While in Shanghai we saw another new addition to the city's expanding art infrastucture. Devised by Massimo Torrigiani (former director of ShContemporary), Davide Quadrio (founder and director of the not-for-profit space BizArt and ArtHub Asia), and Donna Chan (also ex-ShContemporary), Art in the City combines an exhibition platform with a series of events to be held throughout the year where Art in the City maintains contact with galleries, bringing prospective clients to their spaces for tours and talks. It is also supported by a mobile app and website, which are constantly updated with the latest information on galleries and institutions in Shanghai.

Seung Yul Oh's new exhibition memmem opens at Starkwhite on Friday 31 October. Elizabeth Caldwell and Cam McCracken, the directors of the co-organising galleries of Oh's survey exhibition MOAMOA, will also be at the opening to launch their new publication on Oh, which includes an interview with Korean curator Sunjung Kim.
Image: two new paintings from Seung Yul Oh's Periphery series

Near Shanghai's fabled Bund, you can find Thomas Ou's Rockbund Art Museum housed in a beautifully restored 1933 Art Deco building that was at one time home to the Royal Asiatic Society. The Rockbund is a comparatively small, but innovative space with a impressive record of shows with artists and curators such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Zheng Fanshi, Paola Pivi, Hou Hanru and Fumio Nanjo among others.

The Rockbund is currently showing Ugo Rondinone's Breathe, Walk, Die, an installation staged over five of the gallery's floors. The walls are painted floor to ceiling with colours that move from cool to warm in tandem with the coloured filters on the windows. Each floor has circular canvases of blurred concentric colours, all combining to form a backdrop for 40 impassive clowns doing nothing. It's a beautiful, but disturbing piece –  the best show in town, in the smallest museum space, and proof (in a ciiy known for its massive museums) that bigger isn't always better.
Images: Ugo Rondinone's Breathe, Walk, Die at Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum

The Power Station of Art is another must-see art museum in Shanghai – an old coal-fired plant converted into a 41,000 square metre contemporary art museum at a cost of US64 million. Unlike the city's raft of new privately-funded museums, the Power Station of Art is China's first state-funded art museum, allowing it to take on a wider brief, including hosting the Shanghai Biennale, which opens on 22 November.

China is going through a museum boom, which some observers say is outstripping the country's museum practice. Positioned as flagship stores of culture, the new museums are often criticised for their poorly presented exhibits, aimless curating and ineffectual public outreach. But China also has a growing number of world-class museums and galleries – nowhere more so than in Shanghai, a city of 25 million people and one clearly set on becoming China's cultural centre.

We visited some of Shanghai's museums (old and new) during a recent visit and we'll post short pieces on them over the next few days.

La Biennale de Montreal L'avenir (looking forward) opens next week and runs to 4 January 2015. In a recent interview with Art Review, co-curator Gregory Burke (a former director of New Zealand's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) talks about the theme of the biennale and how it will be articulated. Read more…
Image: Emmanuelle Leonard, Postcard from Bexhill-on-Sea (video still), 2014

One of the world's richest art prizes, the USD300,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, is being awarded to artist Maya Lin. Now in its 21st year, the Prize is given annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life.”

Best known for her Vietnam War Memorial, Lin has gone on to make work about the environment. She says the award will help her continue with her ongoing project What is Missing?, which combines art and science to increase awareness about the loss of biodiversity and natural habitats.
Image: Maya Lin's A Fold in the Field at The Farm, Kaipara, New Zealand

After a long and distinguished career as a curator, historian and teacher, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki passed away on friday.

Mane-Wheoki is best known in visual arts circles as a powerful advocate for contemporary Maori art, at various times holding positions as Dean of Music and Fine Art at Canterbury University, Head of the School of Fine Arts and the University of Auckland and head of Visual Culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. But he was also a highly respected architectural and cultural historian, valued for his ability to contribute to the work of arts organisations with a wider brief, such as the Arts Foundation of New Zealand where he served as a member of the Foundation's College of Governors. He made a difference and will be sorely missed.

