While the COVID-19 pandemic continued extending its reach across the globe, the month of May in Beijing, with the return of Gallery Weekend Beijing and two new museums opening, seemingly saw the Beijing art world bouncing back to a steady drum of exhibitions. Yet the emergence of new cases of COVID-19 in early June (at Xinfadi Market, Beijing) put Beijing on edge once more. Meanwhile, a few spaces upped sticks, and since it’s that time of the month again, an art district was demolished, and news of disputes/conflicts between artists and institutions popping up every now and then, not to mention a museum hooking up with 20 galleries to put on an exhibition, and certain artists actively taking part and live streaming. Such has been the complex polyphony making up Beijing’s current art scene.

After having been postponed for over two months, the fourth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing finally launched on 22–31 May. The first large-scale art event in Beijing since the pandemic broke out, the 22 participating galleries and non-profit institutions presented a series of exhibitions, public art installations, discussions, and performances at the 798 art district as well as online. The absence of foreign exhibitions and collectors has put a certain degree of pressure on Gallery Weekend Beijing; quite a few galleries mentioned seeing fewer collectors, but that of course is to be expected given the circumstances. Being the first art platform and project to take the lead in restarting, Gallery Weekend Beijing certainly kept up its influence, not least in invigorating the mood of the Beijing art world.

For the first time, Gallery Weekend Beijing 2020 split the “Best Exhibition Award” into two: “Best Exhibition Award: Innovation Prize” went to the exhibition “Ge Yulu” at Beijing Commune, while the “Best Exhibition Award: Master Prize” was awarded to both Zhu Yu’s solo exhibition “Mute” at Long March Space and Duan Jianyu’s solo exhibition “Life” at Hive Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition of the emerging sector, “Those who see and know all, are all and can do all” highlighted 19 artists and artist-groups, with videos and installations taking up the better part of the show—which to a certain extent indicated the overall tendency in this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing.

Zhu Yu exhibition, Long March Space, 2020

Duan Jianwei exhibition, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, 2020

Of the 22 galleries and institutions, more than half of the shows involved hangable art, evenly divided between abstract and figurative works, with the former seen in Galerie Urs Meile, Ginkgo Space, PIFO Gallery, and White Box Art Center, among others, and the latter figured in the exhibitions at Magician Space, Platform China, Star Gallery, Space Station, N3 Contemporary Art, just to name a few. Videos and installations took up a good proportion, with some exploring the art of video itself, such as “Embodied Mirror: Performances in Chinese Video Art” at New Century Art Foundation’s Beijing Space; others explored the relationship between history and reality, such as AES+F’s exhibition with their large-scale video installations at “What Came to Pass” at Tang Contemporary Art, exploring the globalization of contemporary culture through grand visual narratives. Tang Contemporary Art’s Second Space exhibited Zhao Zhao’s large new installations “White”, probing the history of cotton.

Li Binyuan, “Free Farming”, 2014, video, color, sound

Zhao Zhao exhibition, Tang Contemporary Art, 2020

Thematically speaking, quite a few exhibitions reflected on, reassessed, or scrutinized the contemporary condition. The group exhibition presented by UCCA, “Meditations in an Emergency” focused on everyday life, the body and biopolitics, the human/animal dichotomy, migration and borders, and the information landscape. Ge Yulu, too—with his new work, in which the bodily generation of electricity through cycling transforms an everyday movement into the electricity used in the exhibition space—reminds us to re-consider our own “supplementary electric supply.” Online forums and discussions such as “Perspectives from the International Art Community: Challenges and Possibilities in a Time of Global Crisis” and “Post-Pandemic Age: How to Revisit Contemporary Art in China through the History of Thought and Methodology” equally emphasized reflections on the contemporary.

Ge Yulu exhibition, Beijing Commune, 2020

Two of the key galleries chose to present retrospectives of some form or another. With 2019 being the 15^th anniversary of Galleria Continua’s Beijing space, last October saw the start of the exhibition “15 Years of Galleria Continua in China: To Be Continua”, with new alterations added every month. Running through to the end of this summer, the gallery has taken turns presenting many works by artists who had their first major solo exhibition at the Beijing space. Tokyo Gallery, too, celebrated their 70^th anniversary (they started BTAP in Beijing in 2002) with “We Will Meet Again: 70^th Anniversary Exhibition of Tokyo Gallery + BTAP”, showcasing works by the 39 Chinese artists they have collaborated with since BTAP started up in Beijing.

15 Years of Galleria Continua in China: To Be Continua, Galleria Continua Beijing, 2020

During Gallery Weekend Beijing, two new institutions opened. Wind H Art Center, towards the southern gate of 798, opened with “From Screen to Mind: A 50 Year History”, which organized video works by 23 avant-garde Western artists in an exploration of the origins of online and screen art. Another museum up in Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang, received a good deal of attention thanks to its millennial founders: X Museum, opening its doors on 29 May with “How Do We Begin?”, an exhibition that explores interdisciplinary art and youth culture in three “chapters”—“Media and Technology”, “Social Reflector”, “Artists and Architects as Narrators”.

Yet whatever momentum of recovery was knocked back by new cases of COVID-19 in Beijing in early June, to the point of feeling like March all over again. A few art spaces, too, closed or moved for various reasons: The Bunker closed, while XC•Hua Galleries moved out of its Beijing space. What’s more, from late May to mid-June, Beijing’s art districts continued to face demolition or orders to vacate: Caochangdi No. 300 and Dongyuan were demolished (including the studios of the poet Yu Xinqiao and the curator Tang Peixian); Shunyi Shuipo Art Village was demolished; Jiu Chang Art Complex was asked to vacate. Even Li Xianting, in Songzhuang Art District for decades, wrote a post and denounced the way the local authorities were chasing out artists. Such “everyday” news also involved a framing company in Jinzhan, Beijing, which not having moved out in the designated time frame had many artists’ artworks damaged; and another news item was related to the dispute between the artist Zhang Xiaotao, Xia Jifeng, and the former Iberia Center for Contemporary Art.

