The exhibition opens with two photographs of the artist, Tang Song, being taken away by police, stepping on the logo of “no returns” of the “China Avant-Garde Exhibition” at the National Art Museum in 1989. In a letter Tang Song had written to the late Dutch archivist Hans van Dijk soon after his release from…

Around 30 years ago, Italo Calvino used a story from the Boccaccio classic The Decameron in a lecture as a prime illustration of the concept of “lightness.” Boccaccio paints the portrait of a hermetic Florentine poet in Guido Cavalcanti, the refined and solemn philosopher who is distrusted and cast out by Florence’s profligate socialites and…