A toothless garbageman who once wandered Hong Kong’s streets with dingy bags of ink and brushes tied to his crutches is now the subject of a major retrospective. About 300 calligraphic works by the late Tsang Tsou-choi — who is best known by his self-dubbed title, the King of Kowloon — are showing at the ArtisTree art space in a high glass tower.
This is a series of paintings reflecting the struggle and sacrifices made by the Tibetan people for independence. The author is Tenzing Rigdol, who is a Tibetan and influenced a lot by the Dalai Lama and traditional Tibetan culture. The paintings are full of Tibetan cultural elements. For instance, the characters created in the paintings are Tibetan monks, who are the typical representatives of their culture.
In 2009, the dissident artist created a work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. He recalls how the project, Remembering, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever
This is an edited extract from The Start podcast
One of the oldest forms of human expression is art, so it’s no surprise that art is constantly used to critique another of humanity’s oldest practices, violence and war. In the world of art activism, the power of creativity and innovation has been used to create commentary about war since the beginning of time. Art that speaks out against the atrocities of violent conflict embodies empathy, care, and a plethora of other human emotions.
A minibus is parked on the side of the road with a series of pipelines wrapped around it. One end of the pipeline is connected to the exhaust port of the minibus, and the other end is put into the car, so that the exhaust gas can be directly introduced into the car, forming a " Street gas chamber".
As the cold air bit our faces, and we hid deeper into our layer of sweaters, my family and I continued to wander around Manhattan, seeking a place which would provide warmth and food. And there it was, dimly lit: the Michelin-starred ramen restaurant, Tonchin. We ordered the highly-sought after ramen bowl, Tonkotsu, and awaited our meal. Out of the kitchen, the steam arose from a bowl of a warm, salty pork broth.
n Saturday, thousands of women in red, black, and white gathered together in Seoul for what many consider the largest women-led protest ever in South Korean history.
Shu Yong is an artist who has been passionate about environmental protection in recent years. "The Earth Is Bleeding" was created in 1998. The creation was carried out in a studio of more than ten square meters.
The action art performance themed "War on smog, we are taking action" was held by some environmental activists and volunteers on the commercial center and famous tourist spot Yangren Jie (Foreigners’ Street) in Nanan district, Chongqing municipality in Southwest China on Friday, Febuary 28.
McDonald’s wanted children in Hong Kong to spend more time with their imagination after a study showed that children spend an average of 5 hours studying per day.
In its new ‘I’m Amazing’ campaign, the fast food chain challenges these children to draw and create their ideal McDonald’s environment.
A group of South Korean activists is determined to send copies of The Interview across the North Korean border, despite threats from the state to respond with “cannons or missiles” if the plan succeeds.
On October 16, 1964, the artist collective Hi Red Center, clad in sanitation masks and white uniforms and wielding small brooms and toothbrushes, spent several hours meticulously cleaning the streets of the Tokyo district of Ginza, amid the hustle and bustle of a “normal” day.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) by Ai Weiwei is a highly provocative work of art. This series of three black and white photographs portray the artist holding a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn that, frame by frame, he drops, it falls, and shatters. As much a work of photography as a work of performance art, in each still an unaffected Ai looks directly at the camera aware of his destructiveness.
Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year fairs draw thousands of visitors who stroll past stalls of potted narcissus, snack on fish balls and snap up the latest plush toys. In recent years, the largest of the fairs, at Victoria Park, has also become a prime site for political expression.
A few dozen women, wearing white masks, held up signs protesting against pornographic deepfakes. On the afternoon of Friday, August 30, several South Korean feminist collectives demonstrated in Seoul to fight these sex crimes that are flooding the country.
During the public vacation of May Day, also called International Workers’ Day, “For People, Food is the First Necessity: Qiu Zhijie’s Writing in a Market” was launched at the crowded Sanyuanli market in Beijing.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou is a Chinese singer whose accented, croaky voice is hardly ever in tune. But for his fans he's the voice of a generation — one of the very few voices who dare to speak out. After a collaboration, Cowboy Junkies member Michael Timmins called him "China's Leonard Cohen."
Earlier this year Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei recorded a gangnam style video, dancing handcuffed, sending a message to the Chinese authorities who responded by banning the video as soon as it came online. British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor
By a pond inside one of the entrances to Beijing’s Chaoyang Park lies a cluster of one and two storey red pyramid-shaped buildings. Sculptures of Gandhi and Lincoln and other famous figures sit in the quiet woods nearby. This is Yuan Xikun’s Jin Tai Art Museum.
In this black-and-white image, there are no strands of hair or remnants of makeup to be found, except a shaved head belonging to a South Korean. Jeon photographed this image in 2019 for her exhibition that aimed to "destroy the socially defined idea of a woman” (Kuhn 1). The visuals in this image is a brazen response to the conventional beauty standards that has been gripping South Korean women.
Song Dong's Waste Not consisted of a single installation comprising over 10,000 commonplace, domestic items of daily life that had been used and amassed by the artist’s mother (Zhao Xiangyuan) over fifty years.
Exhibition visitors have expressed feelings of uneasiness or even pain and nostalgia when seeing Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei1. The 51 vases that make up the artwork are originally treasures from the Neolithic Age (5000–3000 BCE) and the artist has dunked them in common industrial paint.
Why did Ai Weiwei do it?
Song Byeok is one of the most acclaimed Korean artists living today. He is from North Korea, where he was a propaganda artist for the North Korean government for two decades. After defecting in 2002, Byeok has turned his prolific creativity into powerful, satirical art using North Korea’s ruling culture as motifs.
Beijing-based artist Liu Yi is working on a series of black-and-white portraits he knows will never be shown in a Chinese gallery. His varied subjects — men and women, young and old, smiling and pensive — have one thing in common: They are Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest repressive Chinese rule.
Megumi Igarashi—who goes by the name Rokudenashiko, or "good-for-nothing" in Japanese—is known as a "vagina artist" in her native Japan. Among the pieces she's created are a vagina chandelier, a remote-controlled vagina car, and a 3-D-printed kayak modeled after her vulva, which she actually rowed in 2014 "as a metaphorical image of life springing from it," she told Glamour through a translator.