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'Seeing one's own eyes' is the inaugural exhibition of MadeIn, a new company devoted to creating art and led by Xu Zhen, a leading Chinese conceptual artist.(1) The exhibition is subtitled 'Middle Eastern Contemporary Art Exhibition' (Mec[c]a) and the title itself is drawn from the Koran: "My way, and that of my followers, is to call you to God, on evidence as clear as seeing with one's own eyes. (Sura 12, Verse 108)". ... read more...

For one week a year, Shanghai feasts on art. Curators, gallerists, writers, promoters, collectors, and even artists swarm around umpteen exhibition openings, launches, events, talks and cocktail parties. And in the middle of all this activity is the ShContemporary art fair in the wonderfully daft 1950s Stalinist "Shanghai Exhibition Centre", which actually in Chinese is the "China Russia friendship hall," which clearly didn't work because by the early 1970s the two were on the brink of nuclear w... read more...

Since 2004 the Exquisite Pirate has been raiding coasts around the world. Each incursion colonizes the exhibition space or, this time, shanghais it, by means of a giant cartographic grid. Art in the age of electronic reproduction loves a louche skull and crossbones.

The winner of the July Saatchi Online Studio competition is Justine Shanti, chosen by Saatchi Online's China correspondent, Chris Moore. We will announce the winner of August's Saatchi Online Studio competition on Friday 28 August. The Saatchi Gallery will then donate £500 to a children's hospital around the world chosen by the winner. ... read more...

The winner of the June Saatchi Online Studio competition is Patricia J, from Oaklyn, New Jersey. Saatchi Online contributor, Bill Roberts, comments: "Patricia J.'s neatly-composed abstract images possess a
very satisfying formal economy, and in their oscillation between the geometric and biomorphic, they manage to convey a range of associations, from the claustrophobic spaces of 3D video game worlds,
to ominous microscopic medical diagrams." The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's ... read more...

If you want a whirlwind education about where international art is at, whether the good, the bad, the ugly, the surpising, the shocking, the new, the old, the repulsive and the seductive, then there is really nothing to compare with Basel in early June. Here is my Top 10. In no way is it definitive but then arguing about who should or shouldn't be included is half the fun. All I will say though is that Volta was easily the best of ArtBasel's sister-shows and that ArtUnlimited, as usual, gave th... read more...

Obsession in art is a many-hackneyed thing, blithely presenting middle-class angst as an overheating nuclear core. There are exceptions. Some obsessive art is theatrical, a medium for other ends, often commenting on political or sexual mores. Other times it is really obsessive, like Yayoi Kusama's art, pulling us into a transcendental and beautiful absurdity. And with yet others again it is seductively fun, winning us over with its child-like charm.Three shows currently on in Shanghai let us exp... read more...

A lavish banquet of contemporary Chinese art, including a survey of the last 30 years of Chinese art and retrospectives of Zhang Xiaogang and Australian-Chinese artist, William Yang, is currently on show at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, the sister gallery of the Queensland Art Gallery, famous for its Asia Pacific Triennial which has an astoundingly good record of picking future world stars - Cai Guo Qiang, Zhang Xiao Gang, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing were all picked up by the APT relatively... read more...

Xu Zhen's palace constructed out of 3,000 playing cards is a grand obsession. It took a team of the artist's assistants ten days and nights to build it and we will have to see whether, as hoped, it has broken the Guinness Book of Records - another deliciously absurd gesture by Xu Zhen, whose tries to get to the essence of things, using a meld of minimalism, performance and conceptualism to do it, with a dollop of humour to make the medicine go down.
... read more...

The focus of this subtle and seductive exhibition is the human and artistic relationship to transformation. Divided into four parts and using mountains and ink as Leitmotifs, Wang Tiande meditates on permanence and efflorescence, tradition and modernity. Emerging from the doorway, a mountain of coal confronts you. And the hilarious finale involves a giant 'stockmarket' LED display, tracking the 'values' of various famous Chinese contemporary artists. ... read more...

Last month over three days Christies in Paris auctioned the Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé collection, one of the largest and most important sales of the last 100 years. The collection fetched a staggering total of €374,392,500, beating all records for private collections sold at auction. The sale has been tarnished, however, by controversy surrounding two bronze sculptures, the heads of a rat and a rabbit, which were looted from the Beijing Summer Palace in 1860. The controversy continues t... read more...

Shanghai has saved its most stunning show of 2008 until last. Li Hui's 'Samsara' is extraordinary and if you have the chance to see it, you must. It transforms the Buddhist concept of reincarnation into a parable of technology's transfiguration over humanity - how it does it and how we want it.

Folkert de Jong's 'Thousand Years Business as Usual' is a great exhibition that rewards endless curiosity. But avoid the explanatory notes which appear to have been written in gibberish.

