Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Though he trained as a painter at the China Academy of Fine Arts, Yang Fudong, one of the most interesting and influential young artists emerging from China today, has always preferred film. His videos and photographs combine and accumulate perspectives, investigating identity through ancient mythology, personal memory and lived experience. His subjects, often in their late 20s and early 30s, seem confused and appear to be hovering between the past and present, or perhaps China's past and show more present. That split gives them an expectant quality, as if something is going to happen that never quite does. Yang Fudong seeks, through vignettes, a poetics of place and people as an alternative to the politics of power. No Snow on the Broken Bridge includes in-depth coverage of the recent title piece and an overview of his oeuvre to date. Texts by Ziba de Weck and Hans Ulrich Obrist. show less

Cerith Wyn Evans’ gloriously uncategorizable oeuvre has spanned installation works, sculptures, photography, film, text and a recent collaboration with industrial-music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. Preoccupations with language and perception generally lead the works, from an exhibition at Tate Britain in which a computer randomly selected lines from William Blake’s poetry to be reflected off a disco ball in Morse code format to “Inverse, Perverse, Reverse,” a large circular mirror show more that showed viewers’ reflections upside down, referencing Lacan’s mirror-stage theory of identity while throwing a wrench into the expected experience of representation. Evans has said he wants his work to function as a “catalyst or reservoir of possible meanings that, for the viewer, could unravel many discursive journeys.” In this series of conversations, Hans Ulrich Obrist draws Evans on these and other themes. show less

I quite like this book, as it did open my eyes to the fact that the curating world is a fairly multi-layered world, and it goes way beyond just hanging pictures on a wall.

What I like is the rather simple manner in which he writes, and this kept me somewhat engaged throughout. There is a lot of name-dropping, and this does spoil the book somewhat.

Also, when he uses terms like 'the greatest artist' etc, I cannot help but think that he, like many Western writers, cannot see beyond the Western show more / Northern Quarter of the world. Latin America, Asia, Australia are beyond their vision.

I would have liked some photographs. This would have helped to illustrate the points he was wanting to make.

Apart from these, for me, a good book. show less

This is a difficult book to describe. You can read it in an hour or so. Most of the pages have fewer than 50 words. Many of them have definitions of new words, usually a combination of old words made into something dystopian. The book leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that all is not right in the world. Then you realize – so what else is new?

It really means that Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock of fifty years ago has finally arrived. Things are moving so fast we can’t adjust and show more accommodate. Even if we tried, the world would have moved on to something else before we got anywhere. So confusion and lack of direction reign.

The words on the page are a cross between a Steven Wright one liner and a Haiku for millennials:
-It turns out computer games merely teach you how to play other computer games.
-A one way trip to Mars would be okay if it had smoking-hot wifi.
-What if there were a drug that made you feel more like yourself?

As you would expect from the co-authors, most of the references are to the internet. The memes are multiple choice dropdowns, fill-in boxes, and radio buttons. That is the normal frame of reference for people who have grown up with the internet always available. Reading The Age of Earthquakes is like living an episode of Black Mirror. It’s all very realistic, very possible, and very downbeat. It’s an emotional warning.

David Wineberg show less