Published in Chen Zhen: The Body as Landscape, ed.Ilse Lafer Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2007 I first met Chen Zhen in 1995. I was living in Paris and teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts. While there I was introduced to a number of Chinese artists and curators who had immigrated to France. They included the artists Yang […]

Published in Canadian Art 23, no. 4 (winter 2006) Several years ago, in Dakar, Senegal, on the occasion of Dak’Art, the largest art biennial in West Africa, I was on Gorée Island, a short ferry ride from Dakar, a place developed during the seventeenth century as an administrative post for the embarkation of slaves destined for […]

Published in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), ed. Steven Henry Madoff, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009 Dear Steven, I’ve been struggling with the essay for the art education book. I just can’t seem to get a proper handle on what I want to say. Much of this has to do with a kind of doubt […]

Published in Intruders: Reflections on Art and the Ethnological Museum, eds. Gerard Drosterij, Toine Ooms, and Ken Vos Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders; with the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, 2005 The train departs Linz for Vienna in fifty-four minutes and I am hungry. The only true restaurant in the Linz railway station is rather shabby-looking, a quality […]

Published in Punctum: Reflections on Photography Salzburg: Salzburger Kunstverein, 2009 I took the picture of the Roland Barthes boutique in Beijing in 2009. At the time, I was astounded by my discovery, which gripped me with hilarity. But I can now see that I should not have been so surprised. Over the years, I have taken […]

Published in Canadian Art 22, no. 3 (fall 2005) Monday, 21 February 2005 The seventh Sharjah International Biennial opens in a little less than two months. Every morning, more emails arrive in my Sharjah inbox. I have numerous must-dos each and every day, including hounding artists to send in their statements for the catalogue and/or passport information […]

Published in theartsection: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary www.theartsection.com 2009 Twelve years ago I visited an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris titled Face à l’Histoire (Confronting History). The exhibition brought together art objects and archival documents that dealt with French history between the years 1933 and 1996. Themes focused on the French […]

Published in Sharjah Biennial 7: Belonging, ed. Kamal Boullata Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2005 In recent years, it has become de rigueur for major art exhibitions that survey large swaths of global art developments to draw parallels between the nomad as a figure of creative resistance and the cultural figure of the artist. The disseminations of […]

Published in Prix de Rome 2003: Sculpture, Art and Public Space Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2003 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau drew a distinction between “space” and “place,” according the meaning of “practiced place”—that is, shaped by historical subjects who constantly redefine its use—to the first term, and according a configuration of discursive stability—that […]

Published in Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2006 A slab of concrete sidewalk patched up with a dollop of unevenly applied asphalt. Flat-topped metal newspaper boxes that double as platforms for Starbucks coffee cups or 7-Eleven drink containers, until they are, inevitably, lost to the wind. The urban landscape is full […]

Published in Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945, eds. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum, and Zheng Shengtian Museum Villa, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004 In preparing for Shanghai Modern, the curators—Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Zheng Shengtian, and I—paid several visits to the West Lake (Xi Hu) city of Hangzhou, ninety minutes by train west of Shanghai. One of six capital cities […]

Located on a hilltop just outside of Vicenza, an Italian town designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sits the Villa Rotonda designed by the sixteenth century architect Andrea Palladio. On a recent visit to the site I was struck by how the building and its location cater to a particular type of vision. The […]