Keizo Kitajima and Yasumasa Morimura, Portraits for the Wild Grass: L. X. / M. Y. September 17th, 2023, 2023

Photo: Hajime Kato

Courtesy the artists

The Spatiotemporal Folds

The Yokohama Triennale is the most representative bi-/triennial exhibition of contemporary art in Japan. Since 2001, when the 1st Yokohama Triennale started, its operation has been pushed by cultural organizations specializing in international exchanges. In 2008, the exhibition switched to being run by the overall planning authority of the city of Yokohama. That year, the Triennale’s theme, “Time Crevasse,” touched on the concept of time for the first time, and thereafter, the idea of time was carried on in the themes of the 2011 and 2014 Triennales. The 2011 theme was relevant to incidental time; the 2014 theme, however, turned to the narrative time of criticality. Doubtlessly, the energy of historicity accumulated throughout the three Triennales held from 2008 to 2014. A decade later, the 8th Yokohama Triennale could be regarded as a burst of that energy of historicity.   

In the ten years from “Art Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the sea of oblivion” (the Yokohama Triennale theme in 2014) to “Wild Grass: Our Lives” (the Yokohama Triennale theme in 2024 ), what has shifted in the narratives of human beings? From a 1953 sci-fi novel to a 1927 poetry compilation, from the fictionalized grand narrative published at the beginning of the Cold War to the internalized narrative of the post-globalization age, or let’s call it the “New-Cold-War-To-Be”, the “retrospective future” of the spatiotemporal folds has become the essential sub-narrative of this exhibition. It coordinates all the spatiotemporal folds that are happening—between Ray Bradbury and Lu Xun, between Morimura Yasumasa (the artistic director of the 2014 Yokohama Triennale) and Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding (the artistic directors of the 2024 Yokohama Triennale), between “oblivion” and “wild grass”, between super-control and out-of-control, between Japan and China—to face the history that people are experiencing in this world, and to face all the phenomena, both that accumulated up to now and that emerging today. Between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we have experienced challenges in various historical aspects: (I) violence by the far-right and far-left ideologies has infinitely raised trivial issues to a higher moral level, (II) homogenization in the thinking of historicism, (III) the formalization of structuralism, (IV) utilitarianism and the de-politicization of pluralism, (V) the entanglement of deconstruction and globalization and (VI) the fragmentation and universalization of the governance of biopolitics. In urgent need are we of the method that could pierce through all these transcultural layers of history and help us understand this layering structure: spatiotemporal folds. 

This method, to which the artistic directors (ADs), Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding infer as they return to Lu Xun, is no longer about the cosmological imagination of progressive science, nor does it follow the intelligent device of mechanism anymore. Instead, it is a mode of thinking of utmost concern, between today’s mind and world, between imagination and action. It is also the eco-evolutionary intelligence that is open, extensive, and fluent. Our consciousness has grown clear along the intertwined development of human history and environmental history: reality and story have never been accorded onto a singular axis or coordinates. Rather, they are related to each other on all different scales, in all different aspects, and with respect to all different materialities and interconnected events. From ocean current to turbulence, from mainstream to undercurrent, the distributaries and layers of history either extend or carve out all kinds of narrative spaces. Therefore, the continuity of the world’s changes must happen—and complete—during the dissociations and jump cuts of time and space. That’s why spatiotemporal folds, which come as nuances of the theories of relativity and quantum entanglement, have become the very core method of thinking today.

Miles Greenberg, Mars (left), Janus (right), 2022

Collection of the Artist

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artist

Joar Nango, Ávnnastit / Harvesting Material Soul, 2024 

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artist

Quietude, Out of Control

On the second floor of Queen Mall, we see the print of Lu Xun, dressed up by Morimura Yasumasa and photographed by Kitajima Keizo. This performed image of Lu Xun is deployed to the mall, a space with the blurred face of time, as documentation instead of being installed, i.e. sanctified, on a museum’s exterior or interior wall. Imitation in the role-playing, duplication in the medium, and delivery in the image are exertive forces in a mall that is a mixture of sales info, the desire to consume, and speeds of traffic, creating this bizarre tension. Here, the spatiotemporal fold puts up a full “show” through its low visibility.