Caochangdi Art District under demolition, photographed by Zhang Zongxi, 2020

On another note, Song Art Museum, along the banks of the Wenyu river, allocated its numerous exhibition halls to galleries, splitting and delegating the choice of artists as well as the workload of exhibition-making between the galleries: 20 galleries from Beijing, with 20 artists shown at the same time. “2020”, which opened on 19 June, thus became a highlight in the gradually recovering Beijing art world. The world online likewise became a new front, such as Fang Lijun live-streaming his making of a huge print on Douyin/TikTok on 12 June. The latest news is that as a work of the public sector in Gallery Weekend Beijing, Hu Xiangqian’s performance art session “Superfluous Gallery”—which includes online sales of artworks—will be live-streamed on Baidu on 3–4 July. The curator, You Yang even invited the artist, Wang Xingwei, the band Wutiaoren, the writer Annabel Yang (Yang Hao), and others to join in support, attempting to create a “Li Jiaqi” (Austin Li, a major cosmetics influencer) phenomenon in the art world. Naturally, one can foresee how the significance of the event itself will surpass the significance of whatever sales will be made, but one can equally see how artists and curators seem ever more dissatisfied with loitering between “detour” and “access” in the art world.

Translated by Daniel Ho

Taikang Space will present “Genders Engender”, a major exhibition of the year, accompanied by forums, workshops and publications altogether. Focusing on gender studies and practices that take place nowadays or have impacts on social recognition of gender disparity, it attempts to create a platform for display, a space for conversation, even a workshop for production for these plural discourses through curating an exhibition. It embraces and welcomes participants from every field and every community, expecting to open up a broader sight of view, to build up more diverse connections. “Genders Engender” is not an exhibition presenting “feminist art” or “art of the women artists”, nor providing any definition or producing the tags based on any essentialist tendencies. We believe that gender identity is a kind of symptom or phenomenon which requires reading and interpreting rather than the cause or standard. It is not the similarity of the temperament, the theme or the method that link these works and performances together. On the contrary, the inner connection among the exhibition is a gender perspective that has been already integrated into the practice of all the exhibition participants. It is the latter that plays the key role in identifying or choosing a viable ethics toward a better life and a desirable feature of all the people. Taikang Space commissioned 11 artists (groups) from around China to create works for this exhibition. The works include photography, installation, videos, multimedia and performances, as well as engaging or interactive programs, social investigation and archives. Part of the exhibition space will be used for inviting consecutive events organized by the participant artists and feminist activists. There will also be three forums calling for the engagement of academics, authors and activists to share their gender expressions in the field of writing, photographing and social practice.

李爽，《T》，4频录像，15分17秒，2017-2018，音乐 Eli Osheyack

Huang Jingyuan was born in 1979, Guangxi. Huang received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) in 2005 and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Currently lives and works in Beijing. She is the initiator of “Writing Mothers,” an on-going collaborative writing project with the ambition of discovering the potential of a feminist critique offered through the lens of family life.

Li Shuang was born in 1990. She received Bachelor of Arts in English in Civil Aviation University of China in 2012, and Master of Arts in Media, Culture, and Communications from New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in 2014. Currently based in Shanghai.

United Motion United Motion is a long-term plan which focuses on the contemporary art industry and gets itself involved in it. It aims at improving the awareness of all the practitioners in the art world about their rights, among which the issue of gender is a continuous concern. This includes phenomena such as the unbalanced ratio of gender in the industry, sexual harassment, the “glass ceiling” phenomenon…etc. By organizing artists programs, promoting public education, doing research and archives, offering legal consultancy services, publishing press release as well as other plural means, United Motion attempts to arouse the general concern for gender equality and to seek for solutions based on specific cases and demands.

Ma Qiusha was Born in 1982, Beijing. She graduated from Digital Media studio of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2005, and received her MFA Electronic Integrated Art in Alfred University, New York in 2008. Currently Lives in Beijing.

Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin was born in 1989, Guangzhou. In 2015, she earned an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University following a BA in Studio Art and Communication from Denison University in 2012. Currently based in Guangzhou.

Mountain River Jump! Mountain River Jump! is an artist-duo founded in 2016 by identical twin sisters Huang Shan and Huang He, both born in 1985. They work as a group while continue their own practices under certain context.

Writing Mothers Taikang Project Working Group Members: FENG Junhua, HUANG Jingyuan, WAN Qing, YU Guo, ZHAO Yiren (The full list of the participants can be found on the wall at its site) “Writing Mothers” is an ongoing collaborative writing project initiated by Huang Jing Yuan in July 2017 with Feng Junhua as its co-editor and publisher. Focusing on writing as a driver for the meeting of minds and lives, understanding situations, and responsible action, the project seeks to discover narrative-based and critically focused alternatives to political quietism. In 2017, in addition to two writing episodes (28,000 Chinese characters by eight participating writers for the first and more than 27,000 Chinese characters by seven participating writers in the second), the project also organizes Writing Mothers Working Groups (WMWG) to respond to specific situations, requests, or invitations. These groups are comprised of researchers, activists, social workers, writers, curators, and artists, with the intent that each time its scale, locations, and participants vary. To date, the “Writing Mothers” project has been invited to collaborate in several thematic exhibitions, workshops. It has worked with local community centers and independent spaces to form new programs, as well as taken part in editorial projects, to address a particular topic.

Zhang Ran was born in 1980 in Fushun, Liaoning province. She graduated from No.3 studio of painting department in Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. Currently lives and works in Shenyang.

