Outrage swept across the Central Asian professional art community as news surfaced in late December 2009 that Umida Akhmedova, a prominent documentary photographer from Uzbekistan, had been criminally charged for “insult and slander of the Uzbek people and traditions.”

The January 11 announcement that New York powerhouse dealer Jeffrey Deitch will assume the directorship of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) sent shock waves through the international art world’s institutional and commercial sectors.

This winter, northern China has seen record low temperatures and heavy snowfall, but for the artists of Beijing’s Zhengyang Creative Art Zone, it has been a particularly cold, hard season.

Two exhibitions of Middle Eastern art made entirely by a Chinese collective challenge a viewer’s sense of what a hoax is worth.

The photographs and videos of Bani Abidi reveal the historical anxieties that shape contemporary Pakistan.

Curator of the Istanbul Biennial in 1992, Vasif Kortun reflects on seminal exhibitions that influenced him, how the Biennial responded to the social and historical context of the city at the time, and the role of private financial support in the formation of Turkey’s cultural scene.

How lyrical and intimate patchworks of lizards, sharks, clouds and churches evoke the traditions, myths and colonial legacies of the Pacific.

First exhibited at the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh in 2008, 44-year-old London-based Japanese photographer Tomoko Yoneda’s exhibition, “Rivers Become Oceans,” consisted of works that explore historical resonances concealed in innocuous-looking landscapes.

Each new work by Wit Pimkanchanapong tends to be noteworthy, novel and full of play, partly because he ventures into new formats so often—video, animation, graphics, audience-participation experiments, collaborative installations, stage production for rock musicians, you name it.

Jerusalem has been a place of pilgrimage for thousands of years. “The Jerusalem Show,” however, did not try to turn the holy city into a modern day art mecca, but sought to enact a direct encounter with the city’s residents.

Of the four artists in “ethKnowcentrix,” a group show of contemporary Pacific art, it is co-curator Rosanna Raymond, born in New Zealand of Samoan descent, whose engaging works dominated the exhibition space through quantity, diversity and force of personality.

Zhang Xiaogang’s studio is located in a former motorcycle helmet factory in the village of Hegezhuang—one of the new “art areas” in northeast Beijing.