In the 2014 Yokohama Triennale, curated by Morimura Yasumasa, there was a tension similar to that created by the Lu-Xun-in-a-mall in the 2024 Triennale: the main visual images (VI) showed echoes of both woodcut marks and shimmering water, overlapping both the meanings of “engraving” and “the sea of oblivion” while presenting the mirrored relation between printmaking and writing and the duplicating/comparing relationship between mind and language. Such a tight bond is likewise found in Morimura Yasumasa’s dressed performance, where unity and difference, recording and forgetting coexist. Whereas Lu and Liu’s VI leans towards a state of flowing or doodling, woodcut printmaking is introduced to the exhibition by showing the relevance of various spatiotemporal folds. The first case is Li Pingfan, the significant printmaking artist in the New Woodcut Movement. Through his woodcut practice, Li engaged in an exchange and promotion of the fine arts between China and Japan  that lasted for over half a century. The second case is the woodcut movement of that era, which was closely related to Lu Xun. The third case is the wide use of printmaking during social movements in contemporary Asia. We can possibly make this statement: spatiotemporal folds (an aspect brought forward by the 2014 Triennale), created by “woodcut” between the historic and the psychological, the forgotten and the remembered, seem to have been adopted as a fundamental spirit for art in the 2024 Yokohama Triennale. They embody how individuals, as well as the world, pass on direct and internalized emotions through art. Hence, the politics of woodcut printmaking makes its landing on such profound artistry.

As an artistic-cultural symbol, Lu Xun was constructed in three aspects: literature, politics, and art. However, with what awareness of issues and demands should we re-think or appropriate Lu Xun? How can we reactivate this symbol today? How may “Lu Xun” be an effective, pivotal point today? Without question, the occasion of the 2024 Yokohama Triennale has created the opportunity for us to face these new questions again. Between 1924 and 1926, upon the completion of Wild Grass, his poetry compilation, Lu Xun was brutally criticized by his leftist comrades. His turning towards immanence in Wild Grass shows his anxiety as well as yearning when faced with a chaotic time; furthermore, it shows his sincere view on life while breaking away from collectivity and rigid ideologies. Individuals in this poetry compilation are no longer doctors, spectators, or mentors, but participants in it—in a time of incompetency, of unease, in the vulnerability which everyone shared, and in the possibilities of life and emotion thus expressing their passions and ideas. Indeed, that is the “Lu Xun out-of-control” in prose poetry. Or, it is a Lu Xun reflecting on the concept of “out of control” in a nation and an era that were out of control. Just like Gramsci created by Pasolini, though left with only his own ashes, Lu Xun is still able to touch the core of the revolution in the minstrelsy of immanence and in the conflict filled with oppression and chaos, by transformation of both the self and the world.

The mud of life dumped on the ground. Trees do not grow from it, only wild grass. For this, I am to blame. […] I take pride in my wild grass, but I detest the ground they adorn. Fires surge and churn underground. Once the molten lava erupts through the surface, it will burn up all the wild grass and trees, so there will be nothing left to rot. But I’m at ease, joyful. I will laugh, I will sing. (Lu Xun, “Inscriptions”, Wild Grass, 1927. Translated by Eileen J. Cheng.)

As a theme, “wild grass” indicates the relationship between the individual and the world (i.e. all kinds of systems); it is as much as the shape of anxious individuals on the earth and within this era, or an overlap between the mirroring life and death, as the cycle of lives in a grander world. The “wild grass” refers to neither “people” or “the commoner” in anarchist or naïve democrat terms but leans towards the phenomena emerging in the world and the landscapes of the earth. With the general image that the museum lobby presents, Lu and Liu unfold their contemporary interpretation of “wild grass” into several aspects, hence constructing the introduction of the exhibition: first, the shapes of humans; second, situations; last, language and information. Ukrainian art group Open Group uses the human voice to imitate the sounds of weapons, so as to form an experience of war; likewise, the Gen-Z performance artist of Ukrainian background, Miles Greenberg, shapes, crystalizes, and superposes various performing bodies across the borders of time into homo succulentus. Occupying the entrance is Pippa Garner, accomplished in critiquing American consumption culture. He grafted a fashionable, “blonde, white” woman onto a “white-hatted, black” male model to create homo mixtura, something dubbed the “human prototype,” remarking a mixed-gendered look that carries the post-pandemic biological and cyborg views. The wild-grassium these decentralized human images present rather straightforwardly confronts the human subjectivity of overconsumption, which was imitated by Michael Landy, a member of the YBA art movement in the 2014 Yokohama Triennale with his Art Bin piece at the very same entrance of the museum lobby. Looking at the dialog between the 2014 and 2024 Triennales across time, we see that art’s response to consumption culture seems to have shifted from a refusing gesture of critique to an internalized state of infection. Meanwhile, the hand-made constructions by Joar Nango filling up the site and the huts and wigwams built by Søren Aagaard, Susan Cianciolo, and Shiga Lieko respectively in the educational, co-learning form are both a comparison between handcraft and information (language) and a co-construction of survival—wild-grassium is composed of temporal conditions of survival, too.

