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.

Shanghai is a historic port which first opened up to foreign trade more than 100 years ago. It is therefore fitting that the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM)—a government-affiliated museum inaugurated in the former Royal Asiatic Society building in 2010—recently put up a major solo exhibition of an artist who is not of Chinese origin. “Misdemeanours” is both a survey of Indian artist Bharti Kher’s 15-year solo practice and a series of new site-specific works. The exhibition showcases her highly receptive nature in response to the everyday environment.

Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang has been making his signature gunpowder works for over twenty years. In 2008, he was commissioned to create Footprints in the Sky (2008), a dazzling firework arrangement that traversed the Beijing sky during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.  

In late October, artists, activists, community organizers, politicians, and architects converged in New York City for the  2013 Creative Time Summit. Between panels, conversations, lectures and presentations—bookended with dinners and cocktail receptions—the experience was chaotic, frenetic and, depending one’s ability to process massive amounts of information in a short amount of time, awe-inspiring. Aiming to be a catalyst for collaboration and reflexivity, the Summit facilitated the sharing of ideas and insights and inspired lively debate on issues of capitalism, place-making and belonging—all of which played out with mutual respect and admiration. 

There is nothing frivolous about Juliana Engberg—artistic director of the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire (BoS)—you get what you see. She is likeable, vivacious, entertaining and quick to laugh but is susceptible, she confesses, to “a bit of intellectualism.”  Her background is of Danish ancestry and perhaps this heritage has dictated the biennale’s focus, which this year is strongly influenced by a Nordic and European sensibility. There are 36 artists from Scandinavia and countries such as Lithuania and Poland and several from Northern Europe, France, Germany and Holland, for example.

Satirical Internet cartoonist Pi San illustrates ironic critiques of the Chinese School system in his video animation Kuang Kuang. Fearlessly skirting the country’s Great Firewall, Pi delivers commentary on the absurdities of the modern Chinese society to millions of netizens. In “Blackboard” (2010), Pi asks: What happens to those students who fail to fulfil their national duty?