The leering white faces watch from the walls. They follow you from room to room, vacant eyes staring out from behind their grotesque masks. Though the lower part of their jaws are missing—unhinged—their slit-like eyes and upturned mouths indicate that the figures are consumed with mirth. We see the same white mask over and over, but from various angles: on its side, in three-quarter profile,[.....]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[.....]

This, and then. It’s the title of Matt Phillips’ latest exhibition and a useful shorthand for the mental quick march a viewer undergoes when observing his work. Through his abstract oil and acrylic paintings, Phillips plays with color, form, and volume—the building blocks of our artistic experience—to create dynamic, shifting spatial relationships. His canvases evoke, simultaneously, the calm beauty of the natural world, the randomness[.....]

Through his refreshing lack of self-seriousness or sanctimony, Ragnar Kjartansson has cut a jagged, joyful figure on the contemporary art scene. Indeed, with solo exhibitions in Boston and New York, the artist has recently been favored with the art world’s fickle attentions and is having something of a well-deserved moment. Ragnar Kjartansson, “The End–Venice,” 2009. Performance view. Venice, June 2009. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring[.....]

Windows of Opportunity (2013), Jiten Thukral’s and Sumir Tagra’s (branded as Thukral & Tagra) latest show at Art Plural gallery, gives expression to the cacophonous spectacle of hybridity that defines contemporary India, a site that they deem to be a hotbed of conflicted histories and global transactions. These issues of societal flux are explored in their oeuvre through an eclectic visual language composed of cartoonish[.....]

In early 2011, when I visited a number of young Hong Kong artists’ in their studios, they spoke of their frustration at the focus of curators on art from mainland China, and of their sense of being a ‘poor relation’. Add to that the tensions simmering just below the surface as cashed–up mainlanders poured into Hong Kong, and it seemed a recipe for resentment. In[.....]

Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[.....]