The New York Times | Adel Abdessemed: Tackling Themes of Everyday Cruelty and Extremism

“Diptyque” is characteristic of the work of Mr. Abdessemed, a French-Algerian artist whose art often blends beauty and brutality, and who recently opened an exhibition inside the 17th-century chateau in southern France that once housed the museum. The show was designed by Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker prize-winning architect.

A MEETING WITH ADEL ABDESSEMED

As an artist, I am a witness to my time. For me, the inevitable intimate aspect of our experience is always faced with the barrage of everyday events, the barrage of the world or of images, these intensely aggressive things that we receive every day.

“One Second • One Year”: Chinese artist Zhao Zhao’s depictions of time

Chinese contemporary artist Zhao Zhao’s “One Second” series of drawings and paintings seek to establish a dialogue about depictions of time. Art Radar takes a look at Zhao Zhao’s recent exhibition at H Queen’s in Hong Kong, curated by Barbara Pollack, Professor at New York’s School of Visual Art, for Tang Contemporary.In 2015, Ai Weiwei wrote the following statement about Chinese-born, multidisciplinary artist Zhao Zhao: Today, Zhao Zhao is in a good state of mind. He still goes out looking for trouble where there is none. He still gets bored… Zhao Zhao has attitude, and this attitude of his, neither too hot nor too cold, is going to take him far...

NATURAL SHAPES AND VIOLENT FORCES IN ZHAO ZHAO’S “CONTROL”

Artist Zhao Zhao maps fissures in the fabric of consciousness and society in a new show at Roberts Projects Los Angeles.

True to the gospel of minimalism, the simplicity of presentation obscures the complexity of process, tradition and all manner of existential questions in the work of Zhao Zhao. Step back from these large-scale, finely detailed works; crook your head if need be and then zoom all the way in. In the spareness of that moment, you will find the connections...

MELCO LAUNCHES ART MACAO CONTRIBUTION AT MORPHEUS

Melco Resorts & Entertainment opened its Art Macao contribution yesterday at its Morpheus hotel. The opening ceremony was held on the 23rd floor of the hotel tower; a floor normally reserved for diners at its Chinese restaurant, but now open to the public for the five consecutive months of the Art Macao festival.

Melco is contributing 11 art pieces for this festival, with one now being displayed at the Macao Museum of Art. The other 10 pieces are on show at City of Dreams...

Picturing Ai Weiwei in Istanbul

ISTANBUL — In an era where superstar Chinese artist Ai Weiwei feels ubiquitous, this past summer I experienced the full extent of that reality over the course of two months. After attending a New York preview for his new film about migrants, Human Flow (2017), I traveled to Israel to visit a major exhibition of his work at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem, then a show of his porcelain works at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul. Shortly after that, I returned to New York City, right around the time his major public art project, Fences, opened. And these weren’t the only exhibitions by Ai being mounted around the world...

The Struggles of Installing Large-Scale Artworks in China

With the opening of H Queen’s in Hong Kong, the region has seen an influx of famed international galleries, but what’s really driven the development of the art market in the city is the presence of Asia’s largest art fair, Art Basel Hong Kong.This year, Encounters curator Alexie Glass-Kantor has put together works by a diverse range of artists and influences, including South Korean sculptor Lee Bul, Japanese installation artist Chiharu Shiota, Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset and Chinese artist Zhao Zhao. This sample set of four artists is wildly different, with Shiota’s yarn-based installations standing in stark contrast to Zhao’s floor work, which pays homage to dead cats on the streets of Beijing.

Cui Cancan | Zhao Zhao: Hong Kong Solo Exhibition

Between 2013 and 2016, Zhao Zhao collected a number of colonial-era safes from Tianjin and Shanghai. He was intensely interested in their production. Why were they needed? What caused such insecurity? Zhao Zhao recreated these safes in solid marble of similar size and scale. He had stripped the safes of their functionality, retaining only their solemn and dignified appearance. In a similar approach, he reconstructed a cheap, disposable lighter as a work of ornamental jade, spending a tremendous amount of time and resources in order to detach the spirit from the object, thus elevating it to a new dimension beyond its practical, basic purpose. From that point on, everything it represented entered into a new realm...