Zhang Sirui is an author and curator focusing on contemporary art and architecture. She graduated from Columbia University in the city of New York with a Master of Science degree in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. Currently she works at Artforum.com.cn as marketing director.

Li Juchuan Li Juchuan was born in Shashi, Hubei province, China in 1964, and graduated from Department of Urban Planning of Wuhan Urban Construction Institute in 1986. Since 1990s he has been applying himself to the architectural practice, which utilizes performance, video, photo, and on-site installation. Meanwhile, he has been involved in articles, lectures, teaching, and exhibitions. Currently he lives in Wuhan.

Folded Room wonders in unexpected venues as city nomads with the mission of constructing fluid networks between the experience of action and the path of knowledge. As a group of social activists and independent intellectuals, Folded Room explores the swiftest path in connecting diverse domains and stimulating actions in the social bodies.

覃小诗，《末日生存展会 I》，X架金属支撑、塑料膜，160×60cm，2018

The exhibition works from the perspective of the current critical moment in the world, with its generalised loss of confidence in the ideals and certainties of Western liberal democracy that have shaped globalisation in the previous decades. Across the region, as well as in the West’s centres of power, alternatives and challenges to the liberal consensus are being unfolded, often based on various attempts to create parallel narratives to Western modernity. The arising question is, what comes after the loss of this unifying ideal that drove our world over the past decades? What, if anything, should still be defended from it? Contemporary art has been a privileged expression of that globalising drive, often serving it rather paradoxically through essentialising regional shows, something this exhibition decidedly rejects. As the breakdown in the unity of ideals that lead to globalisation is challenging the basis of a common ground for contemporary art, the exhibition wonders how other shared premises could be negotiated. How can an aesthetic basis for the language of contemporary art be accepted if the ideological bases of contemporary art are crumbling? How can positions that claim disparate and conflicting genealogies sit together in a shared exhibition space?

A beast, a god, and a line relies on a multiplicity of languages and includes artists of various historical, cultural, and geographical backgrounds, many of them being among the most powerful voices who are today reinventing the significance of matter, objects, and forms, their genealogies and deep significance. These are complemented by other practices based on more investigative approaches to art making, where form, content, and political positions are researched and presented as evidences and references. A leading line through the various aspects and works in the exhibition is drawn from the language of textiles, weaving together several of its historical traces and layers. A material and vocabulary common to different cultural spaces, textiles also have a firmly routed history in art, making them possible sites for parallel processes of historiography. Textiles hold a different position in negotiating relationships with places and contexts, in ways that the individual agency of artists escapes. Their inclusion in ethnographic narratives also makes them a fertile battlefield for challenging the methods and the field itself of ethnography. In spite of the exhibition’s diversity of positions, A beast, a god, and a line is not based on an ethos of discovering or introducing artists from presumably marginalised regions, but by working within the premise of an already fragmentary and decentralised art world.

Perhaps the most visible of the issues laid bare by the exhibition is the development and spread of politicised religion and its structures in the form of Salafi Islam, violent Buddhism, Hindu fascism, and revivalist Evangelical Christianity engulfing the region, as well as almost every context in the world today, as part of the crisis of Western modernity. Among these complexes of hate, several works deal with the growing Islamophobia as a global phenomenon with various local manifestations; many are informed by the contemporary waves of migration and refugee crises, which often follow ancient routes of circulation and exchange, and are commonly manipulated today as the pretext for the rising nationalist discourses; while other works explore the hybrid manifestations of the sacred in the new global vernacular languages of pop.

Western hegemony (and contemporary art) are also challenged from a fundamentally different premise, that of unfinished processes of decolonisation and resurgent indigenous identities, which are reflected both in the subject matter and in the aesthetic choices of several artists in the exhibition. A beast, a god, and a line includes explorations of systems of knowledge, visual worlds, as well as economic and ethical issues behind the representation of indigenous communities across South and Southeast Asia, often ignored by the narratives about exclusion and social polarisation in this region. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigate traces of colonial domination, as well as the different ramifications of that hegemony today, when cultural and environmental genocides continue to unravel landscapes, communities, and worlds, particularly among the most marginalised indigenous groups.

Exhibition organised by Para Site, Dhaka Art Summit, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The exhibition was first shown at Dhaka Art Summit in February 2018.

Feng Bingyi’s creation is constructing a world that belongs to herself with her great courage. She carries her faith, reason, and her groundbreaking view of the world to complete the creation for this exhibition, and this is only a small part of her long creative lead.

Feng Bingyi’s exhibition choses the theme “Fool’s Gold”, it is a copper mine whose weight and appearance are extremely close to the gold, has tricked many gold rushers. Its scientific name is “pyrite”. When people see what they have been always searching for, is actually in front of them, are they willing to be tricked by it? Even just for a moment of the visual satisfaction? Feng Bingyi’s work is based on humanistic concerns, but is full of unexpected “logical collages” and “imagery jumps”, all of which are just to make those unspeakable things look better and more sincere.

Wang Jun Solo Exhibition: Sphere

Wang Jun believes that it is the artist’s mission to create a force of deportations and rounding, to capture the uncertain but approachable “real core”. The “core” is wrapped in a sphere, and the artist’s creation is to squeeze the sphere from all its aspects. Hence, the ball will roll, transfer and spin with the force of dragging, and it will show the different movements in the motion of the parabola. The Sphere’s movement makes the language of painting and the object of expression has always been full of tension. The sphere might never be pricked, but the chasing, the evasion, and the mutual oppression and the attraction between the sphere and the artist might be the core of the art, as the perpetual state for the artist. Wang Jun’s practice of contemporary new paintings in the 21st century makes him explicitly sort out this intention, and turns it into a serialized way of organizing the painting languages.

In this solo exhibition, Wang Jun approaches and captures this sphere from different sides in three different series or methodologies, attempts to present the sphere more explicitly in a concerted manner.

