The clichés are by now as old as Confucian proverbs and ancient Chinese secrets. China is a place in transformation, caught between old and new, east and west, and so on and so on. But if sprawling factory floors and towering construction cranes have become the photojournalist's de facto images of it, then Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China offers something more penetrating. Occupying both the International Center of Photography and Asia Society, the exhibition includes 130 works by 60 artists who impart the confidence and fearlessness—and awkwardness and untidiness—that inevitably accompany change. Artists like Liu Jian and Zhao Qin, with their absurdist depiction of interchangeable Chinese archetypes binging at McDonald's, as well as Hong Hao and Liu Zheng (shown top right), parody the crasser side of globalization. Zheng Guogu, Yang Yung and others portray a young subculture in search of its own footing, while the likes of Wang Qingsong, An Hong and Zhao Bandi reenact traditional Chinese tales and mythology with ironic subversion. And in a series of self-portraits, Zhang Huan slowly camouflages his face in Chinese calligraphy until it's blacked-out completely, producing a haunting yet defiant image of individualism that's informed, overcome and absorbed by the country's collective past.

Pizza boxes declaring "God Bless America" on stacks of the New York Post announcing "Liberty in Iraq" give a hint as to which boys K48 magazine founder Scott Hug and Michael Magnan are talking about in Boys Gone Wild, on view at John Connelly Presents. The installation—covered in sand, Islamic decorative motifs, and airing a soundtrack that includes the voice of George Bush I during Iraq War I—also features a circular enclosure covered in newspaper portraits of everyone from politicians and moguls to ordinary folks having their fifteen minutes. Not just an indictment of the current Bush administration, the show is a critique of a media, corporate and political infrastructure corrupted by its own propaganda, and the population that falls for it. In one installation's collages—among many that parody contemporary culture in slogans and images—Nancy Reagan assures us that "It's Not Yor (sic) Fault." In fact, there's plenty of blame to go around.

There might not be any squirting flowers or overpacked miniature cars, but there's plenty of clowning around going on at Cheim & Read gallery. I Am the Walrus, a group show curated by Jan Avgikos, includes works by artists who have ventured into the world of rubber noses and floppy shoes in the last twenty years. From recent works like a Cindy Sherman clown self-portrait to Bruce Nauman's video of a court jester jumping up and down and Paul McCarthy's freakish 1974 "Basement Clown," the show is—like the characters that inspired it—both slapstick and eerie, and reminds us how, especially today, buffoonery and diversion often barely mask darker truths.

Their detachment is estranging and, in both features and dress, they're noticeably average, but it's hard to take your eyes off Karel Funk's men at 303 Gallery. In eleven small-scale, photo-realist portraits set on blank, white fields, the Canadian artist's subjects are all seen with averted gazes—some with eyes closed, others viewed only from the back—with many further obscured by baseball caps, visors and, especially, hooded windbreakers. However, skillfully composed and rendered with such realism as to seem unreal, their clothing approaches the ecclesiastical, and their isolation nearly ascetic. Indeed, their indistinctiveness and remoteness become their most transcendent qualities.

It may be associated with footballs and gross junk food snacks but, in Heide Hatry's hands, pig skin is both a product and poetic medium. At Volume Gallery, the German artist, who grew up on a pig farm, brings a palpable respect for the material to works of redemptive, almost primeval beauty despite, or because of, the violence that produced it. Several hides—some gashed and stitched back together—are mounted and framed to reveal the inherent richness of their surfaces, while others become a canvas for Old Master portraits, recreated as ghostly visages that demand a reexamination of humanism. Elsewhere, pig fetuses are posed in sexual positions and packaged like supermarket meats. These works portray a life cycle coopted by human production systems, exhibiting a near animistic (in a post-industrial sense) devotion.