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What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?

Witness Blanket is a large-scale, three-dimensional work assembled from almost nine hundred objects sourced from First Nations individuals, groups, churches, government buildings, treatment centers...

Since at least the late 1960s, artistic creation has increasingly called upon its audiences to consider the acceptability of certain actions in ways that law cannot. Based on four examples carrying...

Long regarded as paradigmatic in histories of modern art in Asia, abstraction assumed new urgency in the hands of ink painters like Jung Tak-young (1937–2012). During the politically and socially t...

Signaling China’s rise as a major soft power, the global emergence of contemporary Chinese art from the mid-1990s also reflected sea changes in how Chinese citizens internalized concepts of private...

In 1969 the Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, together with sculptor Ed McGowin and critic Douglas Davis, produced Giveaway, an unconventional event involving the free distribution of fifty Gene Davis paintings. This essay argues that Giveaway was a radical avant-garde gesture that questioned concepts traditionally used to indicate artistic and commercial value, including authorship and originality.

Comprised entirely of police surveillance footage initially used to prosecute violators of anti-sodomy laws, William E. Jones’s 2007 film Tearoom embodies the potential value of regarding law itself an artistic medium. The viewing experience it offers contends that when we regard images as artworks, that is, as both a separate, imagined realm and as a specific configuration of materials free of any preordained practical function, we are then most able to grasp law’s dependence on the aesthetic choices of its agents, and in turn, law’s own materiality. Such discernment reflects a more productive relationship between visual art and the law, one founded on symbiosis rather than on decided antagonism or indifference.

In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon directed Film No. 5 (Rape or Chase), a 77-minute-long color film based on Ono's Film No. 5 Rape (or Chase), a set of printed instructions directing readers to chase a girl on a street with a camera. Often known simply as Rape, the film made a compelling case to the law, calling upon its interpreters, practitioners, and enforcers to reconsider the assumptions on which it stands. The film asks how the ethical predicament an artwork generates can sometimes be powerful enough to function as a call for legal intervention into situations yet to be officially recognized by the law. I argue how the experience generated by the film makes concrete ideas that, when expressed in the language of the law, can be unduly abstract despite the law's idealization of semantic clarity. Similar to forms of legal judgment that call jurists to interpret written instructions, Rape entailed translating written procedures into a combination of sound, image, and time. The film subsequently o...

In 1978, Tehching Hsieh began the first of his One Year Performances, in which he subjected himself to conditions of extreme deprivation or banality over the course of a single year. Accompanying each performance were voluntary written pledges to uphold various behavioral restrictions, the language and format of which strongly resembled that commonly used in legally binding contracts. The lengths that Hsieh took to fulfill his obligations recalled the doctrine of good faith, or the legal duty of parties in a contract to deal with each other fairly and honestly. The strong resonance between Hsieh’s performances and the law suggests a model of artistic agency that emphasizes the necessity of holding oneself accountable to higher standards of scrutiny. It also highlights art’s potential as a medium through which to consider what and how the law specifically means.

The symposium for this issue comprises six responses to the video artwork Palais de Justice (2017) by artist Carey Young. The video presents a study of the life of Brussels’ vast, late-nineteenth-century court building. In Palais de Justice, Young presents ‘a legal system seemingly centered on, and perhaps controlled by women’. The respondents are Jeanne Gaakeer, Ruth Herz, Joan Kee, Linda Mulcahy, Jeremy Pilcher and Gary Watt. Jeanne Gaakeer and Ruth Herz have the distinction of being, not only internationally respected scholars, but also experienced judges. Jeanne Gaakeer is a judge practicing in the Netherlands and Ruth Herz was formerly a judge in Germany. The six responses are followed by the artist’s own reflections on her artwork and her response to the commentators’ responses. Joan Kee writes that ‘Young highlights access as a key entry point for thinking about the law. Who can avail themselves of the law? Who may enter (or exit) the courts? Who is excluded and by whose authority? The surreptitious looking and peering that define the experience of watching the film suggests how these questions deny ready answers’.

Among the issues most central to the creation and reception of artworks, scale directly addresses the capacity of artworks to mediate between viewers' expectations and perceptions. A recurring interest in the history of art is a pointed attention to scale that does not simply refer to size alone but to variable relationships between sizes. Standards of measurement, medium, format, and fuction all affect these relationships whose production fundamentally affects how artworks respond to the time and place of their making. Yet despite the context-specificity of scale, close analysis of how it affects the responsive capacity of artworks offers new possibilities of connection between multiple geographies and periods. By including discussions of a wide range of periods and artworks with a special focus on the language used to discuss scale, this introduction seeks to expand upon these possibilities in anticipation of more fully realizing the promises inherent in the idea of comparative art histories.