1000 + project|No Message

Hang Juan and Wang Ruoru

The “1000 +” project space of A Thousand Plateaus will present the collaborative project of Huang Juan and Wang Ruoru – “No Message “. The section of this project is similar to the experimental procedure, neither of the two concepts has a coherent process. However, the comparison between the emerging fruits of two artists’endeavor and the ready-made products shows the form of “manual” and “mechanical” by turns. Whether to establish the fine arts as the free technology once again or to carry out the right to freedom that needs to be started again, it might be a scene full of contradictions.

The final work and exhibition will be done by the artist onsite in our experimental space.

On the opening day of “Detour in Times” at the Times Museum, the audience was offered the chance to follow the curatorial team and visit multiples spaces in and outside the museum on foot starting at 11:30. Gathering at the project space HB Station next to the museum, the audience could first fill up on Cantonese nosh at the nearby restaurants, and then, under the guidance of A-Liang 阿亮, an artist-in-residence from Thailand (Henry Tan), they could officially enter the urban village zone, and pay a visit to three badminton courts that A-Liang frequented every week. The badminton courts are respectively located in the hinterlands of Huangbian Village, in the dormitories of various state-owned corporations, and Rose Garden—a mid-range housing estate developed by Times Property. Then guests returned to the museum lobby, and took part in a conference wherein art workers shared their experiences and strategies in local practices. By then it would have been close to four o’clock, the standard time for opening programs to begin. As soon as the assembly line of tours, interviews, and artist performances ended, the museum team and curators showed up at the other end of the museum to discuss the production models of art institutions, as well as Times Museum’s own responses and practices … As the crowds moved, the conversations relocated to the other side of the city. On the balcony of two shop fronts that served as an autonomous youth space supported by the museum, located in the depth of a residential area now shrouded in dark, a dialogue about anarchy, cross-disciplinary alliances, and self-education began to percolate, continuing until dawn.

“寻向所志”展览现场，广东时代美术馆，2017（图片由广东时代美术馆提供）
“Detour In Times”, installation view, Times Museum, 2017 (courtesy of Times Museum)

“寻向所志”展览现场，广东时代美术馆，2017（图片由广东时代美术馆提供）
“Detour In Times”, installation view, Times Museum, 2017 (courtesy of Times Museum)

“寻向所志”展览现场，广东时代美术馆，2017（图片由广东时代美术馆提供）
“Detour In Times”, installation view, Times Museum, 2017 (courtesy of Times Museum)

The press release published on Wechat describes it as: “As the participants switch between different settings within a concentrated time period, they experience an intense overlay of different feelings and concepts that they’ve absorbed at various sites . . .  the exhaustion of the body and the acuity of the mind form a certain tension.” If we were to trace the model of walking as a production method in exploring and generating direct dialogues with bodily experiences, perhaps we could look to “Long March—A Walking Visual Display”, organized by Lu Jie in 2002, as an important case study. It clearly introduced a novel element that was rare or had not yet been synthesized into contemporary Chinese art exhibition making practice at the time: the exhibition location moved from the white box to a series of mobile spaces, and even included the act of walking itself. The temporality of the exhibition was also extended to be an open process that could be constantly re-activated, along with works created on-site, the exhibiting of artworks on the spot, renewed viewing and re-excavation of local art, as well as the combination of walking and conversing. Through subsequent Long March projects, these methods were further developed, tested, and disseminated into a series of exhibition projects with historical-geographic dimensions, culminating in “Ho Chi Minh Trail” (2008) as the most interesting sample. The latter directly dropped art workers from the Northern hemisphere onto roads of the foreign South. The exhaustion from walking, friction between the physical body and the environment, and the intensified purification of the mind—we saw traces of these experiences in the opening workshops of “Detour in Times”.

“寻向所志”展览现场，广东时代美术馆，2017（图片由广东时代美术馆提供）
“Detour In Times”, installation view, Times Museum, 2017 (courtesy of Times Museum)

“寻向所志”展览现场，广东时代美术馆，2017（图片由广东时代美术馆提供）
“Detour In Times”, installation view, Times Museum, 2017 (courtesy of Times Museum)

It is worth noting that the decade from 2008 to 2018 witnessed the transition of fieldwork and localized practice in contemporary art from the realm of alternative practice to what it is now, a familiar model. Yet the widespread integration of production, exhibition, and localization is now encountering new problems. For “Detour in Times”, even though the three-in-one model of visiting/walking + instant capturing/on-site discussion + exhibition replicates certain methods found in the “Long March Project”, it responds to a vastly different situation, not to mention that it engages with vastly different content. Huangbian Village is nowhere like Yan’an or the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The latter’s historical, political metaphors and symbolism determine not only the visitors’ viewing and understanding of place, but also act as themes for activating place. But for a place like Huangbian, aside from the contemporary dictates that “exhibitions should integrate with their certain locality”, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient reason to necessitate walking. Why walk in areas adjacent to the museum? Why couple the acts of walking with exhibition viewing? Even if the practice of the institution is intimately connected to the local environment, this doesn’t necessarily mean that bundling the acts of walking, discussion and exhibition viewing together is a comprehensive response to this issue.

