The Next Step Forward: Lin Yan

Lin Yan comes from an illustrious Chinese art family. Her grandfather, Pang Xunqin, studied painting in Paris from 1925 through 1930 and developed something of a Western outlook; when he returned to Shanghai in 1931, he established the Storm Society, the first influential modern avant-garde group in China.

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St. Louis: Sculptural Gateway to the West

Imagine a proposed and completed public artwork recording the locations of 94 fire and flood disasters in Queensland, Australia; then imagine the unveiling of the work, as the artist reveals that the list doesn’t document natural disasters at all, but a series of 19th-century atrocities against indigenous peoples.

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Baroque Paradoxes: A Conversation with Albert Paley

Albert Paley’s monumental forms offer a metaphorical resolution to a dilemma first posed by the Industrial Revolution, when it disempowered the human (and human labor) by elevating machines. Today, that revolution has, of course, gone further, morphing into an electronic juggernaut with even greater capacity to dehumanize by reducing us to mere dots in cyberspace.

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