Woo Jin Joo’s studio is full of magic. Ceramic green goblin feet line the windowsill, disembodied furry legs jut out of one white wall and, on the table behind where the Korean-Chinese artist sits drinking tea, a headless being dressed in a black coat squats, arms aloft in warning. There are also neat racks of colourful thread next to a freehand embroidery machine, the source of this supernatural hoard. This is where Joo creates much of her art – surface embroideries and sculptural 3D creatures inspired by Korean myth, philosophy…
Tag: Art and design
Artist known for sculptures of Mao Zedong jailed for slandering ‘heroes and martyrs’
Gao Zhen, a prominent Chinese artist known for provocative sculptures of the former leader Mao Zedong, has been sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of slandering China’s “heroes and martyrs”. The sentencing came two years after he was detained while visiting the country with his family, according to his wife and human rights groups. The case has attracted international condemnation, largely because the artworks at the centre of the case were created more than 10 years before China created the law under which Gao was charged.…
Women Photograph announces 2026 grant recipients – in pictures
Women Photograph, a non-profit launched in 2017 to amplify the voices of women and non-binary visual journalists, has announced three recipients of its 2026 grants. Grants of $10,000 have been awarded to Fatma Fahmy, Caroline Gutman and Yixi Tian. This year’s grants were sponsored by Leica USA The Guardian
Beth McKillop obituary
Long before Korean film, television and music achieved global prominence, the curator and scholar Beth McKillop, who has died of metastatic breast cancer aged 72, was arguing that Korean artistic traditions deserved attention in their own right, rather than as a footnote to the histories of China or Japan. Through her work at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at the British Library, McKillop helped transform how Korean art was understood, introducing visitors, students and researchers to the country’s ceramics, books and design, and helping establish a field that is…
US-based dissident artist put on trial in China over satirical Mao sculptures, says rights group
The Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen, known for making satirical sculptures of China’s former leader Mao Zedong, has been tried over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs”, his wife and a rights group have said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit to China from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, his wife, Zhao Yaliang, and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese human rights defenders group, said. The closed-door, one-day trial took place on Monday at Sanhe city people’s court in Hebei province…
‘Was I scared going back to China? No’: Ai Weiwei on AI, western censorship and returning home
Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home. Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges: “They said, ‘When…
‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.” Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind,…
Sir Terry Farrell obituary
Terry Farrell, who has died aged 87, was arguably the most influential and prolific of the architects associated with the British postmodern movement. At the start of his private practice in 1965 he worked in partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw, and a few years later he seemed destined to join Richard Rogers and Norman Foster as a “high-tech” pioneer, the first movement in British architecture to achieve worldwide recognition since the arts and crafts designers of the late 19th century. A residential tower in St John’s Wood of 1970, streamlined and…
‘The eighth wonder of the world’: China’s terracotta warriors to march on Australia for blockbuster show
Two thousand years ago, in a bid to conquer death itself, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang commissioned a city of the dead: a 49 sq km mausoleum guarded by an army of clay warriors, built to defend his tomb for eternity. When farmers near Xi’an unearthed the first clay head in 1974, they cracked open one of humanity’s greatest archaeological mysteries, with more than 8,000 Terracotta Warriors discovered over the last 50 years. Now, fragments of that dream of immortality rise again – this time in Perth, where the…
A Chinese woman exercising her right to nap in public: Eric Leleu’s best photograph
I arrived in China in 2005 with a secondhand camera, a laptop and a plan to try to make a living from photography within a year. In the end, I spent 12 years in Shanghai, where I managed to earn enough from commercial work to do projects of my own. When I first spotted people sleeping in public, it completely broke the image I had of China. Like many in the west, I had a preconceived idea of the country as an economic monster and of its people working uncomplainingly,…