A Requiem Mass will be held for Jonathan at Auckland's Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on Saturday from 10:30 am to 12:30pm, after which he will be taken to his marae in the Hokiangia for burial.
Image; Jonathan Mane-Wheoki with Colin McCahon's Parihaka Triptych

Upstairs we showing a sampler of Billy Apple's work which includes Billy Apple Bleaching with Lady Clairol Instant Crème Whip November 1962 and a suite of his transaction works.
Image: Billy Apple, IOU 

Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling continues at Starkwhite this week through to 25 October. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling (2014), installation view, Starkwhite

If last night's opening is anything to go by, the Auckland Art Gallery has a must-see exhibition to end the year with. The gallery's reception space was jammed with people poised to flow into the Light Show after the speeches were over.

Organised by the Hayward Gallery, the exhibition features light-based art by leading international artists including Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Jenny Holzer, Ann Veronica Janssens and James Turrell and runs at the Gallery to 8 February 2015.
Image: Carlos Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation

After attracting more than half a million people at the Tate Modern, Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs is about to open at MoMA, where the museum will require Matisse fans to buy tickets allowing them to enter the museum only at a certain time. This policy aimed at regulating huge crowds has only been enacted for two shows in recent years –  the retrospective of filmmaker Tim Burton and Van Gogh and Colours of the Night.
Image: Henri Matisse cut out

Wystan Curnow is New Zealand's longest serving and most important art critic. The Critic's Part brings together a selection of his art writings from 1971 to 2013 and features his long form essays that investigate the stakes for 'high culture' in a 'small province' like New Zealand; major essays on key artists including Len Lye, Colin McCahon and Billy Apple; reports on the contemporary art scene; and catalogue essays and short reviews offering insightful readings of art and artists in all their material and conceptual specificity. Edited by Christina Barton and Robert Leonard, the book is “a map of contemporary theory and practice and a cogent agenda for thinking through the implications and challenges of making art here.”

Maggie Barry is New Zealand's new Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, replacing Chris Findlayson who takes on responsibility for New Zealand's spy agencies. Barry is a former news and current affairs reporter, television and radio broadcaster, magazine feature writer for the NZ Listener, and co-producer and presenter of Maggie's Garden Show. She lives with partner Grant Kerr, an art patron/collector of contemporary New Zealand photographer and member of the Arts Council of Creative New Zealand.
Image: Maggie Barry

Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling continues at Starkwhite this week through to 21 October. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling (2014), installation view detail, Starkwhite

China is experiencing a museum boom of epic proportions. With unlimited capital, rapid land acquisition and a taste for architectural statements, it has become a playground for global architects to design some bizarre and beautiful creations. But some say the rapid development of the sector is delivering museums that have advanced beyond current museum practice. Labelled the 'Louis Vuitton bags of architecture”, they are seen as flagship stores of culture by urban planners and city branders with the potential to introduce the Bilbao effect – the rejuvination of a city through museum building.

In a recent interview with Randian, the author of New Museums in China, Clare Jacobsen, talks about the new museums and whether they can become something more than LV bags of architecture. Read more…

Art as a Verb opens today at Monash University of Art. Curated by Charlotte Day, Francis E Parker and Patrice Sharkey, the exhibition takes as it's departure point the concept of art as action, presenting projects form the 1990s to the present challenge the traditional role of the artist and the site of the museum. What constitutes the work of an artists? How do the varying roles of artist (an instigator, facilitator, teacher, performer, consumer or visionary)for within broader society? And how does the museum support art forms that function beyond the art object?

Artists in the show include Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Billy Apple, John Baldessari, Martin Creed, Peter Fischili & David Weiss, Alicia Frankovich, Paul McCarthy, Rose Nolan, Claus Oldenburg, Ariel Orozco, Mike Parr and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Image: Billy Apple, PAID: The Artists Has to Live Like Everybody Else, 1987, Herbert Fabrication and Engineering 2003, invoice mounted on PAID offset lithograph, 42 x 29.7cm

Last week Charles Esche awarded the 2014 Walters Prize to Luke Willis Thompson, the 7th artist to receive the $50,000 award. Along with the other finalists, he also received $5,000 from patron Dayle Mace when this year's lineup was announced.