Perhaps this critique is a little severe. At any rate, there are probably valid reasons why these methods were used in “Detour in Times”. Exhibition content encompasses the institutional practices of Times Museum, which are literally discussed on several display boards taking up close to one third of the wall space. Using a visual and textual format akin to a three-dimensional PowerPoint presentation and a crisscrossing narration, the display boards are a retrospective of Times Museum itself and its previous shows. We are able to learn from these finely-made exhibition boards that as early as the spatial planning stage, there existed blueprints for the museum’s working methodologies: in addition to taking responsibility for local cultural production, it also has had to reflect on its own path of development, using itself as a case-study and research subject. In fact, this exhibition is a combination of institutional retrospective and display of conventional artworks. As such, artworks co-exist with spatial constructions and reconfigurations produced by the architecture team, with large-scale institutional discourse directly inserted into the exhibition by means of exhibition boards. Admittedly, it constitutes a brand-new experiment, yet still, it is impossible to ignore the show’s ambiguity, vacillation, and rigidity. We are still unsure of the real question posed by “Detour in Times” and whether He An’s neon texts, Li Liao’s video of attacking one’s enemies, Li Xiaofei’s lyrical assembly-line poetry, or Li Zhan’s earring market are connected by a specific time, space context and logic? And when they are juxtaposed with these ten-meter-long exhibition boards that trace back the organization’s history, who is truly present, and whose questions are to be answered by whom? In this half-cooked sampler platter, perhaps the most savory element is Li Juchuan’s surveillance cameras which have been placed around the exhibition hall. They turn the act of looking into an act of being observed, but viewers did not come to this exhibition in order to watch themselves.

蔡回，《手表》，行为录像，10分钟47秒，2016（作品由艺术家及亚洲当代艺术空间提供）
Cai Hui, “Watches”, performance, 10’47″, 2016 (courtesy of the artist and A+ Contemporary)

魏程程，《恶莲》，硬卡纸、喷漆，2017
Wei Chengcheng, “Evil Lotus”, cardboard, spray paint, 2017

李燎，《我是正义的》，单频彩色有声影像，3分13秒，2015（作品由艺术家及空白空间提供）
Li Liao, “I am Justice”, single channel video, color, sound, 3’13″, 2015 (courtesy of the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING)

何岸，《风轻似小偷》，霓虹灯箱，尺寸可变，2014（作品由艺术家及和维画廊提供）
He An, “Light Breeze, as A Thief”, neon tube light box, variable dimensions, 2014 (courtesy of the artist and HDM GALLERY)

The artist’s earliest work, “Dysfunction No. 3” (created in 1983 under Taiwanese Martial Law) appears in this exhibition, accompanied by the multi-channel video “Flickering Light” (1983–1984) made at the same time. The two are seen as companion works. The former is a protest against and provocation of power during a dangerous era—a radical action during which the artist wore a balaclava and walked onto Ximending’s Wuchang Street in Taipei, an area surrounded by surveillance cameras and plainclothes police officers. The latter is a horrifying documentary short in which the artist wears the same costume and faces the camera. The flickering light gives the effect that he is standing beneath a surveillance camera. From the perspective of current methodologies, this is a combination of two diametrically opposed ways of working: one about an intervention into reality through action and one about the artist’s interpretation of his subjective experience in his own studio. In Chen Chieh-jen’s case, the two ways of working are placed into one discursive system. The works together make an expressive gesture that moves from the external to the internal: the artist and his friends first braved the pressures of the authorities and took to the streets, and later used an expressionistic video as an alternative form to interpret and portray their inner experience of the moment of danger.

《机能丧失第三号》，行为艺术，超8mm转DVD．彩色．无声．约8分钟．单频道录像．循环放映，1983（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Dysfunction No. 3″, Action Art, Super 8mm film transferred to DVD/color/silent/approximately 8 minutes/single-channel video/continuous loop, 1983 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo: Chen You-wei)

《闪光》，录像/无声/3分30秒/多频道录像/循环放映，1983/1984（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
Flickering Light, Video/black and white/silent/3 minutes 30 seconds/multiple-channel video/continuous loop, 1983/1984 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo: Chen You-wei)

《闪光》，录像/无声/3分30秒/多频道录像/循环放映，1983/1984（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Flickering Light”, Video/black and white/silent/3 minutes 30 seconds/multiple-channel video/continuous loop, 1983/1984 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

When artists today engage in community intervention under the banner of self-organization, they are rarely motivated to create separate work presenting the abstract spiritual dimension of their actions. But then other artists do not first deliberately search for a foothold in reality for the purpose of fulfilling a conceptual vision. Today’s systems of artistic language and power structures see action theory and theories of ontology as divided into two camps, even opposing camps. The grammatical structure of Chen Chieh-jen’s works has always spanned across both—namely, it is a political approach to life that toggles between reality and the abstract. “Most of my work stems from chance encounters with people, things, places … I am attracted by something in the air in the encounter, the scent of something, and I slowly enter into its environment. Only then do I start to think about how to develop these ‘inexplicable’ images. Most of my videos are ‘incomplete movies’ made up of different senses of time and fragments of events.” Chen Chieh-jen extends the events of reality into the abstract and fragmented worlds of his work, building a coldly symbolic poetry and sense of emptiness in the process.

From “Dysfunction No. 3” to “Flickering Light”, the artist completes the evolution from a so-called action into an abstract vision. In his exhibition, Chen Chieh-jen once again restores these works to their status as “happenings” through archival approaches, supplementing the videos with the story of how their first showing was ultimately rejected by the American Center for Cultural Exchange due to cultural censorship. Chen Chieh-jen’s disillusionment with the ideals of a free world is discussed throughout the exhibition, summed up by the phrase “exiled at home, imprisoned in the world.” In 2016, Chen Chieh-jen’s work “Realm of Reverberation” was shown in Tokyo. Simultaneous to this showing the artist gave a series of lecture performances over the course of several days. Material from these performances and supplementary materials from “Realm of Reverberation” are shown in the exhibition in an archival manner as well. On the last day of those performances, the artist, with all the charisma of true stage presence, invited a young Japanese temporary worker up to the stage to tell his own story, illuminating the brutal realities of labor in a globalized world: control, oppression, exploitation, the maximization of profit. The event is a further window into Chen Chieh-jen’s “global imprisonment.” Lastly, “A Field of Non-Field” (2017), based on the life and circumstances of the artist’s long-unemployed elder brother, is the exhibition’s pièce de resistance, as well as the focal point of its discursive system. It is a film whose gloom reaches a nearly oppressive pitch. In the work, the artist returns once again to the “incomplete movie” as narrative approach.

