"Shitao-Van Gogh #7" by Zhang Hongtu (2004). Photo: Courtesy of Davis Museum

1. "On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West" at Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center through May 24, 2006. Organized by Stanford University, the exhibition includes sculptures, drawings, paintings, videos and installations, all of which examine China's encounters with the West. Whether it's skewed world maps, beautifully shot images of our trash shipped to China for sorting, cheap goods for import, the country's growing superpower status, critiques of our role as a superpower or the way in which Chinese artists were long marginalized by the art world, the show's impressive and thoughtful works take a blistering look at our treatment, understanding and dealings with China and her artists.

2. "The Public Table" and "Of(f) the Table-everything must go!" at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery through May 26, 2006. Like nomads, moving their belongs from one encampment to the next, the artists participating in the traveling show Public Art/Moving Site have been on the road since January. For roughly two months at a time, they have taken turns, setting up their work at New Haven's ArtSpace, Vermont's Rockingham Arts Museum Project and the Cambridge Art Council's Gallery. At the CAC Gallery, DeWitt Godfrey first filled both the gallery's entrance and the breezeway next to the caf?amplona with huge steel tubes. Next Michael Oatman took people's private collections of miniatures and models and put them on public display. And, now the artist collective Spruse is setting up a restaurant at 290 Main Street and transforming the gallery into a free store, turning viewers into consumers and food into a medium for art.

3. "Tipping Point: Health Narratives from the South End," at the Boston Center of the Arts' Mills Gallery through May 28, 2006. The connection between art and science has deep roots-- from Da Vinci's notebooks to Thomas Eakin's infamous painting, The Gross Clinic, up to recent art works that tinker with bioengineering. In this show, the artist Jennifer Hall joins forces with Dr. Ellen Ginsburg, a medical anthropologist and ethnographer, and a team of artists specializing in robotics, software programming and interactive DVDs. Together they've created a number of kinetic devices capitalizing on the bestseller "The Tipping Point's" arguable premise that, given the right conditions, a small number of activities lead to wide-spread epidemics. In this case, Ginsburg's interviews have been transformed into sculptures in which gallery viewers become the agents of change, activating sensors that--you guessed it--set off the pieces' tipping points.

"Youth with Slingshot" by Wang Du (2000). View more images from this month's exhibits.

4. Xu Bing: "Any Opinions?" at Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center through June 3, 2006. Ironically, just as the United Nations is advocating the abolishment of Traditional Chinese as a language, one of China's most famous artists Xu Bing has created a new Chinese-English hybrid. In this site-specific installation Xu has written 2 poems --directly onto the museum's walls -- in Square Word Calligraphy, a language he invented. At first glance the characters look Chinese. But if you look a little closer, the characters actually are made up of English letters; and, once the system behind the configurations are figured out, the poems become legible. Thus, in somewhat the same way that English words are transliterated into Chinese, Xu creates Chinese characters out of English words. The result suggests a future language in which Chinese and English co-exist, in which both mindsets--one whose language is made up characters that represent pictures of the world; the other whose language is based on letters that represent sounds--find a common ground.

5. Neeta Madahar: Nature Studies at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Mass., through June 4, 2006. Like photography itself, Neeta Madahar's photos seem to freeze time. Scenes of nature are so crisply rendered, so perfectly colored and still that a strange, eerie tableaux effect is created--one in which everything just seems just a bit too perfect and pristine, as if the film maker David Lynch was orchestrating life for Madahar to mirror back at us.

6. Barnaby Hosking/MATRIX 155 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, through June 4, 2006. Typically there is the making of an art work and then there is the art work. Unless the work in question is by the English artist Barnaby Hosking. Enjoying his first museum show in the U.S., Hosking's working methods and creations are all rolled into one seamless installation. Playing black off white, romanticism off mysticism, Hosking exhibits a painting, a sculpture and a video of both their evolutions, edited and projected in such a way as to not so much explain the mechanics of the pieces' making as to wrap them in still richer layers of mystery, myth and allegory.

7. Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993 at the Worcester Art Museum through June 25, 2006. Stephen Shore's life is an artist's dream-come-true. At fourteen, Shore sold his first photographs to the Museum of Modern Art. Four years later he was chronicling Warhol's factory in photos. Six years later he had his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. This show, uncovering twenty-five years of the wunderkind's productions, starts with Shore's 1968 road trip and ends with photographs from 1993. His genius: to brilliantly record not only his own life, but to tap into America's collective unconsciousness as well.

8. American Watercolors and Pastels, 1875-1950, at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., through June 25, 2006. Like spring's flowers, watercolor and pastel's bold, fresh and vivid colors delight the eye and dazzle the mind. The instant darlings of fashionable Modernist tastes, their sparkling effects perfectly mirror that era's move away from fussy, overstuffed drawing rooms. Since then, their appeal has never waned; but chances to see them are few and far between: Light sensitive and fragile they must be kept protected in storage room drawers. This then is a rare chance to see pieces by artists like Charles Demuth, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent--artists who helped make these kinds of works so popular.

9. Light My Fire: Rock Posters From the Summer of Love at the Museum of Fine Arts through August 13, 2006. Just in time for the warmer weather: the summer of love. Tucked into one of the museum's rotunda galleries is a sampling of psychedelic posters from the '60s. Their mind-bending forms and day glow colors fabulously argue that nothing beats pop culture for vividly conjuring up an age. As this show readily reveals, Abstract Expressionism may've change the art world forever; but it is the background noise of everyday life--the posters, fashions and even am radio--that provided the recognizable soundtrack.

10. Painting Summer in New England at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., through September 4, 2006. This show has Yankee pride written all over it. Curated by one of the experts in the field of American Art Trevor Fairbrother, it is full of paintings by such New England favorites as Stuart Davis, Childe Hassam and the more contemporary Alex Katz. With many of the American works, painted through the lens of French Impressionism, joining others purely inspired by the area's landscape, the paintings show off New England 's charms, her rugged coasts and cosmopolitan appeal.

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		Arts Features Films at the Gate Photos See photos of kung-fu movies and former Boston Chinatown movie theater locations. Guerrilla Art See photos of local artist Matthew Hincman's bench-like sculpture. "O" is for Original Local artist "Danny O" portrays whimsical scenes of summer in Boston. Multimedia Singer at 100 An exclusive online special explores the controversial work and life of Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gauguin's Tahiti Paintings Take a multimedia tour of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, including the famous painting, "Where Are We From." Hawthorne at 200 View a multimedia celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 200th birthday.