Why Have There Been No Great Women Forgers?
“Why have there been no great women forgers?” The question is curious, not merely to women, and not only for social or ethical reasons, but for purely intellectual ones as well. If the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art world professional, has proven to be inadequate, then it ought to follow that women have also been secretly, deceptively, and even subversively, painting works great enough to be recognized as masterpieces, but for which they cannot, or have not yet, claimed authorship. At a moment when a series of scandals has once again forced the art world to become more self-conscious—more aware of the nature of its presuppositions as exhibited in its own sureties and valuations, we ought to be confronted by many a great woman forger, skilled yet frustrated artists who have cunningly laid waste to the false ideology of authenticity spun by art experts, dealers, auctioneers, and museum directors.
in boundary 2 online, 2025
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The Unteachable Xiao Jiang
The painter Xiao Jiang is an artist of few words. He presents his story as a simple one. He speaks of his paintings as if they were effortless to make, even though it is obvious that they are long in gestation and slow to come to fruition. He builds landscapes, interiors, and figures to produce exquisitely balanced compositions of subtle chromaticity. Still yet suggestive, they hint at something that has not happened or will not happen, a relationship unspoken, an event that may not unfold.
from Xiao Jiang
with texts by John Yau and Winnie Wong
published by KARMA, New York, 2023
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Malak Mattar is a feminist Palestinian artist. She was born in 1999 in Gaza to a family of artists and engineers. Her mother's father, Mustafa Musallam, was a poet. Her mother's brother is Mohammed Musallam, a Palestinian artist who holds a PhD in philosophy of art, and who taught drawing, painting, and art history at the Al-Aqsa University in Gaza until 2016. He now lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Malak Mattar grew up surrounded by poetry and art but also asked a lot of questions about why things were the way they were. She was a child when she concluded that patriarchy was illogical.
in Critical Times, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2022
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These tales are drawn from fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2015 in Dafen village, China, the world’s largest production center for hand-painted oil paintings. All of the names, facts, and dates were true at the time of the telling, which in some cases spanned interactions over some months or years. Readers may refer to my book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2014), for a scholarly account of Dafen village that strived to put such self-accounts into scholarly historical and artistic contexts. These tales, by contrast, record the stories of artists as they were narrated to me. They demonstrate how the most exceptionalist ideas of art are found anywhere, even in the most unexceptional places.
in Collateral: Cross-Cultural Close Reading, Cluster No. 29, 2021
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One of the most treasured tropes in the Chinese literati tradition is the scholar's decision—in the face of an objectionable political regime—to withdraw from civic duties. The fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming retreated to Mount Lu (Mount Hermitage) for a life in seclusion, changing his name to Tao Qian (The Hidden). His poetry reflecting on this disengagement became the touchstone for centuries of literary, poetic, and artistic expressions of scholarly abjuration. Retreating to the mountains is the geographical demonstration of the strategic power of visible silence and committed refusal.
in Critical Times 4:2, 2021
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The Colour of Colour
In 1901, as Pablo Picasso journeyed into his Blue period, an aspiring artist working in a laundry in Winnipeg told a Canadian census enumerator that he was 23 years old and had been born in 1877 in China, and that he had immigrated to Canada in 1898.1 That young man, Lee Youk Tien (李玉田, literally “Jade Fields”), would take on the sobriquet Tie Fu (铁夫, literally “Iron Man”), using that name to sign the oil paintings he began to paint. On that 1901 census sheet, he and his roommate are classified with the colour “yellow,” while every one of their neighbours is classified with the colour “white.”in Matthew Wong, Blue View, 2021
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A 35-year-old Chinese-Canadian painter likened to Vincent van Gogh dies by suicide in Edmonton, Alberta. That was the inconceivable headline of October 2, 2019. The heartrending death of Matthew Wong for those who knew him was parried by the skepticism about his cultural importance for those who did not. Where is Edmonton, Alberta? For Matthew Wong it was a place of solitary productivity, a city where he knew no one, where he worked everyday from 4:00 in the morning until well into the night, for the last three years of his too-brief seven-year career as a painter. It was where he would have a nightly coffee and dessert, solo, at the Cactus Club. In Edmonton even the restaurants yearn to be somewhere far away, but Matthew Wong was there, in its nowhereness.
in Matthew Wong, Postcards, 2020
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On Smallness in Hong Kong Art
How do the inhabitants of a city know when they have seen art? How do they know when they’ve lost it, forgotten it, or when it’s been returned? For all of its existence, Hong Kong has been regarded as a city hostile to high culture, and yet, since its founding as a port city in the mid-nineteenth century, its artists have been making art. Their work has not always been noticed; often it has been ignored. Even as the cultural and market value of art has grown greater and greater, art in Hong Kong has, counter-intuitively, been getting smaller and smaller, sometimes to the point of invisibility. Hong Kong’s contemporary art thus presents us with a unique dilemma: it manifests as a set of practices and sensibilities that evade celebration and sensationalism, and yet, more than anything, it yearns for recognition as a distinct cultural form. How can we recognise that which avoids being seen?
in M+ Magazine, 2018
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In the history of modern China, some of its greatest artists trained in art schools overseas. In each generation, these artists took with them the great social challenges facing their homeland, learned strange and new artistic skills, and returned home to reinvigorate the nation. Just as it has been for over a century, today a generation of young artists born in the Mainland have been training in the art schools of the United States and Canada—NYU, MIT, RISD, SFAI, Simon Fraser University, Columbia—and jockeying in the art world centered in New York city and its many far-flung sites of artistic practice. Nanhai Gallery in this exhibition presents five artists in the midst of this journey. We do not know where they will go and we do not know how it will end, but we are being given a glimpse into a future. Will it be a troubled one? Will it be a beautiful one?
for Nanhai Gallery, 2019
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Pan Youxun 潘有勋 (1745-1780) — courtesy name “The Arriving Subject”, style names “Stone Monolith” and “Virtuous Lotus”, pseudonyms “the Impersonator”, and “Monk of the Demon Pavilion”, aliases “Zhengxie” and “Zhengde”, occasional sobriquets “Shallow Well” and “Expensive Drunk”, born in Guangzhou city 10th year of the Qianlong reign (1745), passed the examinations in 27th year of the Qianlong reign (1762), and the first noted investigator of the primitive cloth paintings of the Western Ocean Barbarians.
in Public Domain Review, 2017
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