“Anida, nice bugs don’t bite but dream.” Lee Wen scribbled these words inside my copy of his monograph Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real when I first met him in 2015. 

There was once a time in the (art) world, not so long ago, when geographical distance still mattered, and when countries, people and cultures still appeared “foreign.” 

One late, rainy afternoon in March, I traveled to the far end of Berlin’s Tempelhof district to visit the artist Song-Ming Ang in his studio. 

Styrofoam boxes, nylon bags and recycled rubber are not just the materials of Shirley Tse’s sculptures; they are the subjects too. 

At the heart of Wang Xu’s solo exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum, a monumental female figure standing more than seven feet tall carries an urn on her left shoulder.