Galerie Joseph Tang Sculpture inhabits a precarious position in the genre-bending inclusiveness of contemporary art, which, encouraged by the digital turn of culture at large, lately prizes ephemerality at the expense of monumentality and a cartoonish or kitsch grotesque in lieu of ‘process’: Carsten Höller’s groovy tube slides descending from Richard Serra’s massive rolls of steel via Dan Graham’s playfully reflexive pavilions. The need for statuary or commemoration in the 21st century feels equally superfluous amongst artists of the younger generation, after Jeff Koons, so sculpture slips into a liminal space somewhere between image and environment, drifting far from figurative aesthetic notions of representation and beauty toward the anti-humanist installation, complete with a post-Duchampian fetish for the consumer object despite any art historian’s theories of dematerialization. The young French artist Chloé Quenum’s recent work addresses a less sensational, still somewhat tongue-in-cheek legacy of Modernism; that of post-Minimalism.

REDCAT Since its 1974 premiere, Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece Chinatown has been interpreted, for better or for worse, as a meta-film of sorts – both an allegory of the cinematic valorization and corruption of Hollywood and an abreaction to the insidious trauma visited upon its director with the zeitgeist-defining murder of his wife, Sharon Tate. Mythologized as the artistic climax of Robert Evans-era Paramount, the film’s success was also indebted to the self-congratulatory role given to the setting of Los Angeles itself, re-envisioned during the louche post-1960s era as a gilded soundstage.

Travesía Cuatro A hypnotizing sound overwhelmed the gallery, as if heralding an ominous event that never occurred. The source of the noise was a record player, looping in the final grooves of an old vinyl record by the famous Mexican folk singer José Alfredo Jiménez

Linn Lühn Some people say that extraordinary names can influence the course of a life. A common name like Peter is less likely to be predetermining

Leo Xu Projects In the streets of Shanghai, the evolution of male identity is apparent. Tapered jeans and asymmetric haircuts, smart shades and toned biceps: the possibilities of body image and fashion, once denied under the uniformed rules of Mao, are opened into the space of capital. Curator Leo Xu has spent several years collecting and commissioning works that interrogate the development of male identity according to local, but also global, contexts.

Angus-Hughes Gallery On entering the large space taken up by John Wynne’s new installation, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer physical impact of low frequencies as they make the windows rattle and the floor tremble, and by the elusiveness of high frequencies that flutter around the ears and intermittently create an odd sense of aural déj

Lawrie Shabibi ‘Black is the New White’ features six new works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke; it’s her first solo show since winning the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011. The idea of the ‘trap’ is the artist’s main point of inspiration in these new works, focusing on how society can become entrapped by social, cultural, political and economic ideologies; in all of these pieces, a distinct regional context abounds. The most literal reflection of entrapment is apparent in Smooth Criminal (2012) a sculpture made from a white, spherical lobster trap, which is commonly found in the UAE

frieze , the leading magazine for contemporary art and culture, is inviting entries for the Frieze Writer’s Prize 2012. Frieze Writer’s Prize was established in 2006 and is presented annually

Federica Schiavo Ariel Orozco’s second solo show at Rome’s Federica Schiavo gallery, ‘Detra Del Cristal’ (Behind the Glass), dealt with issues of plenitude and scarcity, pre-emption and impotence, evoking both desire and lack in a consumer driven world. Playing on these elements the show expressed – via the presentation of a Champagne bottle, over 3000 glasses filled with sand, an unlit firework, a pencil and tens of plug holes bored into the floor – the eerie sensation that whilst all may be well, there is always the potential for things to change quickly and in ways we might not have possibly forecast. On the opening night viewers were met with a cautious curator – Chris Sharp, a writer and editor at Kaleidoscope magazine – warning people not to knock the grey pencil, Gris (Grey, 2012), which was precariously balanced on corner of a desk.

GEM. Museum of Contemporary Art LIFE Magazine , astronauts and moon landings; these stereotypical American subjects set Matthew Day Jackson on the road to success in his homeland, and in ‘Matthew Day Jackson. In Search of…’, they are the subjects of the artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe (travelling from MAMbo in Bolgona, Italy and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland in 2011)