randian | 燃点

Dissecting the piece as a whole, I found no link between these images, which constituted an anything-goes pile-up of various symbols: Tantric Buddhism, Taoism, body politics, the larger narrative of human civilization, reincarnation, redemption, self-examination, revelation, purgatory, Hieronymus Bosch’s “Ship of Fools” and “The Seven Deadly Sins”. . . >> Read more

In an age in which he feels artists have become exceedingly demo­cratic, Luc Tuymans adheres closely to the method he has honed over time—mercifully without, he says, a moment of “painter’s block.” >> Read more

A first for modern times, our historical narratives are moving out of tragedy and into comedy, and like it or not, this will be a major turning point. >> Read more

Recently, I came across a conver­sation between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht (in the former’s book Understanding Brecht, first published in 1966)... >> Read more

The ocean space borrows its designation as a non-space from the fact that it is by law a no-man’s-land: the sea belongs to everyone and to no one. >> Read more

For a world that we cannot perceive, what does it matter whether it exists or not? Perhaps you can further demonstrate that, though an autonomous world is imperceptible, it can still think for us. Yet in this sense, such a world becomes one stipulated by human thought, and ultimately cannot escape the fundamental relationship between thinking and being. >> Read more

What can we make of topography or “writing a place” as a way to think about “locality” and site? >> Read more

I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities —Ovid, Metamorphoses >> Read more

These are truths, affirmations, stated or not, that are felt but not proved. >> Read more

Zian Chen interviews the curators of the 11th Shanghai Biennial. >> Read more