Karen Smith

The modern city of Shanghai rose up from truly 'muddy' origins, both in the soft subsoil its foundations were built upon and its early economy based on a trade in opium, or 'foreign mud'. Forced open to the British by the unequal Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Shanghai did what it does best—it beat the odds to become a 'bawdy...

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is truly an artist for the twenty-first century. In his sculptures, he refashions artefacts and antiques into surprising, sometimes monumental constructions such as Template (2007): hundreds of wooden doors and windows taken from demolished Ming and Qing dynasty temples and arranged into a massive outdoor sculpture. As much as these materials look to the past, they...