On the first floor of the museum, where the exhibition begins, gather the decentralized human images, situations of survival/sustainability, and conditions of information. In the view of an ecosystem of decentralization and post-disaster survival under globalization, they form a gesture of exchange with 2014, continuing and responding to Morimura Yasumasa’s frustration and concern for the excessiveness and ecstasy within a context of globalization. Similarly, Sandra Mujinga, the artist who has lived between Europe and Africa (The Congo, Norway and Germany) continues the dark, ghostly overtone of her artistry, transforming the shapes of ancient creatures into suspended spaces that resemble temporary shelters after disasters take place, and ingeniously responds to that gothic piece by Wim Delvoye,  the master of combining biomaterials and fetishist imagery, in 2014. Threaded throughout the 2024 exhibition spaces are Teshigahara Sofu’s works, just like the offering-yet-critiquing boxes by Kasahara Emiko, which  gave the  status of “immanence” with their changefulness in 2014. “Out of control” is an accelerated extension of “excessiveness” and “redundancy,” whereas Lu and Liu gather and articulate a kind of quietude under the wild-grassium. They are working out the quietude that is turbulently emerging from a time of transformation; wild-grassium, in Lu Xun’s expectation, was serving the operation underground, instead of accumulating the rotten. This contemporary, ecological control-lessness represented in such “quietude, out-of-control” at the very beginning completely shatters the symmetric “stepping upward” arranged by Tange Kenzo, the designer of the art museum. Having restrainedly set some asymmetric differences, Tange Kenzo still achieved a journey of sublimation, humble and firm, with the terraced design. In this Triennale, the Japanese modernist geographical space has been transformed by the artists into all kinds of rescuing, self-learning tents, just like those gymnasiums or schools after nuclear disasters and the epidemic. The Triennale itself, therefore, has become a center for disaster recovery and response, while we, wandering amongst the works and installations, are just like those people in disasters, buzzing and spreading rumors as well as survival information.

Photograph by Thomas Williams as presnted by Jonathan Horowitz, Food industry workers rally on the National Mall to highlight the contributions immigrants have made during the pandemic and call on Congress to deliver COVID-19 and citizenship relief for 11 million undocumented immigrants on Wednesday , February 17, 2021, 2021/2024 print

©AP/AFLO／Miho Dohi, from buttai

View of the 8th Yokohama Triennale

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artists

Side Core, big letters, small things (detail), 2024

Photo: Ohno Ryusuke

Courtesy the artists

The Critical Deep Dive

Works of Shiga Lieko, the major photographer working on the Fukushima issue, and Teshigahara Sofu (father of Teshigahara Hiroshi), the modernist avant-garde artist, can be found throughout two spaces of the chapter, namely “Fires in the Woods,” unpacking politics and economics respectively. Shiga’s red-toned serial photography, criticizing governmental policy on the Fukushima disaster, covers the outer walls of the two galleries, and inside are pieces of Teshigahara’s Kojiki Series. Under this title, the chapter also implicitly draws both axes of Western modernity and nature to cross the two directions of “fire advancing” and “crystalizing,” thus examining contemporary experiences. The chapter “Streams and Rocks” unravels its title, not with frenzying movements or highly stylized artistic expressions, but with an emphasis on the individuals and their methods, regardless of whether in terms of cross-cultural exchanges or how they navigate between personal careers and waves of art—such a relationship is just like what’s between streams and rocks, lasting, quiet, adjusting to bonds. For instance, using the common exchange mode of fine arts associations, Li Pingfan led the initiation of community bonding among immigrants; the showcase also focuses on the development lineage of what had motivated the communal bonding. 

