Born in 1975, one year before the death of Mao, Chen Qiulin seems fated to personally channel the shocks of China’s relentless social metamorphosis. Five years ago, the artist, trained in printmaking at the famed Sichuan Academy, saw her hometown near the Yangtze River wiped out by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Her efforts to commemorate this loss have included carving 100 common Chinese family names in tofu and displaying the characters along a roadside, as well as having several abandoned buildings reconstructed, brick by brick, inside the Long March exhibition space in Beijing. But her most widely known riposte comprises richly colored videos and photographs in which she and a few accomplices, ornately costumed and made up as traditional Beijing Opera players, cavort amid demolition rubble with new high-rises soaring around them like unnatural cliffs.

In this engaging and provocative exhibition, Michael Rakowitz considered the degree to which adolescent fantasy is woven into the pursuit of modern warfare. The show presented sculptural installations, found objects and panels, which combine handwritten text with line drawings, mimicking the style of graphic novels. One set of panels recounts the history of the hot air balloon, which was deployed as a means of spying during the French Revolution and later became the inspiration for Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Another set of drawings tells the tale of Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist who was inspired as a child by Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Bull went on to work for both Iraq and the U.S., contributing to the creation of the American missile defense shield. Originally disguised as an experimental means of space exploration, the yet-to-be-realized program became known as “Star Wars,” an unmistakable refer

Could it be that Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s anthropodino actually felt a tad small? The statistics for this succession of cavelike chambers and corridors, many of them adorned with spice-filled stalactites, suggest it should have been otherwise. Organized by curator Tom Eccles for Creative Time, anthropodino measured 180 by 120 feet overall, with one elephantine spice-laden trunk drooping an impressive 60 vertical feet. A marvel of tinted translucent Lycra stretched over bone-shaped plywood supports, it was billed as Neto’s largest sculptural work to date.

Gaylen Gerber’s reputation rests largely on his tactic of significantly altering the normal, expected viewing conditions in which the work of his colleagues is seen. He eschews the term “collaboration,” disavowing the shared intentions that term implies. This recent “two-person project” with Joe Scanlan was a departure: Gerber showed three site-specific works which, while framing Scanlan’s sculpture, also functioned autonomously.

Chinese video artist Yang Fudong has gained international recognition for his poetic, dreamlike meditations on Chinese culture and identity, most fully expressed in his epic five-part work, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003-07), currently on view at the Asia Society in New York [see article this issue]. East of Que Village (2007), installed recently at Marian Goodman, is a sharp departure from that approach. Created for a 2007 exhibition at Tate Liverpool titled “The Real Thing: New Art from China,” the roughly 21-minute, black-and-white work seems indeed brutally, even painfully real. Projected on six screens, it depicts scenes from daily life in the artist’s native village, a desolate and desperately poor settlement whose human inhabitants are shown mutely performing prosaic tasks—eating, feeding animals and, in one scene, pulling together what appears to be a rather pathetic New Year’s parade. But the real focus is a pack of wild dogs that lurk<