Sometimes a curator is like a cowboy herding cattle through tumbleweed plains and rocky gulches, constantly under attack from displaced Iriquois and mean Gene Hackmans. Other times its all Prada Meinhof, aloof and dust-free. In recent years the many types of curators have grown like pimples on a teenage trainspotter. It started off in big museums and, like iPods, soon everyone wanted one. But not all iPods play cool tunes and not all curators are visionaries. So what happens when a museum direct... read more...

Yang Zhichao's exhibition at Eastlink Gallery this year, curated by his friend and mentor Ai Wei Wei, recalls Eastlink's infamous Fuck Off exhibition held in 2000. That exhibition was closed down after three days; it was radical, visceral, categorically disruptive art. The new exhibition pertains to the space of the individual within the space of the state. Sometimes bloody, sometimes funny, it was also profoundly disrupting - and disrupting assumptions is at the heart of radical art. ... read more...

Chris Moore reports on some of the most interesting exhibitions in Shanghai including a mini-Biennale of Chinese artists at Shanghai MoCa, a mini retrospective for Song Dong, and small abstract/figurative paintings by Enrico Freitag.

The week that the world's financial markets went plop, I spent in an art-induced haze, all because of the enormous, vast, gigantic Shanghai Art Week which takes in 1 Biennale, 2 international art fairs, and over 70 museum and gallery openings.

The winner of the August Your Studio competition is Moti Sagron. Chris Moore, Saatchi Online Magazine China correspondent, comments: 'Moti Sagron, from Tel Aviv, plays with our expectations of space and his series of works created on Your Studio are also very attractive.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a hospital of his choice. The critic and Saatchi Online magazine contributor Anthony Haden-Guest will judge the September Your Studio competition; the winner will b... read more...

Qiu Zhijie's outstanding latest exhibition is all about the place in Chinese culture of the Nanjing Bridge, which was the first bridge to be built entirely by the Chinese (it was completed in 1968). Inside the exhibition, with shoe covers on, you stand minute within a towering tomb-like excavation. As you venture inside you walk upon charcoal casts of hundreds of dead crows while a few taxidermic versions watch on. A couple of people in the middle of the room are hard at work making more casts ... read more...

The plain trees hum with cicadas. Down a laneway old women natter, a paper collector on his tricycle rolls, pinging a pot lid. The iron gateway is unimposing but the name promises much: James Cohan Gallery - the first New York gallery of note to open in China, beating by a few weeks the much heralded Pace Wildenstein opening in Beijing. Step through and you find yourself in a lush garden gazing at a still opulent but faded Art Deco villa. The Cultural Revolution slogan is clearly visible above t... read more...

The winner of the July Your Studio competition is Larissa Evanova. Ana Finel Honigman, Saatchi Online Magazine regular correspondent, comments: 'The Venus de Willendorf solidified Pre-historic passion for fleshy, fertile and well-fed women in stone, but Dijon-based Larissa's plump, pretty and pink Venuses are more seductively rendered in soft pastel pixels. These luscious-looking ladies might not have fashionable frames, but Larissa convincingly depicts the primordial power of their rich contour... read more...

This group exhibition of Japanese artists born after 1980 asks whether material wealth and a consumer culture can ultimately satisfy. When these artists were born Japan was undergoing a development boom, a course China is currently embarking upon. But the show is much more than a cautionary tale about glitter and gold. The six artists are also products of what they analyse and criticise, products which acknowledge the ambiguity and absurdity of their existential crisis. ... read more...

AroundSpace, a gallery in a former opium dealer's villa in Shanghai, is celebrating its first anniversary with a group show of work by 15 artists, including Maleonn's imperial poetry photographs, Xu Xiao Guo's gutsy paintings, Liang BinBin's increasingly popular birdcage-bears and Cao Yuan Ming's Christian-China churches (below).

With increasing wealth, Chinese contemporary art has developed an aversion to risk, production often following the gallery Siren call. Art becomes stagnant, lost in a time-loop, with many well-known artists producing endless copies of the works with which they became famous. As new galleries and artist co-operatives open in different areas of Shanghai, Chris Moore argues that perhaps it is time Chinese art galleries learned a new word - risikofreudlich, which is German for 'joy in risk taking'. ... read more...

Shen Shaomin, famous for simulacra skeletons of monstrous animals, has recently demonstrated a commanding facility with other media. In two exhibitions in Hong Kong and Shanghai we see him branching out into bonsai, model-building and film. His rigorous and provocative thinking continues unabated.

Mixing installation and video-art, Zhang Ding (born 1980) is quickly emerging as one of the most provocative and intriguing of China's new generation of artists. He came to wide attention with his show last year at ShangART gallery in Shanghai, which played on the theme of fragility and violence, using cactuses as his leitmotif. Now his film, 'Great Era' (2007), recently shown at Art Basel, can be seen again at the entrance to the gallery. ... read more...