艺术界 LEAP : 27 INTRO…’In this issue’s cover feature we see artists in rural Beijing in the mid-1990s employing queerness as means to further marginalize themselves, and with others in the past couple years, to stand out among their peers and predecessors. Yet given the paucity of queer art and artists here at home, we also look beyond these borders: Douglas Crimp walks us through the queer heyday of 1970s New York, Travis Jeppesen peers into the queer gaze of experimental film elsewhere in Asia, and Cosmin Costinas and Chantal Wong elucidate issues of sexuality in Hong Kong and their roots in race and urbanization. Finally, we examine queer art on the Mainland, only to discover that sometimes, appearances deceive. Bisecting these four articles are a peppering of artworks from Jaanus Samma, Wu Tsang, Wang Taocheng, and Trevor Yeung…
Filling out the middle section of the magazine are two features on rising young artists Qiu Xiaofei and He Xiangyu. What we see in the practice of Qiu is both a reverence for and avoidance of the past that in the present find a rational reconciliation by way of the artist’s granting greater autonomy to the canvas. He Xiangyu, meanwhile, distances himself from his previously “big” art, returning to inner reality and bringing painting, sensation, and the body together on the same plane.
In the top section of the magazine, we recount the Art Basel Hong Kong Salon “The Gift of Tongues,” wherein LEAP deputy editor-in-chief Einar Engström set out together with curators Pauline J. Yao and Anthony Yung to delineate the intersections of art and language as seen, and heard, in the practices of Chow Chun Fai and Xu Tan…’
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