Is there hope of stepping outside of the digital matrix? As the Secession exhibition demonstrated, one is always inside a body in Hsu’s art—its physicality, its imperfection, and its vulnerability a rejoinder to the clinical syntax of technological data. To every age its art, to every art its freedom.

Among the many contemporary Chinese writers deserving of a wider readership both within and beyond the borders of China, Yan’s name is frequently mentioned. Among Sinologists and the literary cognoscenti, he is also considered a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With spring slowly emerging from its winter slumber, the streets of Vienna were awash in color, and so too was Vienna’s Loft 8 Galerie, which presented “Gravity’s Rainbow: Nie Shiwei and Wang Lei.”

While images and texts travel well enough, multi-hour performances require a certain physical architecture and funding ecosystem in order to be staged across the world, which makes the ongoing residency of Beijing’s Paper Tiger Theater Studio in Berlin both a rare treat and a performance-art event in its own right.