NOV 7–MAR 21, 2021 QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE Gordon Bennett’s upbringing was “strictly Euro-Australian,” in his words. It wasn’t until his teens that he learned of his Aboriginal heritage. This discovery had a tremendou

In her 2009 Frieze article “The Big Issue,” critic Carol Yinghua Lu decried the trend toward large-scale spectacle in contemporary Chinese art driven by market forces that favored “visual extravaganzas” over criticality. Over a decade on, Lu’s concer

Embracing performance as a spontaneous, organic form of expression, Tong Wenmin utilizes her own body to explore her relationship with her surroundings. In Lawn (2018), Tong, wrapped in a long coat stitched from green turf, silently lies face down on

“More, More, More” was a garden of sensory delights. Works in this thematic exhibition drip, stain, aromatize, sprout, and glow throughout the spacious galleries of TANK Shanghai. Curated by Passing Fancy (X Zhu-Nowell and Frederick Nowell) with Elis

Our blue planet has made more than 18,450 full rotations since the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, in major cities and on university campuses across the United States. Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, who was inspire

Duality is a dialectic often claimed by contemporary artists to characterize a broad spectrum of works that assert a coexistence of discrete sensibilities. While such sensibilities may occasionally operate in harmony, they more often compete for domi

Born in Yogyakarta in 1976, Irene Agrivina experienced firsthand the seismic social and political shifts that unfolded across Indonesia following the end of Suharto’s 31-year autocratic rule in 1998. Among the Reformasi period’s most significant chan

Wheezing: strained breaths signaling a deficiency of air; the desperate noise one makes after running up a flight of stairs too quickly, or getting punched in the diaphragm. Mark Chung took this word as the title of his debut solo exhibition, at de S

Every ritual tells a story of how we relate to the world. It connects us to a sense of order, structuring our days, imparting fortune, marking our place in society. Australian photographer Tamara Dean remembers devising rituals using stones and feath

“We are all prisoners here,” is the thought I had each time I went to visit the exhibition drafted by Xue Tan, “My Body Holds Its Shape,” over the course of its four-month run. The pair of live performers clad in gray sweatsuits in Eisa Jocson’s Zoo

Recognizing our interdependence with our environments and earth’s diverse organisms is becoming increasingly critical as the planet’s ice caps melt at rates beyond scientists’ expectations, wildfires ravage lands from California to Siberia, and droug

The upcycling of agricultural waste into building components, water treatment technologies, household goods, and other items is a growing sector of sustainable material research. A proponent of this field of innovation is Mae-ling Lokko, an architect

Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, a prominent communist revolutionary executed by the French colonial government in 1933, is a national hero in Vietnam, where many streets and schools bear her name. Yet, despite Minh Khai’s recognition, her identity exists only

The first Kurt Vonnegut book that I ever read was his memoir, A Man Without a Country (2005)—incidentally, the last title that he had promised to write and publish. It was 2006, and my father had picked up a copy from an airport. After reading only a

Grotesque histories of political domination and beautiful moments of intersubjective connection—for Thu Van Tran, these are both instances of contamination: a phenomenon where disparate agents come into contact, and a process that has fundamentally i

The 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art unfolded as a process rather than as a single event, prefaced by three programs of readings, workshops, and performances that launched last year at the ExRotaprint complex. Curated by Maria Berrios, Renat

I first met Siah Armajani in 2008 when I became director of the Walker Art Center. I was struck by the quiet, soft-spoken qualities of the humble citizen-artist, whose towering legacy had shaped my sensibilities as a young curator more than a decade

The history of the 21st century will be written on water. When sea levels are certainly on the rise, the sea becomes our new desert. – MAP Office, 2009 Our collective future lies in the ocean, and with the ocean. Deep in that future there is history—

In 1995, sound recordist Umashankar Manthravadi was invited by Thomas Ault, professor of theater at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, to prove a hypothesis surrounding India’s Rani Gumpha caves: that as well as being a Jain monastery dating to circ

During the office of the socialist mayor Manuela Carmena (2015–19), the names of 52 streets in Madrid were changed. The original street names used before the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) were recuperated, or else the names of women scholars or pedag

The farmers of India have been toiling on the front lines of climate change and crony capitalism for decades. In Prabhakar Pachpute’s home state of Maharashtra, in western India, more than 32,000 farmers committed suicide between 2001 and 2019, as re

A hunk of an object—green, glossy, and grainy—opened “Becoming Alluvium,” Thao Nguyen Phan’s show at Chisenhale Gallery in London. The six-sectioned lacquer screen, Perpetual Brightness (2019–20), has a surface dense with swirls of deep mineral pigme

On September 24, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara won the inaugural NZD 25,000 (USD 16,340) My Art Visual Arts Award, granted by New Zealand’s Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi. Painter Vincent Namatjira became the first Aboriginal artist to receive th

Historically, Vietnam’s Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) region was coveted for its rich basalt soil, which allowed French colonizers to establish profitable rubber tree plantations. Even after Vietnam’s 1975 independence and its economic reform in 198

Born and raised in Okinawa near an American military base (ZIP code 96375: the show’s title), Kaz Oshiro once came across a poster of a Ralph Goings photorealist painting of a ketchup bottle and salt and pepper shakers at an American-style restaurant

Artist-architect Siah Armajani (1939–2020), known for championing democracy through his sculptures and installations, died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27. That same day, Mono-ha artist Noriyuki Haraguchi (1946–2020) passed away from an

Inspired by French philosopher Felix Guattari’s book The Three Ecologies (1989), Su Yu Hsin’s three-part video Mori (2020) investigates how nature, communities, and individuals mutually influence each other. The first chapter, “Shou (to protect),” fo