Ge Yulu’s artistic practice playfully pulls at the strings of a social system that, although seemingly all-encompassing, is in fact a malleable structure consisting of individual human beings. For his 2016 project Eye Contact, Ge positioned himself in front of a surveillance camera and stared directly into the lens for hours, then negotiated with a security guard to buy the footage.
It can be important to reflect on the artistic recounts of activists experiences under state imprisonment. In a revealing interview with Artspace, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei reflects on his 81-day secret detention in 2011 and the psychological strategies used to dismantle identity and autonomy.
At a gallery within a shopping complex in the South Korean capital, a couple saw paint cans and brushes at their reach and use next to what was actually a finished portrait worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thinking the available paint and brushes was a signal to be a part of the art, they ended up technically vandalizing the artists' work.
Women around the world fed up with long lines for the ladies’ restroom have a new folk hero: a Beijing college student leading her own version of an “occupy” movement in southern China.
On May 12, 2008, a massive earthquake in China’s Sichuan province killed approximately 90,000 people. Ai Weiwei created this serpentine sculpture, made of backpacks, to commemorate the more than 5,000 school children who were killed when their shoddily constructed schools collapsed.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.
It may have been a while since you’ve set foot in an internet cafe, but a pop-up one on the Lower East Side offering free tea on top of free wifi is well worth a visit for a lesson in online freedoms.
Liao Guohe’s solo exhibition ----“Satisfaction Guaranteed”, the first-time all-round summary of his paintings in last 10 years, is held from November 14, 2014 to March 14, 2015 at Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China.
The Hong Kong 1 July protests are a surprising sight on the often chaotic stress. This day marks the transfer of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China (PRC) and is a public holiday it was originally thought to be a day of celebration. However, now it is mostly known for hundreds of thousands of people flooding the streets who protest for democracy, universal suffrage, and other political concerns.
In November 2013, a group of 17 female students at Beijing Foreign Studies University sparked national debate when they staged a bold social media campaign in support of an upcoming performance of The Vagina Monologues, a feminist play by Eve Ensler.
Grangeon's long-running traveling exhibit, Pandas on Tour, features 1600 papier-mâché pandas. That's approximately one for as many as there are left in the world (recent estimates actually place the number slightly below that, at 1596).
Sima Qian: China's 'grand historian' By Carrie Gracie BBC News, Beijing
Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price.
Rectification of names
"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything."
Confucius
Fang Si-Qi’s First Love Paradise, a 2017 novel by Taiwanese writer Lin Yi-han, has become one of the most haunting and politically charged literary works in the Chinese-speaking world. Although presented as fiction, the novel closely mirrors Lin’s own lived experience of being groomed and sexually abused by a private tutor during her adolescence.
The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have a new mascot: a roughly 12-foot-high figure of wood blocks holding a bright yellow umbrella in its outstretched right hand. The students call it Umbrella Man.
Umbrellas emerged as a symbol of the demonstrations after dozens of students wielded them on the night of Sept. 28 to fend off pepper spray as they jostled with the police.
From October to December 2020, Chinese university students nationwide launched a viral movement to install “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in women’s restrooms—free, wall-mounted containers stocked with disposable pads on a take-one, replace-one basis. Nearly 250 campuses joined within weeks. Some sustained their boxes for over a year, while others saw them vanish after bureaucratic pushback, logistical hurdles, or dwindling volunteer resources.
In a private Tokyo dinner party artist Mao Sugiyama served his genitals to five of the events guests. Several months prior to the event he chose to have his genitals surgically removed. He released invitations to the event on social media, 70 paid attendees were present for the event.
Self-identifed as asexual, Sugiyama stated that he intended to raise awareness for "sexual minorities, x-gender, asexual people."
Photo taken on Oct. 15, 2020 shows a "comfort women" statue in Berlin, capital of Germany. The statue was built to commemorate the more than 200,000 girls and women from 14 countries and regions, so-called "comfort women," who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)
The White Paper Movement was a large-scale, decentralized protest movement that erupted across China in late November 2022, initially sparked by a student demonstration at the Communication University of China, Nanjing.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
Xiao Lu was one of the most influential women in contemporary Chinese art, better known for provoking performance art works and sharp social commentaries. Her works address sensitive social and cultural issues that counter mainstream attitudes and values. In 1989, she put her work "Dialogue" up for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
Born in China in 1941, artist Lily Yeh experienced first-hand the ravages of that country’s civil war when her family became refugees, fleeing to Taiwan as the communists took over. That personal story and the story of Yeh’s global art activism with communities from North Philadelphia to Rwanda and China is the subject of a new documentary film, The Barefoot Artist, now in post-production and ready for viewing later this year.
On the small island of Teshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, Multibasket – No One Wins invites visitors to reconsider competition, collaboration, and the intersection of art and play.
The Xuzhou chained woman incident, also known as the Xuzhou eight-child mother incident, is a case of human trafficking, false imprisonment, sexual assault, severe mistreatment, and subsequent events that came to light in late January 2022 in Xuzhou's Feng County, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China.