When I was young, I practiced painting. It was a natural extension from Chinese calligraphy. I remember being fascinated with beautifully “watery” paintings of landscapes, wildlife and buildings produced by ancient Chinese masters, and I certainly tried very hard to mimic the natural flow of brush strokes common in many Chinese paintings, but [...]

Vice President Joe Biden, voice trembling, paid tribute to one of his closest friends, Sen. Edward Kennedy, calling him a “truly remarkable man.” “Today, we lost a truly remarkable man,” Biden said. “To paraphrase Shakespeare, I don’t think we shall ever see his like again. I think the legacy he left was [...]

Two hundred years ago, the little Indian kingdom of Marwar, in what is now Rajasthan, was a bloodsoaked and troublesome place. The long decline of the Mughal empire encouraged squabbles in the Hindu ruling dynasty; in 1751 an upstart second son, Bakhat Singh, came to power, having murdered his father the maharaja a quarter-century [...]

Through his paintings and sculptures, Gernman Anselm Reyle is reviving concepts of 20th century art history. He often cites the painter Otto Freundlich as a great influence. Minimal and abstract, Reyle’s works are notorious for eye-catching colors and surfaces. His paintings can be drippy, gestural or sharply geometrical, yet his works are [...]

The work of George Condo is grotesque, comic, baroque and sinister. His paintings, drawings and sculptures portray humanlike figures that make one think of caricatures and cartoon films. But these characters are brought to life on canvas in an expressive utterly painterly manner. Condo goes about his work in the traditional way, [...]

Heaven, earth, water, and forests are the natural ingredients in Axel Hütte’s landscapes. The photographs stage a subtle play on the difference between nature and landscape. Here, ‘nature’ is the physical world which surrounds us while ‘landscape’ is nature as it appears to the observer.

Nature has always been the subject of participatory interest, [...]

I used to doodle endlessly in class, especially during Biology. It infuriated my teachers but filled my classmates with curiosity. They always wondered what I would draw next. I never realised it at the time, but my doodles let me explore my inner world - a world filled with both biological possibilities [...]

Delicate and elegant as they are, ancient costumes have alwways been a symbol of Chinese cultural tradition, as clearly witnessed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. But as time passes by, that materialism and consumerisn gradually change the Chinese culture - Western style attire substitute traditional ones. By making a contrast between [...]

… A naked man is hung up by the armpits. The suspended man, with his drooping head and transcendent air of concentration, recalls the sacred archetype of Christ on the cross. It is as if, like Christ, he is hung up for maximum humiliation in a punishment that might be rehearsed in holy rituals [...]

Daidō Moriyama was born in 1938 in Osaka. He is easily one of the most important Japanese photographers since 1945. His work, depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan, plays a central role in establishing Japanese photography as one of the most creative directions in the history of photography. His work [...]