“Fires in the Woods” is filled with more conflict and turbulence, or, shall we say, the artists’ feelings of trying to communicate with the outside world. This exhibition chapter attempts to take a retrospective look at historic Western Europe and Japan (Jeremy Deller and Hamaguchi Takashi) and contemporary Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Appearing in both spaces are the works of Slovakian artist Tomas Rafa, the cinéma vérité project started in 2009 to document new, rising nationalisms. Further, how can anxious individuals take a “deep dive” (or settle down) in a turbulent time, as they echo those words on the wall from Kuriyagawa Hakuson, the author of Symbols of Depression, as they speak of their own situation in the advancing fires? The ADs set up tension in the galleries with multiple dualities of fire-advancing and crystallization—Shiga vs. Teshigahara, Deller and Rafa’s intense emotions in contrast to Josh Kline’s crystallization of pedestrians’ instant actions to cope with an incident, Kosovar artist Artan Hajrullahu’s everyday sketches of shattered ordinary life and Kobayashi Akio’s educational project, B-semi. Accordingly, the space on the other side shows more economic fires with the excessive goods under globalization, chaotic phenomena due to consumption, and the alienation of labor. Following his artistic lineage, Danish artist Jens Haaning’s switch of value presents the acceleration and contradiction of trading. Taiwanese artist Huang Po-Chih, who has a long interest in the circulation of bio-resources, creates sentimental fiction about the relationship between garments and individual lives. Departing from non-fiction to set off her cross-media artmaking, Margaret Salmon captures the spiderweb-like connections and tension between objects, materials, images, and memories, and produces ruins that are being lived, or, in other words, a consumerist life that is relics-becoming. In addition, hidden in this chapter as well is Sakamoto Ryuichi’s 2006 piece, a tribute to Nam June Paik. A smashed violin not only recorded the flux of avant-garde art and media art, but also preserved emotions that had deep-dived for years. An artist witnesses, bears, and records the tremendous change of their time, meanwhile constantly performing their own flow of change, adjustment (evolution), and crystallization (individualization). 

In the two chapters “Fires in the Woods” and “Streams and Rocks,” Wild Grass: Our Lives has displayed the role, also the act, that artists take facing a new era in formation, from the twentieth century to right before the pandemic of the twenty-first century: the deep dive. This internal state of the deep dive is a requirement, no matter whether for the most up-close documentation or for confronting the harshest anger. It is a deep dive into criticality. To take a critical deep dive is to transcend depression – in fact, the deep dive and the depression, are they not the two sides of a single mirror?

Modernity is no longer a solution here, and the modernity of colonization is but a bunch of embarrassing, superficial spectacles. While the anger born in oppression burns and advances, it seems to have been embodied in the histories of Asia and armored with alchemists’ gold—no more opposition between the soft and hard, the resolving and clumping, and perhaps some wiser Dao of life may allow all of them to co-exist. Inheritance also shows new aspects following the topic of education. The Teshigahara father and son are the perfect example: both were devoted to Japan’s exchange with the outside world. The former introduced numerous Fluxus artists to follow his personal consciousness and transform materials and media; the latter went through the transformational journey from ikebana to avant-garde art, from installations with plants and calligraphy to metal casting. Shiga Lieko relocated to Fukushima because of the 3/11 Tohoku nuclear crisis (the accident of a nuclear power station releasing radioactive materials after the Great Tohoku Earthquake), so as to reconnect with the community and dedicate to her own child’s education. Her DIALOG IN THE FOG shares with us a blazing Dao of life: “connections” and “relationships” can lead us through the fog. 

In terms of the presentation of medium and space, Lu and Liu’s narration displays how the transformation of materials can resonate with the concepts of translation and education in human history. The experimental, artistic education developed by Kobayashi Akio and B-semi Yokohama resonates with Li Pingfan’s migration, exchange, and education in the “Streams and Rocks” chapter. Tomiyama Taeko, in the “My Liberation” chapter, offers another art model of education with her own striving through diaspora, political identity, and gender roles. The research, selection, and showcase of Li Pingfan and Tomiyama Taeko in this Triennale is of special significance. We may see it as a cross-cultural genealogy of Lu Xun’s internal anxiety expanding into the present time. They were figures in the China–Japan and the Japan–Korea cross-cultural relationships, respectively. This double study firstly reflects the profound concern of the artists for the country and nation, as well as their participation in movements, which was of historic importance. Yet, throughout their lives, Li and Tomiyama’s beliefs had far outgrown the limits of those grand narrative subjects, such as migration, war, or identity; it is the special significance of individual art that gets highlighted here. With printmaking, Li transcended the intensified relationship between China and Japan over different periods of time, and reached pure, friendly exchanges between art peers; even though she had personally experienced the conflict between identities, Tomiyama projected inclusivity and care to the conditions around the world. One quietly moved forward in his communal relationships, and the other witnessed time as she was making her voice heard. Without a doubt, these two had embodied a way out of the wild-grassium. In these cases, experimentality and creativity are nearly the most profound contact points for art and education. They allow us to feel vaguely, as we walk through the exhibition, the connection between education and art in human destiny: the deep dive as an action.