《中空之地》，蓝光光盘/黑白（部分彩色）/有声（部分无声）/单频道录影/ 61分07秒/循环放映，2017(Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)
“A Field of Non-field”, Blueray disk/black and white (partly color) /with sound (partly silent)/Single-channel video/61 minutes 07 minutes/on loop, 2017 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

《中空之地》，蓝光光盘/黑白（部分彩色）/有声（部分无声）/单频道录影/ 61分07秒/循环放映，2017(Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)
“A Field of Non-field”, Blueray disk/black and white (partly color) /with sound (partly silent)/Single-channel video/61 minutes 07 minutes/on loop, 2017 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

Throughout the exhibition, Chen Chieh-jen expounds on a series of complex informational and conceptual strands and adeptly weaves them into a hierarchy. On the one hand, we should be bowled over by such a mastery of a language. On the other hand, we should question such a polished operation. Chen Chieh-jen’s view of history, together with his vocabulary, ultimately culminate in a hollow “poetry” and “hierarchy of knowledge”: a poetry in shades of grey and a vast taxonomy of life both having to do with pain in some way. The issue of the idea of being “exiled at home, imprisoned in the world” is in the generality of the notion of “the world” itself. Anybody can target that great all-purpose target that is “capitalism,” but in doing so one has likely already lost sight of the true object of criticism, avoiding political discourses specific to the given region, and deviating from the true pain and reality of survival there. For instance, the residents of Losheng Sanitorium (a leper hospital in Taiwan) in “Realm of Reverberation”, who are about to lose their home and shelter, become in the context of the art work something else entirely; they are (in the artist’s words) “… like images floating, suspended in air over the city and this land of so many traumas.” Here the cruel reality is coerced into abstraction and poetry. The artist, in the name of art, commits linguistic leaps and sublimation. Though he can take refuge in his identity as an artist, even from the perspective of the relatively autonomous aesthetic discourses of art we will not find artistic balance or “beauty” when it is lodged between a cruel and targeted starting point and the denial of its full expression for the sake of “results” or the feeling of a “completed work.” The visual and conceptual discourses of this cold, grey, refined exhibition allow spectators to escape reality and enter into a well-organized one-way theater, themselves becoming objects of the artist’s own personal discursive disciplining.

I must clarify that this concern over making things “immaculate” is not itself the issue here. The problem is in the meeting of the artist’s exercise of language with the reality it confronts. The problem is that for people on the ground, this language does not match up. For someone who is up close to the reality in China, the real world cannot be thrown into the world of spiritual poetics or hollow global theories alone. We need artists and creators whose work, by way of more targeted methodologies, can better reflect upon the behaviors and stance of the artist and upon the realities of the situation.

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

“陈界仁：中空之地”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Chen Chieh-jen: A Field of Non-field”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

右：《中空之地 – 1》，艺术微喷/收藏级别相纸，170 ×104.5 cm，2017
左：《中空之地 – 2》，艺术微喷/收藏级别相纸，170 ×104.5 cm，2017
（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
Right：”A Field of Non-field – 1″, Giclée Print/Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique, 170 ×104.5 cm, 2017
Left：”A Field of Non-field – 2″, Giclée Print/Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique, 170 ×104.5 cm, 2017
(Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

《星辰图》，黑白相纸/机械滚动条，210 × 131 × 31 cm，2017（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Star Chart”, Black and white photo paper/mechanical scrollbar, 210 × 131 × 31 cm, 2017 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

《星辰图》，黑白相纸/机械滚动条，210 × 131 × 31 cm，2017（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Star Chart”, Black and white photo paper/mechanical scrollbar, 210 × 131 × 31 cm, 2017 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

《无居所者、租屋者、房贷者的肖像》，35mm转蓝光光盘/彩色/有声/17分15秒/单频道录像/循环放映/铁皮屋，2008（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“Portraits of the Homeless, Renters and Mortgagers”, 35mm transferred to blu-ray disc/color/sound/17 minutes 15 seconds/single channel video/continuous loop + sheet-metal structure, 2008 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

《推移者》，35mm转蓝光光盘/彩色/有声/17分15秒/单频道录像/循环放映/铁皮屋，2007-2008（图文资料由长征空间提供，拍摄：陈又维）
“People Pushing”, 35mm transferred to blu-ray disc/color/sound/5 minutes 19 seconds/single-channel video/continuous loop + sheet-metal, 2007-2008 (Courtesy of Long March Space, Photo：Chen You-wei)

This time, the exhibition will include installations, manuscripts, origami and dimensional paintings to present at both the gallery and the art center. This is the preliminary presentation of Liao Fei’s works based on his new way of working that started from 2017. The exhibition begins from February 3, 2018, and will run until March 31.

Speaking of the exhibition theme, Res Extensa, Liao Fei elaborates as below:

Descartes falls into deep thought. When facing materials, language is far less enough to describe them, not even to imagine them. After repeated deliberation, he finally writes down, Res Extensa. The subject left out has been replaced by attribute, and are the thoughts under subject absent?

Leibniz repeatedly plays games about zero and one without willing to affirm that whether the “retracting from wrong path” only exists in the unitary world.

“Humans are materials. Mirrors are materials. Images in the mirror are materials. Looking into the mirror is a material.” If it exists or has existed, it is a material. Liao Fei still has doubts about materials, though. “If the world does not have any material that is isolated, then materials must be connected. If materials are connected, then they must be an integral whole.” This simple demonstration from Edmund Husserl gets the artist a sense of light aesthetic feeling. Materials might be even lighter than we could possibly imagine.

