Reviews

Mixing works by Asian-American artists, both foreign and native-born, this show demonstrates how Zen, calligraphy and Automatism, as advocated by the Surrealists, combined to form one of the most influential movements of the 20th century.

During the brushfires of 2008-09, Youngsuk Suh photographed people in places that were engulfed in flames. What we get is a fresh spin on the New Topographics mode of photography and portrait of the American West that is true to life and a bit vexing: You can breathe the air; just don’t inhale.

Anderson’s obsessive paper works are composed of thousands of small, geometrically shaped holes. From a distance they look like giant doilies. Up close they unfold kaleidoscopically, like fractals, revealing a virtuoso technique.

The personal, sexual, and bodily evocations of Stella Zhang prove that in some quarters of San Francisco, a woman’s sexuality can still be a potent and contentious statement. Lia Wilson reports on what made CCC’s administrators so nervous on opening night.

Peter Schjeldahl named Eggleston “one of the great Romantic originals of camerawork.” His sole video effort, “Stranded in Canton”, was shot with a Sony Portapak, and the result, is a manic home movie that mixes distance and drunken intimacy in equal parts.

Unike the elegiac, rivulet-stained oil paintings of 19th century and pre-Revolutionary women that, for decades, Hung Liu has been painting from period photos, her latest series, “Drawings from Life and Death” carries a different kind of load: the weight of mortality

Is Ai Weiwei the plucky, disciplined Horatio Alger of the art world or its lucky, virtuous Oliver Twist?? Despite a harrowing life story that surpasses even Charles Dickens’ novels for melodramatic reversals of fate, Ai now enjoys global art world celebrity

If you ever feel like contemplating infinity, try copying out by hand, several thousand digits of pi. It sounds punishing. But for Jiayi and Shih-Wen Young, such exercises inspire visual possibilities.

Raymond Saunders casts an array of disparate elements into a pitch-perfect balance of order and accident, demonstrating the subtle poetry of random arrangements of everyday detritus.

Chris McCaw uses the sun’s heat to scorch the his large-format photos. Mario Giacomelli depicts the Italian landscape as a palimpsest of gestures and messages, overwritten by time and human activity.

Nodding to historical notions of Romanticism, this show of New York artists filters its subject through the lens of various other isms: narcissism, voyeurism, consumerism and careerism.

Margaret Harrison explores the politics of domesticity, addressing from domestic labor to genital mutilation. Her work tracks gender oppression in the global and political sphere.