Xper.Xr, Grinder, Megaphone, Rattles from Tailwhip (Losing my religion,
Yokohama, 2024), 1989/1990/1994

Collection of the Artist

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artist

Søren Aagaard, Preppers Lab, 2024

View of the 8th Yokohama Triennale

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artist

The Mirroring Dialectics

Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s words inside the gallery run right across Lu Xun; as the translator of Kuriyagawa’s book Symbol of Depression, Lu Xun was curated to be in the “Symbol of Depression” chapter. Using the image of “nobody” and the motif of “mourning” that were found throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lu and Liu weave the narrative of the exhibition. The oppressed people, laborers, and unconscious consumers all have become the fulcrum for intellectuals and those who are aware of their citizenship to think about the world. The mourning, farewells and melancholy of people when faced with utter desolation, oftentimes, constitute depression that is beyond words.

In such depression and battles so miserable, as we march on the road of life, we’d groan, scream, whine, or cry. But from time to time, we could be intoxicated in the joy and ode to triumph. Such sound we make is art. (Symbol of Depression, written by Kuriyagawa Hakuson, Chinese translation into Chinese by Lu Xun. Re-translation into English by Wang Zhuxin)

Mirroring relationships with multiple aspects are well demonstrated in this chapter, such as Käthe Kollwitz mourning for Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg’s comrade, vs. Ono Tadashige expressing mourning with the piece, Death of Three Generations (1931); Pippa Garner’s long-term documentation of fetishist items in consumption vs. South Ho’s recording of drawing strokes in urban spaces. Furthermore, it is exactly these mirroring relationships with multitudes that let the deep divers, artists, and us within the wild-grassium understand that vitality has always reflected death, the oppressed have always reflected the violence of the dominant, sexual minorities have always reflected the perfunctoriness and blindness of biopolitics’ governance. In the words of both Kuriyagawa Hakuson and Lu Xun, Lu and Liu have found mirroring relationships which they can use to frame their dialectics. The “Symbol of Depression” chapter put the spatiotemporal difficulties on display, whereas the “Dialogue with the Mirrors” chapter is where the ADs really unfold their statement.

The mirroring dialectics is presented as the contrast between life and death in the “Dialogue with the Mirrors” chapter: from Özgür Kar’s animation-sculpture installation of three skeleton instrumentalists to Raffaella Crispino’s white neon light installation questioning coloniality, We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors (from Stanisław Lem’s novel, Solaris), the artists break away from the oppositional or cut-ties confrontation and choose to position themselves in a mirroring relationship as a solution. Is it possible—with our experience in facing a world out of control and history nonlinear as a foundation—to open up the field of immanence within individuals and networks so we can escape the binary and linear narrative of life and death? Through dense reading into the works and writing on the exhibition narratives, Lu and Liu constantly enter into mirroring dialectics to deploy works and information. Hereby we may try to imagine what Lu Xun was facing between 1924 and 1926—is it not the recognition that the relationship between life and reality is the same as nonlinear space and image in a mirroring relationship, and “wild-grassium” is neither the fantasy of wildfires for anarchists or third-wave democrats, nor the “multitude” of Antonio Negri, which is closer to our time. It is the liminal dynamics of immanence, reaching the peak via mirroring dialectics. It is the “mundane impetus,” contrary to the Bergsonian imagination of evolution, “vital impetus.” Therefore, from the AD’s design of showing Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska’s various series (especially, the Mama series) as antiques, we can clearly see how they have taken the pathway of “mundane impetus” to launch the flux of cyberization in all kinds of twin technological imaginaries, as shown in the Jomon and New Japan Dream section, even in the mixed media painting by Tsukuda Hiroki, which merges living/dead cyborg figures. Henceforth, we see that the “mundane impetus” is not “vital impetus,” which has already entered the abstract imagination of molecular biology. It is the specific factors, coming from the earth, rivers, woods, and all environments. Artificial calculation and natural generation, in this era where technology is going out of control, do they not end up inside a mirroring world that is of neither the living nor the dead?

