This past July, as the crowds descended upon Europe for the Grand Tour of Venice, Kassel and Münster, a modest convergence of gallery shows in London and New York heralded Pakistan’s arrival on the international art market. 

Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami continues his bid to galvanize new modes of artistic production with the transplant of Japan’s successful GEISAI arts festival to Miami for December’s PULSE Contemporary Art Fair.

In a breakthrough for the Lebanese art scene, multimedia artist Rabih Mroue’s critically acclaimed play How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke made its national debut on August 30 at Beirut’s Masrah al-Madina Theater in the city’s trendy Hamra district after public outcry following its ban by government censors. 

One thing you can say about the Chinese—they never do things by halves. Only 10 years ago the government vilified avant-garde art as “spiritual pollution.” But recent years have seen an abrupt turn, with contemporary art exhibitions at state-run museums, government-supported biennials in Shanghai and Beijing and official participation at the Venice Biennale in 2003 (cancelled due to SARS). 

A Korean dictator’s Japanese past meets a miners’ union and a modernist visionary at the summit of a legendary mountain in disputed territory.

Inspired by the Chinese Communist Party’s epic cross-country retreat from Nationalist forces in 1934, the Long March Project itself is hard to define.

Tibet, to most people, is a remote society frozen in time with Buddhist temples and high mountains. However, the first gallery exhibition in China outside of Tibet to showcase its contemporary art, “Lhasa – New Art from Tibet,” suggests that the territory is not beyond the realm of rapid modernization and globalization affecting the rest of the country.

Montri Toemsombat is known for performance and gallery installations that take a meditative, questioning look at art and life. Here, in his first effort at conceptual photography, he turns toward graphic social critique.

Marking its 10th anniversary, New York’s South Asian Women’s Creative Collective organized “Sultana’s Dream” on the heels of such major exhibitions as the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Global Feminisms” and the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art’s “WACK.” “Sultana’s Dream” featured over 30 female artists from South, Central and West Asia, and was dominated by new-media works, all of which were collaborations among multiple artists. 

Raqib Shaw created a sensation with his first suite of paintings loosely based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th-century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delight. However, unlike the Flemish master, Shaw celebrated the pursuit of pleasure without boundaries, painting underwater paradises with hybrid creatures in erotic play.