In 1757, the scholar Kang Se-hwang (1713-91) documented his trip to Kaesong (formerly known as Songdo) in an album that has since become one of the most celebrated groups of paintings in the history of late Choson art. Known as "Journey to Kaesong", the album has been particularly recognized for its incorporation of linear perspective and other techniques associated with Western-style oil painting. Yet even more significant was how Kang treated scale, defined in this context the deliberate calibration of objects according to size. The vast majority of Choson paintings used scale primarily as a means to make visible abstract ideas such as infinity and vastness, often taking as a standard the kinds of relational frameworks used in inkbrush painting since the early Song Dynasty. In "Journey to Kaesong", however, both the physical scale determined by the album format and the pictorial scale internal to the depiction are used to generate viewing experiencies that induce in audiences a sense of immediacy, one that enabled the possibility of imaginig the world beyond the geographic, aesthetic, political and social hierarchies prevalent at the time the work was first made and shown.

In the 1990s, contemporary art's “global turn” was vividly demonstrated by artists whose works directly reflected upon their experiences of moving across vast geographical distances. Coinciding with a multidisciplinary crisis over globalization as expressed through different approaches to the question of scale, the ambivalence towards the global turn's expansionism was vividly taken up by the large number of Asian artists whose rise to international prominence was enabled by this “turn.” Artists like Suh Do-Ho, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Danh Vo engaged with scale not simply as metonymical reflections of the world, but as a means of responding to those systems, standards, and hierarchies whose own assumptions about scale were mobilized to put things in their proper, but not always rightful, place.

What does it mean to take a stand for sculpture now? Such is the question Lily Cox-Richard asks in the appropriately titled series The Stand (Possessing Powers). Here she selects, edits, and then re-creates elements of the works of Hiram Powers (1805–1873), the presumptive “father of American sculpture” who helped establish and define the young country's genre of Neoclassical sculpture for domestic and international audiences. In many respects, the reference is anachronistic to the point of disbelief, even for an artist of a generation to whom creation often means the promiscuous cutting and pasting of images without regard to their original contexts. The intensive, almost excessive amount of labor undertaken in the making of these sculptures is yet another indication that this is not appropriation as usual. In looking to Powers, Cox-Richard asks about the strange divide between geography and temporality. His works are widely exemplified as “American” sculpture, yet they are distinctly and even aggressive...

Historires of modern art in Korea frequently begin with the self-portrait of Ko Hui-dong (1886-1965), widely recognized as the first examples of Western-style oil painting by a Korean artist. His three existing self-portraits were painting right before, or just shortly after Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, when the shift to colonial rule dramatically raised the stakes of representation. This essay argues that in addressing this shift and its implications, Ko's self-portraits thus anticipate the emergence, and more importantly, the ambiguity of "hyondae misul", a phrase doubly invoked to refer to both modern and contemporary art. They embodied what might be describe as the predicament of understanding the potential of contemporaneity in a time that seemed overly determinated by the impweratives of a certain model of modernity predicated on teleology and the attendant destabilisation of long-standing forms of social order.

Among the most outstanding characteristics of recent painting in China is its size, an aspect some view as a function of individual volition or of market forces. Yet the question raised by the matter of large size has less to do with the absolute physical dimensions of a work than about the kinds of relationships initiated by these dimensions as well as by the relativisation of size. In short, the question of why Chinese paintings are so large is a question of scale, which, as the works of numerous artists, including Yan Pei-Ming, Zhou Tiehai, and Yun-Fei Ji, demonstrates is further tied to questions of social function and social value. This article is an extended rumination on the significance of scale and its capacity to frame the artwork as itself a function of responses between meaning and materiality.

How do we write a history of contemporary art? Globalisation is frequently identified as a major characteristic of contemporary art since the late 1980s, yet it remains wedded to notions of progress and innovation, as well as to a centre-versus-periphery world-view that presumes the belatedness of those living and working in the alleged margins. This article proposes rates of change as an alternative model through which to rethink contemporaneity, particularly when considering art from the so-called ‘margins’. Of special importance are issues pertaining to questions of medium and genre, both of which might be regarded as indices of the extent to which change took place. By way of a case study, this article focuses on the postwar Korean artworld from 1953 to 1975, a time and place distinguished by the confluence of two distinct, yet symbiotic, rates of change: acceleration and delay.

