Author Archives: jolanta

The Taliban gutted Afghanistan of its museums, monuments, artists, and dissidents. Under their rule (1996-2001) visual arts, music, television, photographs of people, and magazines were deemed illegal. Peshawar, Pakistan, a historical trading post right over the border from Afghanistan, became a center for refugees?Human Rights watch reported that by 2001 more than 2 million Afghans […]

"We’ll see a forest of chimneys from here" Mao Zedong, Beijing 1949 Fifty years ago the Chinese city was set to become an orderly grid of danwei–of small worker units packed about the bases of glorious factories. This low, even dispersion of workers would guard against potentially corrupting bourgeois downtowns. The skyline was to be […]

Tan Dun?s exhibition Visual Music at the Shanghai Gallery of Art is a sprawling, clamoring multi-media installation that defies categorization. Tan Dun is skilled at evading labels, but most people know him as one of the most successful contemporary Chinese composers. Raised in a rural town in the Hunan province and condemned to working in […]

The world?s most renowned architects are flocking to China, where they are building the world?s biggest skyscrapers, hotels, and futuristic model towns. Following the 1990s building boom, Chinese cities are again in a state of architectural foment. Government officials and developers are tearing down plodding Communist bunkers and rethinking the cookie-cutter chrome and glass towers […]

Pauline Doutreluingne: You first began with documentaries, and later in 1994 you founded the Living Dance Studio together. How did this story began? Wu Wenguang: You can think that film and dance are two media that are really far from each other, but they aren’t. Dance is like theatre: it’s about a space with different […]

"Design is what exists I inside a person?s mind. We can design anything: everybody can design," says Ou Ning, one of the four curators of the exhibition "Get It Louder," the first design exhibition of its kind to be organised in China. Held in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, Get It Louder (GIL) is curated by […]

Contemporary artists trained in traditional Chinese painting still follow principles established during the 6th century. But with the opening of China to Western influences, Chinese artists are absoring Western ideas and practices into their traditional schooling, just as Chinese art has influenced Western artists for at least the last 150 years. Painting revealing character Mary […]

William Kentridge’s Learning To Play The Flute is a strange, busy and imposing collection of images. At first glance it appears more cipher than teaching tool; an abstract documentation of the process of learning. The Magic Flute (and learning to play it) The Theatre Royale de Monnaie, Brussels Arhan Virdi William Kentridge, Learning To Play […]

In 2004, when Romania inaugurated its first-ever National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu?s nightmarish Peoples Palace, Dumitru Gorzo contributed a large painting depicting the palace on fire while two thugs knife a peasant ?a tableau based on a folkloric legend of the Carpathian mountains. Three Breasts and Multiple Tongues Valery Oisteanu Dumitru Gorzo, The […]

San Diego’s 25-year old Community Art Space Project, dubbed "Sushi," is a nomadic but essential voice in the San Diego art community. "Pencil on Glass" at Voz Alta Project Gallery Richard Frankin Joe Winter?s television screens and radio equipment translate visitors? movements through the Voz Alta Project Gallery into TV snow and sound distortion. San […]