Since the beginning of China's economic boom in the late 1980s and its ever-increasing influence on globalized society, the country's burgeoning contemporary art scene has attracted great attention around the world. However, despite the Chinese art market's emergence as a highly prolific industry and a growing international recognition of contemporary art from China, there is a remarkable lack of Chinese women artists represented in (inter-)national exhibitions and publications. Stepping Out! is the first comprehensive publication in 25 years to present a broadly representative selection of the work of contemporary Chinese female artists, including pioneering as well as emerging artists thus far little known abroad. Through an enormous wealth of perspectives, the artists reveal personal and social fears, contradictions, and hopes in the tense field occupied by powerful tradition, and shed light upon the search for identity both as a woman and as an artist within a rapidly changing Chinese society. Stepping Out! features more than 100 artworks by 27 artists born between 1960 and 1994 living in mainland China, including Wen Hui, Cao Fei, Lin Tianmiao, Xing Danwen, Yin Yiuzhen, Ma Qiusha, Xiao Lu, Luo Yang and Tong Wenmin.

At the Tipping Point Taking a deliberately kaleidoscopic approach, the exhibition 1.5 Degrees and the accompanying catalogue encourage us to address the climate crisis in a curious, innovative, participatory, and active way. More than 30 international artists, including melanie bonajo, Laure Prouvost, Julian Charrière, Otobong Nkanga, Marianna Simnett, Ernesto Neto and the collective SUPERFLEX, explore the complex interdependencies between humans, nature and technology, and search for solutions, from plants as data repositories, algae as energy sources and microorganisms as empathic dialogue partners. Including all parts of the museum collections as well as new outdoor installations at the National Garden Show BUGA, the book presents various models of how to use the means of art to reshape the coexistence of species and emphasizes the hope-giving potential of creativity and innovation.

Martin Eder's new body of work is inhabited by ghostly hybrid creatures. Blurring the transition between humans, animals, and supernatural beings, Eder explores the motif of the boundary and its transgression in his oil paintings. His subjects allude to an encounter with the underworld and recall Dante's Inferno. A symbolism that both reflects a (post-)pandemic unease and hints at the encounter of reality and illusion. Eerie and fascinating at the same time, the paintings outline a space marked by the collapse of a shared perception. In addition to studio insights and paintings, the volume includes an elucidating text by art historian Thomas Elsen as well as a conversation between Eder, Damien Hirst and Tim Marlow, director of London's Design Museum.

The title Present Perfect ambiguously relates to an “ideal present� on the one hand culminating in a “perfect� moment, and on the other hand to the English tense referring to a state or an action that began in the past and continues to the present. An allusion to the photography’s utopian attempt to enshrine the present moment, when it is only ever able to capture a moment in the past. Echoing a plethora of attentive everyday observations, Eidinger’s photographs capture oftentimes paradoxical scenes of mundane life including people’s ambivalent behaviour. In a society of singularities, reality has become a colossal photomontage. Behind it lies an abysmal world entangled in contradictions. Eidinger depicts the lonely emptiness of modern life’s non-places, provisionalities, garishly out-of-place oddities. His confrontations with insufferable incongruities turn into symbolic images of an era of exhaustion. Present Perfect assembles new images captured with his mobile phone, as well as images taken with a reflex camera, tracing Eidinger’s photographic self-explorations over the past 20 years.

You can find him on the stage or in front of a film camera, in the director’s chair or at the mixing board—Lars Eidinger has many faces, and not just as an actor. His performances testify to a sheer, inexhaustible energy that makes every appearance a tour de force that infects and electrifies the audience in an almost magical way. No less can be expected from his photographic works, which are gathered together here for the first time in a publication. As diverse as the subjects of the pictures are, they still allow us to recognise Eidinger’s signature: elements of fi m and theatre unite to form a unique rhythm that transforms the everyday into a paradoxical world essence. Only one word can suitably describe the richness of these visual spheres and the way of seeing that they articulate: epic.