The Walters Prize is the brainchild of Dame Jenny Gibbs and Erika and Robin Congreve, patrons who bring ideas as well as deep pockets to the arts. In 2010 Jenny Gibbs talked about the Prize and how it has been set up to keep the founders (and other patrons associated with it) at arms length, leaving it to the Auckland Art Gallery to appoint four New Zealand-based selectors to come up with a short list of four and the international judge to select the winner. You can view the video here.
Image: Dame Jenny Gibbs

Ai Weiwei has staged his latest exhibition at Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough and the house where Winston Churchill was born. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones reflects on why Ai Weiwei would mount a survey of his work at a British stately home where visitors are more likely to come for the Capability Brown gardens or the tea shop, and perhaps not for conceptual art. Read more…
Image: Ai Weiwei's Han Dynasty vase with Coca Cola logo

Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling continues this week at Starkwhite through to 10 October.

La Biennale de Montreal opens next month. L'avenir (looking forward) examines how contemporary artists give form to the question, what is to come? “Shifting between assessment and anticipation, clearly grounded in the now and informed by echoes of the past, the exhibition looks forward to the future to unveil a range of possibilities and rekindle some that may have been prematurely foreclosed.”

L'avenir (looking forward) was conceptualised by Gregory Burke (former director of New Zealand's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) and Peggy Gale, and developed in tandem with co-curators Lesley Johnstone and Mark Lanctot of the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal. All four curators worked in close collaboration with the biennale's executive and artistic director Sylvie Fortin to create an event that promises viewers “powerful experiences: moments for contemplation, invitations to wonderment, occasions for exchange and calls for action.”

The biennale runs from 10 October 2014 to 4 January 2015.

In a surprise move, Frieze art fair has announced the appointment of Victoria Siddall as director of Frieze London and Frieze New York. The fair's co-founders and current directors, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, say it will give them more time to focus on the future and explore new projects for Frieze.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Slotover said the new projects he and Sharp have in mind do not include opening another fair. “It's not clear there are obvious opportunties elsewhere,” he said. But he added, “Never say never.”
Image: Victoria Siddall

While art fairs are on the rise in Hong Kong where Art Basel Hong Kong will be joined by Art Central in 2015, Shanghai's main fair is in troubled waters. The recent edition of SHContemporary was a disaster, opening with the grand Shanghai Exhibition Centre conspicuously devoid of art. Consignments were held up in customs with many crates arriving after the last visitors had left the vernissage. And to cap it off, participating galleries were told no sales could take place within the fair as the permit obtained was one only to exhibit art.

Art fair director Guido Mologni says it is too soon to say whether SHContemporary will continue in the future, but it's hard to see the fair recovering from such a set back.
Image: SHContemporary booths in the grand hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre

The founder of ART HK, Tim Etchells, will launch a new art fair in Hong Kong in 2015. Co-directed by Eve Share Banghart (Art Basel, ART HK and Gagosian Gallery) and Maree Di Pasquale  (Melbourne Art Fair, Sydney Contemporary and Abu Dhabi Art Fair), Art Central debuts 14 to 16 March to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong.

News of the fair comes as no surprise – Etchells has been planning it ever since he sold ART HK to MCH Swiss Exhibition Limited, the parent company of Art Basel. However, rather than rolling out an 'affordable' art fair (as expected), Etchells has opted for a high-end fair that will sit alongside Art Basel Hong Kong. Art Central will be staged in a purpose-built tent on the new Central Harbour Front, less than two kilometers from the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre where Art Basel takes place.

Word on the street is Art Central will offer an attractive alternative to galleries that are unable to get into Art Basel Hong Kong, but it will also appeal to gallerists who liked the the focus and format of ART HK before it was made over by Art Basel.

On Friday 19 September we open a new exhibition by Australian artist Rebecca Baumann. It is her first solo show at Starkwhite and follows her participation in Art Basel Hong Kong in May, where we presented a commissioned work in the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa.

New Zealand has featured in previous editions of the Sao Paulo Bienal – Joe Sheehan in the 28th, Andrew McLeod and Brendan Wilkinson in the 27th, Remember New Zealand curated by Tobias Berger for the 26th, Gavin Hipkins in the 25th and Peter Robinson in the 23rd. But New Zealand artists were not included in the 29th edition and they haven't made the cut again this year with the 30th edition. Nor are there any New Zealand artists in the Gwangju Biennale or in the upcoming Shanghai Biennale.