A beam of light that falls through the room; a beam of light that goes beyond the seashore: Palomar sees himself in the absolute uniformly smooth medium mirror. A snake zigzags and tries to approach an impenetrable wall, and the space is waving like ripples and transforms repeatedly from smooth and sticky substances.

In the intersection of time, how much time is an instant?

The zebra is running and jumping in order to go across the river of death. A young crocodile is observing the zebra’s movement to calculate the best moment to attack. By the moment of attack, it hesitates with some thoughts. The zebra is nearly surmounting it. In an instant, the little crocodile jumps and bites the zebra on its rear leg. In that very moment, it comes up with the best time of attack. Time carves deeply in its body.

For the observers, light beams shoot into their eyes, touch their skin and feel their existence. The sniper whose face cannot be seen clearly pulls the trigger after prayer. At this moment, he feels himself in an absolute isolated point of location. Is it that we fabricate the world or the world fabricates us? Streets are extending until losing their boundary. In front of the shop that is being bulldozed, the owner is greeting the demolition team to come for a meal and finish up his business for the last afternoon.

The Dualism that bases on differentiating materials from spirit is the foundation that established cognitive system in the whole scientific world. Because of curiosity, the artist reexamines the early Dualism and finds out surprisingly that, in Methodology, where Descartes differentiated materials and spirit, was not indeed materials and spirit, but Res Extensa and spirit. Until the times of Leibniz, people were still using “Res Extensa”.

Speaker: Cecilia WU
Date: 18.10.2017
Time: 19:00 – 20:30
Language: Chinese
Location: Chronus Art Center Address: No.18, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai

*Free admission. To reserve a seat, please click here.

To a vocalist, the body is both a musical instrument and an instrument for expressing emotions and intentionality. The singer can position the body and manipulate the vocal system in a way that improves tone quality and/or conveys nonverbal communication to the audience. Extending this concept of the singer’s body as an instrument, human-computer interactive systems using motion-capture data to control vocal processing have been developed at least since the 1990s. Currently, no follow-up formal scientific evaluation for gesture-controlled vocal processing Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) has been conducted. On the other hand, although the uses of the body as a technology mediator for digital music-making have been designed and implemented since 1968, no theoretical research in design principles has been proposed in the context of electroacoustic vocal performance (EVP). These missing pieces of the puzzle are the keys to opening up wide-ranging possibilities. These possibilities concern questions of artistic identity and body boundaries in the posthuman era, understanding people’s intertwined kinetic and sonic awareness in order to enhance wellbeing and productivity at work, and forming novel pedagogical methodologies in music education in the 21st century.

In this lecture, Cecilia WU proposes the first scientific methodology of examining action (body)/perception (sound) mappings and DMI design in the context of EVP from the audience’s perspective. The empirical data can be used as evidence to identify the audience’s degree of musical involvement from synchronization, to embodied attuning, and to empathy‒the human connections. Design principles are proposed based on subjectivity, affordance, culture, social meaning making, and technology. This lecture is interwoven not only with technical and scientific components, but also an original artistic theory called “Embodied Sonic Meditation (ESM).” It invites new ways of using sensorimotor coupling to deepen our engagement in sonic awareness. ESM is elaborated by three interactive audiovisual compositions–Mandala, Tibetan Singing Prayer Wheel, and Resonance of the Heart. ESM combines the strategic research in DMI design and gesture acquisition, contemporary vocal processing and performance, and Eastern contemplative philosophy of mind into an experimental EVP theory.

About the Speaker 

J. Cecilia Wu (AKA: Wu Xiao Ci) is a scholar, composer, audio engineer, vocalist, and multimedia artist. In 2013, Cecilia obtained her Master’s degree in Music, Science and Technology at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where she focused on computer-assisted composition and audio engineering. Currently, Cecilia is a Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also a lecturer at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies. Her research focuses on composing multimedia arts with written music, studio engineering, sound design, improvisation, computer based live interactivity, and computer generated graphics. Her compositional vocabulary includes embodied sonic meditation, dynamic vocal processing, gestural music, and soundscape creation. Her artistic and scholarly work embodies the Tibetan cultural knowledge, which contributes to promoting cultural diversity and augmenting underrepresented cultures. As a world traveler, her creative foundation comes from studying Buddhist philosophy and the human condition. http://ceciliawu.com

In academia, revolutionary and radical ideas are actualized through an engagement with scholars and scholarly traditions of the canonized past. Contemporary generations read, or more often reread older texts, resulting in “new” readings that do not fit the dominant reception of these texts. Also, academics tend to draw in scholars from an unforeseen past, those who come from a different academic canon or who have been somewhat forgotten. It is in the resonances between old and new readings and re-readings that a “new metaphysics” might announce itself. A new metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a “new tradition,” which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation.

“New materialism” or “neo-materialism” is such a new metaphysics. A plethora of contemporary scholars from heterogeneous backgrounds has, since the late 1990s up until now, been producing (re-)readings that together work towards its actualization. This book is written on the new materialism simultaneously with its fleshing out of the new materialist ambition. The negotiations concerning the new tradition are carried out in the first part of this book. This part consists of four interviews with the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part is made up of four chapters that situate this new tradition in contemporary scholarly thought. The problematics shared by the interviewed scholars are the subject matter of the chapters in Part Two, but it is new materialism that is active everywhere and always throughout. New materialism is the metaphysics that breathes through the entire book, infusing all of its chapters, every statement and argument. New materialism is thus not “built up” in this book: its chapters are not dependent upon one another for understanding their argument. The different chapters of the book can be read independently, although there are many different transversal relations between them.