In the past decade, contemporary art has become one of art history's most urgent questions. The question has special urgency in light of art's globalisation, a phenomenon that might be usefully analysed through the works identified as ‘Contemporary Southeast Asian art’. Compared with its East Asian counterparts, Southeast Asian art has been relatively invisible in discussions of contemporaneity, yet the circumstances of this lack of visibility have much to say about contemporary art. Moreover, the sheer complexity of art in this region possesses the capacity to complicate, and even to trouble how contemporary art is generally understood. Finally, this article defends the use of terms like ‘Southeast Asian art’, contending that the ideals embodied within contemporary art's ‘global turn’ can be effectively advanced through modes of regionalism that recognise the contingency of things.

Among contemporary art's blind spots, few are as apparent as contemporary ink painting. Despite accounting for a considerable proportion of art making in East and Southeast Asia as duly reflected by a large and enthusiastic collector base, ink painting rarely figures in chronicles of contemporary art. Critics periodically expound on what they see as the medium's state of crisis or rebirth, while historians increasingly recognize the medium's contributions to canonical modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism.

The Japan-based artist and critic Lee Ufan is perhaps best known as a key figure of the Mono-ha, or Things School. Although never officially acknowledged as a group by its presumed members, the Mono-ha was, and is, celebrated as an exemplar of Japanese avant-garde practice. Those affiliated with the Mono-ha were known for their espousal of things, or objects whose fundamental material properties were allowed to be shown without alteration. From approximately 1968 through the mid-1970s, the practice of the Mono-ha was in large part derived from Lee's writings. Published in rapid succession from 1969, these writings tacitly sought to externalise the interface between ideas and sensibilities from the West, namely Western Europe and the United States, and those found in East Asia. Many commentators stress Lee's stated desire to escape, or refute, 'Western' ideas of signification. Yet, Lee's works harboured a different and in many ways more ambitious objective. They wanted to bring forth a different kind of world, one brought together by a desire for parity, rather than hierarchy, among its constituents. This ambition, and the motivations behind it, was especially well articulated by the series of paintings that Lee first exhibited in 1973 titled 'From Line' and 'From Point'.

Exhibitions of contemporary art in Asia have proliferated in the major visual art centers of Europe, the United States, and Japan in the past ten years. Among the largest of these in terms of quantity of works and artists shown was the 1997 group exhibition “Cities on theMove,” cocurated by theMusee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and independent curator Hou Hanru.1 Its significance lay not so much in its size as in its optimistic conception of “Asia” summarized as New Utopia, a term borrowed from architect Arata Isozaki’s invocation of a New Utopia from his Haishi/Mirage City proposal to construct an artificial island near the southern coast of Hangqin Island and Macao in southern China. In “Cities on the Move,” New Utopia was built on works whose formal components or general physical appearance overly suggested physical movement and speed. The recurrence of such works implied a different and more specific definition of NewUtopia than Isozaki’s original proposal, which was based

The first fifteen minutes of Pak Ch’ŏl-su’s 301/302 (1995) is a veritable melange of stylized poses, lush surroundings, and glances ranging from coy to sullen.Amid an endless sequence of aluminumcountertops and twinkling halogen track lights, the resident of apartment 301 (Pang Un-jin) practices to make her cooking a fine art. Her stylish short hair, fashionable attire, and wary glances, calculated more to penetrate than to seduce, combine to generate an image that is more icon than individual, more unattainable than accessible. Although she is clearly alone, there is no sense that she is lonely. Mirroring this representation is the depiction of her neighbor, the resident of apartment 302 (Hwang Sin-hye), who appears in a succession of momentary close-ups. Against a set of blond wood furniture and harsh daylight reflecting off a profusion of shiny surfaces, she is, in contrast, all urban sophisticate, always attired in black. Like her neighbor, 302 is a singular being, not desolate or abandoned, but elusive and mysterious.

Among the most persistent and difficult problems in the field of copyright law is determining whether copying has actually occurred. This article responds to this challenge by proposing that judges and juries consider practices used in disciplines revolving around the close and methodical viewing of visual objects. Of special interest is connoisseurship, long employed by art historians, curators, and collectors to adjudicate the origins, provenance, and authenticity of art. Mindful of law’s emphasis on the spoken and written word, this article focuses especially on the visual analyses of Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr, two art historians whose foundational status in the discipline of art history stems from the extent to which they attempted to systematically translate the experience of looking into words. The article concludes with a brief test case drawn from the high-profile 2005 dispute between architects Thomas Shine and David Childs over the latter’s alleged infringement of the former’s design.