Air and water, two chemicals vital for life, establish the conceptual thread around which Haegue Yang’s recent solo exhibition in Seoul revolved. These two elements, however, remained elusive in the galleries; the artist’s eponymous sculpture was conspicuously absent, though not by oversight. Art historian and curator Harry C. H. Choi examines the significance of this choice, pointing to the artist’s practice of experimentation, association, and variation. At the MMCA, Yang’s experiments comprise a trial for their own sake, writes Choi, displaying an expansionist approach that will persist until she approaches a perhaps implausible end of complete exhaustion.

The Anti-Extradition Bill Protests in Hong Kong, which began in early 2019 and continued well into 2020, unfolded for many of us on screen, across social and news media feeds in highly spectacularized form. Reaching across distances, vanishing fault lines, and intersecting time zones, Tiffany Sia’s exhibition “Slippery When Wet” considers the implications of this mediation and deals with somatic experience in the midst of looming political transformation. Artist Polly Yim examines Sia’s works in the context of Hong Kong’s moment of uncertainty, loss, and grieving, writing that the act of viewing is implicitly powerful as crisis unfolds.

Since the start of the pandemic, our lives have increasingly been hosted online: for many of us, work and school convene in some combination of Zoom and cloud “solutions,” and private social interactions are mediated through screens, facilitated by a seemingly infinite selection of software. There are serious data privacy concerns that come with digital life, as well as copyright restrictions that are often monitored by automated systems. This can create particularly frustrating hurdles in cultural criticism or pedagogy. Art historian and author of the book, “Is It Ours? Art, Copyright, and Public Interest,” Martha Buskirk examines the implications and pitfalls of overly aggressive content filtering, writing here about the international discrepancies across legal frameworks that govern digital space.

Viewing art – or, more precisely, visiting exhibitions – under the conditions of the pandemic is often a test of patience and organization. The euphoria of recent reopenings was quickly extinguished as a new wave in Europe forces closures to be reinstated. Here, author Quinn Latimer retraces a recent excursion, narrating her thoughts and prescribing a salve for their breathless pace: go back to the lake. Open the book. Approach the object, the image, the wall. Let it hold you. Let it hush you in its expert relation, if just for a bit. Hush, hold.

A member of the Situationist International (SI), Jacqueline de Jong has more recently garnered international attention in her own right. Her latest exhibition at Treize in Paris included work across media as well as ample archival material, offering a crucial synthesis of de Jong’s artistic practice, her work on “The Situationist Times,” and her relationship to the SI. Curator and critic Estelle Nabeyrat visited the show and considers here its relevance to the current political moment.

The age of pandemic-induced lockdowns has confronted many artists with the challenge of continuing their production even as exhibitions, art fairs, and biennials are canceled until further notice. For Amy Sillman, 2020 brought unprecedented productivity. In the spring, as the virus began to spread and Sillman was temporarily unable to go to her painting studio in New York, she responded to the novel situation, which called for improvisation, by sitting at her kitchen table every morning and painting floral still lifes: a bouquet of peonies, a single sunflower hanging its head, or, as we can see here, a bundle of irises. Making art in the pandemic – an image series by Amy Sillman.

Zwar hat das Medium Spaziergang Corona-bedingt Konjunktur. Essenseinladungen sind aber auch in der Pandemie keine Seltenheit. Doch über was wird im Lockdown eigentlich (noch) gesprochen? In ihrem Essay zeichnet die Schriftstellerin Helene Hegemann das Bild eines Dinners, bei dem über Clubhouse sinniert wird, über Hugh Hefner und Paul Preciado, und darüber, was Elon Musk täte, hätte er einen Hund. Das Schönste an Corona? „Der Schnelltest.“