The interviews in Part One are intra-actions rather than interactions. The former term was introduced by Barad and is central to her new materialism. Qualitatively shifting any atomist metaphysics, intra-action conceptualizes that it is the action between (and not in-between) that matters. In other words, it is not the interviewers or the interviewee or even the oeuvre of the interviewee that deserves our special attention, but it is the sense of orientation that the interview gave rise to (the action itself) that should engender us. For it is in the action itself that new materialism announces itself. We have emphasized this by making strong connections between the individual questions and answers in Part One and the individual chapters of Part Two. This allows the reader to go back and forth between the two parts, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the new materialist tradition

The interview with Rosi Braidotti revolves, firstly, around the issue of the genealogy of new materialism, and around new materialism as genealogical. The latter can be read either as an instance of Jean-François Lyotard’s “rewriting” or of Gilles Deleuze’s “creation of concepts.” The genealogical element of Braidotti’s take on new (feminist) materialism, Braidotti herself being an (un)dutiful daughter of great Continental materialists such as Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault and Deleuze (van der Tuin 2009), most certainly pervades the remainder of the book. Braidotti makes clear how it is important to draw situated cartographies of (new) materialisms, and to traverse these maps at the same time in order to produce visionary alternatives, that is, creative alternatives to critique. When it comes to Braidotti’s precise take on the matter of materialism, we encounter a Deleuzean “univocity” or “single matter,” while we simultaneously find Braidotti acknowledging difference as a force of sexual differing on the one hand, and a sexual difference that needs to be traversed in order to come up with post-human, post-anthropocentric, and post-secular visions of sustainability and (intergenerational) justice on the other.

The next interview, with Manuel DeLanda, demonstrates how new materialism is indeed filled with a visionary force, and how an attentive study of a material world asks us to look again at notions such as the mind or subjectivity from which this material world is independent. Braidotti’s genealogy comes back in DeLanda’s formulation of the new materialism, but initially in the form of dynamic morphogenesis as a historical process that is constitutive of the material world. It is only in a secondary instance that DeLanda is interested in the way in which for instance postmodernism or linguisticist idealism has led us away from theorizing scholarly processes as material processes, and as having dynamic, morphogenetic capacities of their own. DeLanda’s univocal methodology is at work from the word go, so it could also be argued that the “new” subjectivity or mind, including significant, not signifying, power differences, is always already implied instead of a priori established.

In the subsequent interview with Karen Barad, this discussion that cuts across the epistemological and the ontological is continued. For the visionary aspect of a new materialism that she calls “agential realism,” Barad brings in a “diffractive” methodology, which is a methodology that allows one to establish the genealogical aspect of Braidotti and the univocity of DeLanda in their entanglement (not interaction). This entanglement comes first, Barad demonstrates via feminist theory and Bohrian quantum physics. She explains how the so-called subject, the so-called instrument, and the so-called object of research are always already entangled, and how measurements are the entanglement of matter and meaning. Barad also singles out the ways in which what she calls “onto-epistemology” is always already ethical, that is, how possibilities for post-human agency are part of what Braidotti would call (sexual) differing, and what DeLanda would call morphogenesis. All of this opens up for a notion of matter that, as Barad says in the interview, affirms that matter “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers” because “feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness.”

The final interview with Quentin Meillassoux seems to go back to the new materialism proposed by DeLanda. Whereas Barad and Braidotti work towards a new materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical, DeLanda and Meillassoux seem to be more interested in the ontological, either at the expense of an immediate or simultaneous interest in epistemology and ethics (DeLanda) or by leading up to epistemological questions of the classificatory kind (Meillassoux). This reading, however, would itself be classificatory, and would divide the terrain to an extent that may overstate differences and overlook similarities. Meillassoux produces a new materialism (a “speculative materialism”) that radicalizes the relation between epistemology and ontology, thus producing a new materialism that can access the in-itself. Similar to the projects of the three other interviewees, it is especially a subjectivism (also known as a social constructivism, a linguistic idealism, or an identity politics) that is qualitatively shifted in the anti-anthropocentric work of Meillassoux. Here, a “realism” is brought forward that intends to do justice to matter and the contingency of nature most radically, while stressing the limitlessness of thought.

In terms of academic attention, new materialism is in many ways a wave approaching its crest. The amount of publications on this topic is growing, especially in cultural and feminist theory (see e.g. Alaimo and Hekman eds. 2008; Coole and Frost eds. 2010; Bolt and Barrett eds. forthcoming). As the authors of this book we have engaged actively in the constitution and application of new materialism (e.g. Dolphijn 2004; van der Tuin 2008; Dolphijn 2011; van der Tuin 2011). With this book, which is the result of an intense cooperation over several years, we have aimed at producing an open cartography of new materialism that radically explores this new tradition in thought, and that aims at including all that it can virtually do.

1. Alaimo, S and S. Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
2. Coole, D. and S. Frost, eds. (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
3. Bolt, B. and E. Barrett eds.Forthcoming. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism Through the Arts. London: IBTauris.
4. Dolphijn, R. 2004. Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption. Delft: Eburon.
5. Dolphijn, R. 2011. “‘Man is Ill Because He is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside.” Deleuze Studies 5(1): 18–34
6. van der Tuin, I. 2008. “Deflationary Logic: Response to Sara Ahmed’s ‘Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism.’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(4): 411–6.
7. van der Tuin, I. 2011.“‘A Different Starting Point, a Different Metaphysics’: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively.”Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26(1): 22–42.

Rick Dolphijn is a writer and a philosopher. He teaches and researches at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities. From 2017 to 2020 he will be Honorary Associate Professor at Hong Kong University (Hong Kong). He wrote Foodscapes: Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of Chicago Press 2004) and New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press 2012, with Iris van der Tuin). He has recently published This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (edited by Rosi Braidotti, Brill/Rodopi 2014/5). He writes on contemporary, on art, theory and politics. Currently he is finishing a new monograph entitled Cracks of the Contemporary.