall is one of several ambitious... [more]

Mona Hatoum: Domestic Insecurities
By HG Masters
Newspapers around the world announced escalating violence in Lebanon in the first week of May: “Day 2: Violence Intensifies, Spreads to More Areas.” (The Daily Star, Beirut); “Battle for Beirut” (The Times, London); “Strike Turns Violent, Disrupting Lebanon” (The New York Times). The violent clashes that erupted in Beirut this year were the outbursts of long-standing rivalries, the headline-grabbing manifestations of... [more]

Unity in Diversity: The Formation of Modern Indonesian Art
By Cecilia Levin
When many societies in South and Southeast Asia threw off the tethers of colonial rule shortly after the end of World War II, they found themselves spontaneously transformed into independent modern nations in search of self-identities. Artists in these regions grappled with unfamiliar issues: how to create an innovative visual language and a national art to link their pasts with the present; how to express pictorially the changes they witnessed in... [more]

Makoto Aida: No More War; Save Water; Don't Pollute the Sea
By Andrew Maerkle
The two-hour train from Tokyo station to Makoto Aida’s home in Chiba prefecture requires a succession of carefully timed transfers to increasingly smaller alternate lines, moving from urban density to suburban commuter settlements and through rice fields pockmarked with brutally utilitarian structures made of... [more]