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Stacey Duff explores new shows by Gu Dexin, rumoured to be the last show of his career, Navin Rawanchaikul and a group show of 24 up-and-coming Chinese photographers, who all competed for the first Three Shadows photography award.

Shenzhen is Southern China's rhinestone capital of opportunity, an immigrant town where styles are constantly getting mixed up and fused - and in that sense David Rong's new hotel captures the personality of an entire town. The Vision Fashion hotel is perfect for Shenzhen and it wouldn't stick out in Las Vegas either. It's gaudy enough - though for gambling, you'll have to ferry over to Macau. But like Shenzhen itself, the hotel's contradictions merge into a consistently chaotic whole, a livable... read more...

Our China correspondent looks back over the most memorable shows in Beijing in 2008, including the Huang Yong Ping retrospective (below) at the Ullens Center, solo shows by Li Zhanyang and Yin Xiuzhen, and Cai Guo Qiang's contribution to the Beijing Olympics.

In her latest work Song Kun puts her past on show in a coded language, as peering through ice at an inner landscape. This landscape, being personal and shielded, resembles an underwater - albeit well-ordered - arctic cave where the materials of contemporary urban life are diluted with prehistoric beasts, sea creatures, tree branches, distant lovers, close friends and all their pretty amulets. ... read more...

Stacey Duff reports on the shows chosen to coincide with the Olympic Games in Beijing, including a retrospective by Cai Guo-Qiang whose spectacular fireworks project for the opening ceremony - 'Footprints in History' - has been exposed as having relied on digital graphics.

The Spanish title of Carlos Garaicoa's show in Beijing, ¿Revolución or Rizoma?, calls to mind revolutions - both Cuba and China have had their share - as well as the concept of the rhizome as explored in the 1976 text, 'Rhizome', by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The show, in spite of its complex foundation in economic and political theories, is not oversaturated with abstractions, but takes on a personal feel. Garaicoa uses philosophy to deconstruct and better unders... read more...

Shows that mix traditional and contemporary elements are about as refreshing as Beijing smog. But there's something different at play in 'New Vista', an exhibition in which fifteen artists reevaluate the place of classical Chinese aesthetics in contemporary China.

A six-panel jury, and collector Uli Sigg, has announced the winners of the inaugural 2008 Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, or CCAA. Ai Weiwei, just 50, received a Lifetime Contribution award, while Liu Wei, 36, was recognized as the Best Artist of 2008. Both awards came as little surprise to the art world in Beijing, where both Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei are based. The jury also minimized any possible political interpretations of selecting a Taiwanese artist, Tseung Yu-Chin, as Best Young Artist in 2... read more...

Stacey Duff's selection of the top shows to see in Beijing this month, including solo exhibtions by Yin Xiuzhen, Xia Xing, Cui Guotai, Zhang Zhicheng, Du Jie, and debuts in Beijing for the LA-based Clayton Brothers, Paolo Gioli and Miroslav Tichy.

Saatchi Online magazine's China correspondent, Stacey Duff (below), looks back over a year in which China saw the opening of the Ullens Center in Beijing, lots of important shows for established and emerging Chinese artists, and an unprecedented number of solo shows by non-Chinese artists, plus the launch of Saatchi Online in Mandarin with, so far, 10,000 art students in China registered on the site. ... read more...

The doors to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art finally opened this week with a bang. It's the most lavish Beijing opening in recent memory with almost 250 VIPs flown in for the occasion. Whilst a positive reception by the international art world is virtually in the bag, the rockier story here is how the Chinese art world and the Chinese public perceive the Ullens Centre. ... read more...

New solo shows for Yue Minjun, one of China's highest selling artists, the Korean painter Park Seo-Bo, Shanghai-based artist Xue Song and an ambitious effort by Zhong Biao including a four-panel acrylic and charcoal on canvas work measuring 380 x 1200cm (detail below).

Writer Geoff Dyer chooses Stephen Shore's photographs of Andy Warhol and the Factory at Spruth Magers in London; photography curator Susan Bright is intrigued by the oddness of wedding photography at a show at Yossi Milo in New York; critic and artist Barbara Pollock recommends Banks Violette, who has two shows on over the summer in New York, plus the films of Chen Chieh-jen at Asia Society; and our China correspondent Stacey Duff picks a show of two of China's most promising young artists Li Bo... read more...

This small solo exhibition at a relatively new gallery near Shanxi Road South in Shanghai has been a summer surprise, and the talk of the town, so much so that Art Labor is extending its original closing date for the show. You Si's ink-and-wash paintings on rice paper are anything but traditional. For starters, the artist shuns using a brush and distributes the paint with an eyedropper. Alternately using color and black-and-white ink, he forms a series of private abstract landscapes, each one br... read more...

In this show of two of China's most exciting emerging artists, Lei Benben demonstrates a fast eye for quirky connections - shots of nipples, torn jeans and toilet bowls abound. Passion mixes the euphoria of being young with the anxiety that being young is slipping away. Li Bo shares Lei Benben's attention to the self in an urban milieu. But Li Bo's psychological considerations are darker and his urban landscapes grittier. They are about the contradictory ways - both traumatic and ecstatic - that... read more...

The photographs in Zhang O's 'Daddy and I' series depict Western fathers posing in various outdoor locations - mostly public parks but also backyards - with their adopted Chinese daughters. The series here at Pekin Fine Arts' newly inaugurated space in Caochangdi mingles natural affection with shades of latent intimacy. To bring a slice of garden into the gallery, thereby recalling the various outdoor settings where the subjects posed, the artist has also created a small pleasure garden installa... read more...

Among the most exciting shows currently on in Beijing are Hugo Tillman's mapping of the psyche of the Chinese contemporary art world in "Film Stills of the Mind", YOON Jeong-mee's portraits of Korean children surrounded by their toys (below), Liu Wei's 150 sq metre installation "The Outcast" that captures both the political and physical atmosphere of Beijing, and Song Dong's retrospective which articulates the connections between contemporary and classical Chinese art. ... read more...

'The canvases themselves emit a dim uneven glow that wraps you. The most prominent element in the work is a lanky naked boy who trudges through landscapes either thick or barren, wearing what appears to be a gas mask. In the series 'Serbonian Bog,' the masked boy wades at night through a knee-deep swamp full of water lilies and murky water. The canvases are large enough (on the average around 2.5 by 4 meters) to embrace the viewer...' Stacey Duff is entranced by the first solo show of young Chi... read more...

For his current show, Liu Wei has constructed a series of ox-hide sculptures modeled on the world's landmark buildings. Monuments that are supposed to represent the pinnacle of human achievement are reduced to shriveled-up toy buildings fit for a city of mutts - ox-hide is the same material used to make bones for dogs to play with and chew on; and Liu Wei reportedly wanted to unleash a dog or two among his sculptures and let them gnaw and gnarl and lick to their heart's canine content. ... read more...

Stacey Duff previews this month's upcoming exhibitions in Beijing, including Tang Maohong's 'Sunday', a perverse 5-channel video-wonderland of body parts, strange micro-organisms - not to mention snails, slugs and decapitated angels - as well as young Asian girls making sloppy noises whilst sucking their thumbs: Beatrix Potter on speed meets Beavis and Butthead on Viagra. ... read more...