There are sure to be both prurient reactions and voyeuristic interest when details of Chinese artist Yang Zhichao’s Love Story become public in 2016. Originally a collection of punch cards, it has grown over the years, and now takes the form of a diary, with individual pages embellished with drawings. 

The young British artist James Richards, known for his atmospheric collages of grainy analogue video, recently made headlines as one of the four shortlisted nominees for the prestigious Turner Prize, an annual award presented by the Tate gallery in London. Just a few days after the announcement, Richards was in China to attend the opening of his first exhibition in the country, “Of Disturbance,” at Magician Space in Beijing’s 798 art district. His visit to China also included a series of screenings and symposia, co-organized by Magician Space and London-based arts organization Electra, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, as well as at OCAT Xi’an, OCAT Shenzhen and the Asia Society in Hong Kong. ArtAsiaPacific caught up with Richards to chat about his work, his experiences in China and his thoughts on the 2014 Turner Prize.

Curator James Elaine has been seeking out emerging artists for over 25 years—first on behalf of the Drawing Center in New York and then for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he implemented the highly respected Hammer Projects series, focusing on emerging international and local talent.

South Asia is described by many in the art world as being “the next big thing.” With more and more artists and museums popping up, increased attention has been focusing on the rapidly emerging Asian art scene. 

Back in 2006, the government of Shanghai ambitiously declared their mission to build 100 new museums by decade’s end. Now, nearly ten years since, it has unsurprisingly not reached this lofty goal; yet the city has nonetheless seen a significant museum boom in recent years, thanks mainly to the proliferation of private institutions. In less than a decade, Shanghai has averaged a new museum per year, with even more to come. 

Untitled Selection is a bi-weekly post of photography from ArtAsiaPacific’s areas of coverage. Created by photo editor, Ann Woo.

Shanghai-based MadeIn Company is the brainchild of Chinese artist Xu Zhen, who in 2009, subsumed himself into what is ostensibly a strictly commercial company that produces and sells Art. Established as a saucy rejoinder to all things “Made in China,” MadeIn is also a rebuke to the prepackaged mechanics of the contemporary Chinese art market. Its works are ambitious and conceptually provoking—including performance, sculpture, video, photography, internet art and painting, as well as research and curation.

The third edition of Frieze New York, which returns to its gigantic white tent on Randall’s Island Park from May 9 through May 12, features a remarkable 18 exhibitors from Asia, including a smart mix of established and emerging galleries from Japan, Korea, China, India, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey.

Cigarettes, incense and ash are rather uncommon materials in the context of traditional Chinese painting. Yet, since the early 1990s, Shanghai-based artist Wang Tiande has experimented with ink painting, transgressing assumptions of tradition to recontexualize the genre with a contemporary visual vocabulary. 

In early September 2013, the local government attempted to demolish artist Yuan Gong’s eponymous studio compound in Shanghai’s Changning District. One hundred black-shirted men, protected by a phalanx of police, arrived unannounced at dawn and quickly razed the upper floors and balconies to a pile of smashed concrete, shards of glass and twisted metal before Yuan and friends managed to stop them amid much pushing and shoving.

Contemporary Chinese art was the undisputed belle of the ball at this year’s Armory Show. The largest art fair in New York hosted 205 galleries from around the world, including 17 from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. The Armory’s “Focus” section, now in its fifth year, highlighted three decades of contemporary Chinese art, under the discerning eye of curator Philip Tinari, the Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Clustered along the corridor connecting the modern section of the fair to the contemporary one, fairgoers could not transition between the two periods without encountering the many facets of the Chinese art scene—which, as Tinari emphasized, is making its own inroads too often overlooked by Western audiences. The following are some of the fair’s highlights from ArtAsiaPacific.