Over the past two decades a handful of New Zealand curators were instrumental in brokering our artists into these events before moving overseas to take up curatorial positions. Two of them have returned to New Zealand – Robert Leonard (now chief curator at the City Gallery Wellington) and Simon Rees (the new director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) – and look set to ramp up biennale representation for our artists again.
Image: Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, venue for the Sao Paulo Bienal

Jeff Koons will create the first in a series of new works that will be used to raise money for the United Nations Foundation. He will create a large sculpture (and several smaller pieces) made of materials from luxury handbags donated for the project by Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstanberg, Almine Ruiz-Picasson and others. The finished piece will be auctioned at a dinner at Four Seasons restaurant in New York on on 9 November with the proceeds going to the United Nations Foundation's shot@life campaign, which is raising money to fight  measles, pneumonia, polio and rotavirus in children.

Okwui Enwezor is the first curator of his generation to direct Documenta and the Venice Biennale and the first African curator to direct either one. In an article titled How Okwui Enwezor Changed the Art World, the Wall Street Journal tracks Enwezor's global curatorial project, beginning with his 1996 breakthrough show Insight: African Photographers 1940 to Present at the Guggenhein Museum. Since then he has produced international exhibitions that seek to define their moment – biennials in Johannesburg, Gwangju and the Paris Triennial – and historically-driven, encyclopedic museum shows. Read more…
Image: Okwui Enwezor

Like the recent Biennale of Sydney, this year's edition of the Sao Paulo Bienal has opened with artists calling for the organising foundation to sever links with a sponsor – this time from the state of Israel. Fifty-five of the 68 participating artists have signed a letter protesting Israel's Gaza offensive and calling on the bienal to return funds received from Israel.

“At a time when the people of Gaza return to the rubble of their homes, destroyed by the Israeli military, we do not feel it is acceptable to receive Israeli cultural sponsorship,” the letter reads. “In accepting this funding our artistic work displayed in the exhibition is undermined and implicitly used for whitewashing Israel's ongoing aggression and violation of international law and human rights. We reject Israel's attempt to normalise itself within the context of a major international cultural event in  Brazil.” Read more…
Image: Pro-Palestine protesters in Sao Paulo (2009)

SIGNALS continues at Starkwhite closing on Saturday 13 September.
Image: Jin Jiangbo, Silent (2011), pigment ink on photo rag, 110cm diameter

Every September Jerry Saltz conducts a “semi-sick ritual”, returning to the September issue of Artforum to see what the new season of shows and openings holds “for the faithful, the frightened, and the shy.” This link takes you to an article on what he found this time.

ARTINFO caught  up with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Sydney and talked about her plans for the next Istanbul Biennale.

Having seen every edition of the biennale since its inception in 1987, she finds the history of the event particularly meaningful. “I think it was the beginning of a decentralisation of the art world from the canonical, traditional venues like the Venice Biennale to another system that we now have where there are 150 biennales around the world,” she says. “The geopolitics of art really changed with Istanbul, and that's why I decided it was important.”  Read more…
Image: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Our current exhibition SIGNALS has been extended by a week and will now close on Saturday 13 September. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: SIGNALS, installation view (Billy Apple's THE ARTIST WILL LIVE FOREVER (Chinese) and FROM THE LAI SOO COLLECTION. and Jin Jiangbo's Hidden

Stephanie Rosenthal has been named as the artistic director of the 2016 Biennale of Sydney. Currently based in London, Rosenthal has been Chief Curator at the Hayward Gallery since 2007, having previously worked at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art. She was also one of three curators who realised a national section of the first biennial in Cartenga, Columbia earlier this year.
Image: Stephanie Rosenthal

SIGNALS responds to the changing face of Auckland, a multi-cultural city with a rapidly changing demographic, where the mix of European, Maori and Pacific Island cultures is being enriched by new New Zealanders, notably from Asia.

Artists in the exhibition include: Billy Apple (NZ/US), Stella Brennan (NZ) Trenton Garratt (NZ), Jin Jiangbo (CN), Seung Yul Oh (NZ/KR), John Reynolds (NZ), Layla Rudneva-Mackay (NZ) and Yuk King Tan (HK) and Wang Dawei (CN).

SIGNALS runs from 9 August to 6 September.
Image: Billy Apple, THE ARTIST WILL LIVE FOREVER (Chinese) 2013, uv impregnated ink on canvas, 618 x 1000mm