CHRIS MOORE ON MADEIN AT SHANGHART, SHANGHAI
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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)". 
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CHRIS MOORE'S HIGHLIGHTS FROM SHCONTEMPORARY 09, SHANGHAI
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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 war. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON SALLY SMART AT OV GALLERY, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF ON CURRENT GALLERY HIGHLIGHTS IN BEIJING
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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.
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CHRIS MOORE ON OBSESSIVE ART IN SHANGHAI
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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 explore this turf a little further.
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CHRIS MOORE ON XU ZHEN AT JAMES COHAN, SHANGHAI
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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.
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CHRIS MOORE ON WANG TIANDE AT CONTRASTS GALLERY, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON THE YVES SAINT-LAURENT AUCTION AND THE LONG SHADOW OF THE OPIUM WARS
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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 this week with news that Cai Mingchao, a collector who submitted the winning bid of 31.4 million euros for the two bronzes, has no intention of paying up, and in a poll carried out by Le Figaro over 80% of its readers believe the bronzes should be returned to China. So how, you might ask, could the sale of two bronze sculptures cause such upset in China? Chris Moore, based in Shanghai, explains.
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STACEY DUFF ON DAVID RONG'S VISION FASHION HOTEL
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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 art installation with references to Twombly, Warhol and Lichtenstein, among others. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON LI HUI AT BUND 18 CREATIVE CENTRE, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF PICKS HIS TOP 5 SHOWS IN BEIJING IN 2008
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON INVOLVED AT SHANGHART, SHANGHAI
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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 director treads the earth of mere mortals? This exhibition, curated by Phillip Pirotte, director of the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, gives us a chance to find out.
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CHRISTIAN DIOR AND CHINESE ARTISTS, UCCA, BEIJING
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An ambitious new exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art features specially commissioned works by more than 20 Chinese artists, including Lu Hao (below), Li Songsong, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Du, Zhang Huan, and Liu Wei, inspired by works from the House of Dior. The aim of the exhibition is to create 'a dialogue between two continents and two different means of expression, contemporary art and fashion.'
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STACEY DUFF ON SONG KUN AT BOERS-LI GALLERY, BEIJING
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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. 
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'OUKA LEELE: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS', BEIJING
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The bright-coloured work of Ouka Leele is one of the remaining icons of Spanish new wave cultural movement La Movida, which began in Madrid during the 1980s with the arrival of democracy. Nearly thirty years later, a new retrospective of her work opens this week in Beijing.
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CHRIS MOORE ON YANG ZHICHAO AT EASTLINK GALLERY, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE'S TOP SHOWS IN SHANGHAI THIS MONTH
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON SHANGHAI ART WEEK
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF'S TOP FIVE SHOWS IN BEIJING
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON QIU ZHIJIE AT SHANGHAI ZENDAI MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
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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 to replace those crushed by visitors. One thinks of the tomb in Xian of the first Qin dynasty emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, and his 8000 terracotta warriors, and of the huge numbers of miners who die in China's coal mines every year. The feeling is one of vertigo, consternation, and contemplation. But also, and this is probably unintended, fun. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON MINING NATURE AT JAMES COHAN GALLERY, SHANGAHI
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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 the patio doors, through which can be glimpsed a vast seascape photograph by Wim Wenders. The arrival of James Cohan Gallery has quietly and nonchalantly changed the Shanghai art scene. 
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AN INTERVIEW WITH SHENG QI BY WILLIAM CORWIN
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A shipment of bronze astronauts has just arrived at Sheng Qi's hangar-like studio. There are ten half-scale and four life-size sculptures. They don't stick out all that much, surrounded by giant paintings of Lhasa, protesters, execution squads, busts of Mao, a drum set (hallmark of artistic coolness), and, at the center of the room, a low table with a miniature Tian'amen Gate surrounded by toy-like tanks, one or two of them overturned. Each bears Sheng's trademark four fingers - he cut off his little finger in 1989 in solidarity with the protesters massacred in Tian'anmen Square. 
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ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST'S BEIJING DIARY
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A long wall painted with officially sanctioned graffiti glides by as you approach Beijing's 798 Art District - 'No. 4. IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING' one section crows. In English. The largest of several Art Zones to have budded in the city over the last few years, 798 is gated, and security was hovering in the form of twenty-somethings in short-sleeved white shirts. This is China and now with the Olympics the world's hugest nation is on tippy-toed alert. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON IF YOU'RE HAPPY CLAP YOUR HANDS AT ANDREW JAMES ART, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON UP-TO-DATE AT AROUND SPACE, SHANGHAI
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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). 
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CHRIS MOORE ON SHANGHAI'S NEW ART CENTRES
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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'. 
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CHRIS MOORE ON ZHANG DING AT SHANGART, SHANGHAI
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF ON CARLOS GARAICOA AT GALLERIA CONTINUA, BEIJING
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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 understand reality. He does this with games such as Chinese checkers and pool, altering them slightly and placing them in a fresh context. The effect is that we've just overheard someone tell a good joke, only to realize afterwards, that there are several punch-lines, not just one, and we were willing participants all along. 
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ZHANG XIAOGANG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN
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Zhang Xiaogang no longer has to worry about being pressured into accommodating the market - he has a clause written into his contract with art dealers precluding any discussion of subject matter and style. He is very grounded for an artist who's work sells at auction for seven figures. He chain smokes like most Chinese men, dresses casual chic - sporting a Polo baseball cap. His work is everywhere; it hangs in the entrance hall of the Asia Society in Manhattan and his paintings are the only ones deemed worthy of a protective rope at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing. he talks here about the early influences on his work and what life is like now that he has reached Art Stardom. 