Your Bros. Filmmaking Group (So Yo-Hen, Liao Hsiu-Hui, Tien Zong-Yuan), Ký Túc Xá/ Dorm, 2023/2024

View of the 8th Yokohama Triennale

Photo: Ryohei Tomita

Courtesy the artists

Hajime Matsumoto, Inter-Asia Woodcut Mapping Group, Liao Xaun-Zhen & Huang I-Chieh at the 8th Yokohama Triennale 

Photo: Ohno Ryusuke

Courtesy the artists

Whose Liberation?

Liberation is a dream that art always holds on to yet also a commitment it can never un-claim. Even though Claire Bishop has introduced social-participatory art to art history in the name of avant-garde, the voices of liberation might still sound too naïve and harsh, and the outcry of many contemporary artworks may seem mere whispers in comparison. However, during this Triennale, Lu and Liu confront this issue full-on: they invite the artists to join the discussion of liberation rather than simply blowing up the volume of it. The speakers’ works concern the radiation and experimentation of liberation and answer the questions, as well as expectations for liberation, while the exhibition deploys and adjusts different dialogical relationships between different voices of liberation. “Dialogue with the Mirrors” is not only a title to define one area in the Triennale, but the method used throughout the exhibition narrative and the curatorial logic. Tange Kenzo’s asymmetrical design places a circle and a square on either side of the architecture’s axis, creating a relevance to Lu and Liu’s design of mirroring dialectics, where geometric asymmetry is used to symbolize the mirroring relationship between the lineage of life and the generation of networks. The ADs have also located Tomiyama Taeko and Your Bros. Filmmaking Group in such asymmetrical positions. Tomiyama Taeko’s paintings of different themes remark on the images of individuals participating in different times and fields. In her abundant expressions, we see each collective “us” fill up with emotions and tensions. But only when the viewer sees the journey of a sole life throughout all these various spatiotemporal systems might one encounter the one and only “Tomiyama Taeko,” the unique being that the ADs certified and named “liberation.” Across the square room in the distance shows Ký Túc Xá by Your Bros. Filmmaking Group. The group represents and fictionalizes an attempted demonstration by a group of female migrant workers from Viet Nam. The filmmakers retreat to a position of observing and setting, quietly, using the name “Your Bros.”—an image of the other—initiate actions in the form of workshops in a “dorm.” Nearby Ký Túc Xá, which takes the perspective of a local watching the demonstration plan, stands Niwa Yoshinori’s performance pieces, keeping a considerable distance from the others. In juxtaposition with Tomiyama’s restless, fearless utopian efforts, he raises endless questions about the “never-reachable” state of liberation movements; in response to Your Bros.’ maintained distance, he alienates himself as the other in the field to intervene. “Liberation” for Lu Xun during his “wild grass” period, was a utopian question no more. Likewise, the ADs invite us to ask a follow-up question: how can we return to the mundane? How can we not be confused by the out-of-control chaos and enter “wild-grassium?” “Who are we?” seems to be a self-reflexive question in this intricate, deep construction of the exhibition, for our entrance into the mirror’s reflection is also into the “environment”; inside the “environment,” we take our deep dive and hatch the wildfire-born heresy. And heresy, as Sylvia Wynter has argued, was the real force behind the Renaissance in Europe. Heresy might have been the most modest defense of art in every era that has gone out of control.

Translated by Wang Zhuxin

Chien-Hung Huang works as professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts, and a director of Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts since 2019. He translated books by G. Deleuze and J. Rancière. He has curated “POST.O” at Taipei MoCA (2009), Chim.Pom’s “Beautiful World and Crush” on EMU (2012), “Dicordant Harmony” (2016), “Trans-Justice: Paracolonial@technology” (2018), “Touch of Games: Francis Alÿs” solo show (2022), “Wild 80’s: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan” (2022) and “Entropy of Emptiness: Cosmogonic Narrative of Dis-paracolonization” (2023).