randian | 燃点

“Has the decision to host the Olympics not yet been made? Why is it that we dare not do such a thing?” —Deng Xiaoping, 1990 >> Read more

"River of Fundament", an operatic, five-hour-long film created by Matthew Barney in 2014, was presented in Asia for the first time last September; it is known in translation as Chongsheng zhi He— literally “River of Rebirth­ ­—which is believed to be the film's subject. >> Read more

Lecture 1: Turing Testing: Distinguishing Man from Machine Speakers: Korean Art Collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun and Dr. Anna Greenspan, moderated by Rebecca Catching Saturday, April 1, 2017, 2-3:30 OCAT Shanghai 30 Wen’an Lu, Jing’an District, Shanghai In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing developed a test to determine if computers were able to exhibit intelligent behavior. A […] >> Read more

In their project “Stone” Korean artists Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun examine this persistent human interest in “self-improvement” through technological prostheses—applying this theory of “perception extension” to something as inert as a volcanic rock. >> Read more

Dressed in casual clothing, Katsuki Nogami’s Namada Taro citizens move and act like humans; >> Read more

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