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LI GANG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN
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"For me, Ming Dynasty furniture is abstract art," Li Gang. Li Gang, who is having a solo exhibition this month at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, and will be featured in "P.O.P. Beijing/New York: Works on Paper" at the Pickled Art Centre in May, discusses the difficulties of making abstract art in China. 
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AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURENS TAN BY WILL CORWIN
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"This young generation in China has the greatest opportunities in the world right now," says Laurens Tan, a digital media artist and sculptor based in Beijing. Tan's appearance and demeanor are deceptively sleek, as is his artwork. Dressed in black, with spiky white hair and Corbusier glasses, he has the look of the classic aesthete. His recent creations - variations on the theme of the three-wheeled vehicle, or Sanlunche, that can be seen on almost any street in China - are for the most part on a toy scale. For Tan, the Sanlunche, whether in the form of a bicycle, motorized rickshaw, or minivan, is emblematic of the clever, scrappy and indigenous solutions to the congested life of Chinese streets, disappearing as quickly as those streets themselves. "The opposite of globalization is nostalgia," he quips. 
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XIAO XIONG IN CONVERSATION WITH WILL CORWIN
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Sunday March 15th, a sunny afternoon in Beijing's art district, 798. Excavation for a sewage system is currently underway in the neigborhood's dirt roads, so everywhere is piled high with clods of earth and mounds of dirt. Laborers stand around armed with shovels, chain-smoking and bemusedly eyeing sunglassed art tourists decked out in Prada, Fendi and the ubiquitous Beijing dust coat. Xiao Xiong, the creator of the innocently titled "Bumped Into Installation, 2008", currently on view, is available for an interview in 15 minutes. "You can't even see my piece!" he jokes on the phone. 
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STACEY DUFF ON NEW VISTA AT WHITE SPACE, BEIJING
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF REPORTS ON THE CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART AWARDS
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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 2008 (film still below). Juror Hou Hanru called the decision only a 'small heart-attack.' 
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MATTHEW COLLINGS VISITS WANG QINGSONG'S STUDIO IN BEIJING
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In the second excerpt from his new book, This Is Civilisation, Matthew Collings (below) visits the Chinese artist Wang Qingsong at his Beijing studio: 'The TV crew and I walked a couple of hundred yards into the space towards bright lights and the sound of shouting. We saw hills, tanks, jeeps, artillery and barbed wire. Real horses arrived and clip clopped up to the hills. Rifles, model bombs and grenades lay around. The mock hills ran for several more hundred yards and were about seventy-five yards deep. There were trenches, craters and abandoned vehicles, plus rickety wooden fences with burned tin cans tied to them with wire.' 
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LAST CHANCE: REFRESH - EMERGING CHINESE ARTISTS, ARARIO, BEIJING
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This exhibition of young emerging Chinese artists comes with a word of warning about the hype currently surrounding the contemporary Chinese art market: 'Should we decide to consider contemporary art with a historical determinist attitude, and feel gleeful about it, then we may make mistakes unknowingly, because the development of all things does not necessarily follow our willful expectations. The fierce prosperity of the contemporary Chinese art market seems to have elevated the expectations of those who care about it, especially artists, who have actually benefited from these recent developments.' 
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STACEY DUFF'S BAKER'S DOZEN: BEIJING IN JANUARY 2008
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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. 
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NEWS: STACEY DUFF ON THE ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BEIJING
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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.
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STACEY DUFF ON THE SHOWS NOT TO MISS IN BEIJING THIS MONTH
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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). 
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A RUNAWAY ZERO: EMERGING ARTISTS FROM TAIWAN
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For just one week 'A Runaway Zero: Taiwan Emerging Artists' will present work by 9 of the most promising and exciting artists from Taiwan. One to watch is Hsieh Mu Chi who was born in 1981 and is currently studying on the MFA programme at the Taipei National University of the Arts. 
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SH CONTEMPORARY, SHANGHAI
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The first international contemporary art fair in Asia opens on 7 September in Shanghai. SH Contemporary will present the best 50 Chinese and Asian contemporary art galleries, 50 top galleries from Europe and the US, 15 solo artist stands and a curated showcase of the most promising new talent from China and Asia. 
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REJECTED COLLECTION AT THE KE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, SHANGHAI
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Taking as its starting point the Salon des Refuses, the 1863 exhibition of works rejected by the Salon de Paris, this show gets us to think about the selection criteria for exhibitions. What determines which works are selected for biennales, museum shows, or exhibitions curated by artists? Are there are set of factors - institutional policies, curatorial structures, preconceived notions about an artist's work - which pre-determine what we, the public, actually see? 
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STACEY DUFF ON YOU SI AT ART LABOR, SHANGHAI
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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 brimming with organic swirls and blots. 
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STACEY DUFF ON LEI BENBEN AND LI BO AT ART NOW GALLERY, SHANGHAI
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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 human sexuality joins us together and tears us apart. 
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STACEY DUFF ON ZHANG O AT PEKIN FINE ARTS, BEIJING
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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 installation in which to display the work. 
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STACEY DUFF'S ROUND-UP OF SHOWS IN BEIJING
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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. 
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STACEY DUFF ON JIA AILI AT PLATFORM CHINA, BEIJING
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'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 Chinese artist, Jia Aili. 
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