In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before drinks orders are taken by a human. The customers tip the monkeys in boiled soy beans. 

In China there are more than 100 million fans of Manchester United. At least that’s what I’m told when I get to the the city's National Football Museum. And in a sartorial decision unusual in the art world, we are greeted by artist Chen Wenbo wearing an Arsenal football scarf. In sport, as in contemporary art, the Chinese are often playing the same game as us.

It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.

Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.

The crusty old Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, but there’s a new art work by him at this year’s Folkestone Triennial. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye, but you can through a pair of binoculars. If you peer through a viewing tower from Folkestone’s disused Harbour Pier you’ll see one of Finlay’s enigmatic phrases come into focus: “WEATHER IS A THIRD TO PLACE AND TIME”. The words are written on the grey façade of a lighthouse in that gorgeous shade of midnight blue the artist favoured. 

Like a canny political campaigner, the Edinburgh Art Festival offers “something for everyone”. In this singular year for Scotland, the festival weaves together strands concerning the independence referendum, the Commonwealth and the centenery of the beginning of the First World War. It also provides an introduction to a host of other ideas and artistic worlds. 

In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra.

In 1920, Man Ray, now better known for his solarized photographs, produced a sculpture made from found objects. L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, named after the 19th-century French poet who used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, is a sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket and tied with string. The title refers to the poet’s evocation of the strange, even threatening beauty of familiar objects in startling juxtaposition, and is a line later adopted by André Breton to suggest Surrealist dislocation.

Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk. Supported by FRAC, it has so far amassed some 1,500 works of contemporary art, French and international.

At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.