The reception of Chinese contemporary art abroad is not unlike that of Chinese food in most foreign countries. It is exotic, tasty, inexpensive, an increasingly fashionable. When exported, the inexhaustible diversity of Chinese food dwindles down to certain foolproof items likes sweet and sour pork, chicken nuggets with chestnuts, fried rice, and to the more […]

Jae Rhim Lee tells me I will spot her among the other artists at the prayingproject performance festival at Exit Art because she will be "the one in the white onesie." (won-sy: the all-in-one outfit that babies wear). Furniture for meditation Sady Sullivan Jae Rhim Lee, performance with Furniture Set, "prayingproject," Exit Art, 2005. Jae […]

The practice that Alexis Zelda Stevens cultivated during her residency at ArtSway, a contemporary gallery deep in England’s New Forest, is precarious and precocious; and it might have begun with a pink-painted tree branch or a dinky green ladder. The St.Ives New School Max Andrews Alexis Zelda Stevens, Untitled, 2005. Courtesy of ArtSway. The practice […]

Judith Schaechter, a 2005 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, inaugurates the new location of the Claire Oliver gallery with an intrepid exhibition of stained glass works. Following her four-museum touring exhibition, "Extra Virgin," Schaechter’s "Seeing is Believing" provides a glimpse into the artist’s exquisitely paradoxical world. Consisting of her signature lightboxes, a remarkable large glass […]

A man naked from the waist up sits on the stage of the silent auditorium, his face in his hands. When he finally moves, it is to vigorously rub his hands against his face. The sound of flesh tormenting flesh slowly crescendos, and as the man’s eyes follow his hands as if they were strange […]

Re-presenting performance, a symposium that took place at the Guggenheim in New York in April 2004, was organized by the "grandmother of performance art," Marina Abramovic, to discuss what could be a painful and productive episode in the development of performance art: the idea of re-performance. (Re)Performance at the Guggenheim Rodrigo Tisi Joseph Beuys, How […]

White," the title of the new series of paintings by Kehinde Wiley, is bound to catch the attention of the 27-year-old artist’s legion of fans. With this single, supercharged word, the painter insinuates that he has turned away from they’ve come to expect of him in his brief but immensely successful career: monumental portraits of […]

Always a connoisseur of forbidden ventures, my ears perked up upon hearing that Marina Abramovic plans to masturbate at the Guggenheim Museum this fall. Marina Abramovic Plays With Herself: Re-Performing Others, Engaging the Audience Theresa Smalec Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972. Photodocumentation: black and white photographs and text in 4 panels: 3 Photo/text panels: 10 1/2 […]

Pain and anguish find their way into the playful abstractions of D. Dominick Lombardi. Pulling from the vast history of newsprint caricatures and the iconography of tattoos,�Lombardi presents an array of�abstract, moody forms. Dominick Lombardi: "The Post Apocalyptic Tattoo" Jill Conner D. Dominick Lombardi, Twister (Bust), 2002. Mixed-media wall sculpture, 29x14x6in. Pain and anguish find […]

The odd title, "Fish Thoughts," comes from Patrick Corillon’s analogy of the behavior of human thoughts to that of fish breaking the surface of the water and disappearing again. It signals the off-beat Romanticism in his work, which affectionately and only partly ironically imputes mystery and profundity to the most ordinary things. ‘Fish Thoughts’ Patrick […]