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An Odyssey for Children (and Other People)

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. This week marks the launch of a new format where several regular columns run alongside one another. Feel free to write in to share your thoughts on the content or format, and please subscribe and share with friends.

Editor’s Note: Turn that Simile Upside Down

Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

My main reading project for June was Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. It was a fruitful project working through dense verse, as this translation is notable for maintaining not only the poetic register but also the archaic tone and repetition of the original. Since Nostos shares a namesake with the Homeric epic traditions, referring to the Nostoi or the lost third of the trilogy relating the homecomings of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War, I thought I’d share a couple of my favorite moments from everything I’ve learned. I am not a specialist here, or even particularly well-read in any of this, so let me lead with amateurish passion.

The first thing, and what we have to start with, is that the structure of The Odyssey is nothing like the cinematic retellings and abridged translations that we are used to. Only four of its twenty four books really tell the story of Odysseus’s journey home, and even then they are told over a series of meals in retrospect, told as much to impress a host and push the trip forward as anything else. Almost all of the action and most of allusions to mythology comes in asides in which Odysseus or a bard or a marginal character relates past action. There is not a lot of Odyssey in The Odyssey! It is much more concerned with homecoming than it is with the journey. And indeed, the concept of heroism that we relate to The Odyssey—the hero’s journey—is very nearly disavowed. When Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld, Achilles expresses something like regret for his choice to die with valor and be remembered by all men. Better to get yourself home. To quote Juergen Teller: better to live.

The second thing relates to the culture of xenia, or the etiquette of hosting. In the era of the narrative it is expected that an honest traveler be met with not only the basic hospitality of a meal and a place to stay but also, if his status registers, treasured gifts from the household. If there is some connection between them, they become “guest-friends,” linked out of courtesy going forward. Much of the bad luck and divine retribution meted out over the course of the journey is related to the righteous appeal to or wrongful abuse of xenia networks, seen clearly not only in the massacre of the suitors on Ithaka but also in the murder of Agamemnon upon his return from Troy.

Third and finally, there is this fantastic literary device deployed a number of times throughout the text called the reverse simile, which I wouldn’t have paid attention to at all without Mendelsohn’s helpful footnotes. Essentially, Homer describes a character in a way that inverts his/her gender, social status, or role in the situation. In its first appearance, Odysseus is alone at sea, buffeted by a storm, and catches sight of land. Oddly, his state of mind is described “Just as a father’s children would welcome some sign of life.” He is, of course, the father whose children would welcome some sign of life, and yet the psychology of his distant son is transposed onto his person—the man is the shore, the man is the child. In another scene, Odysseus begins to weep hearing a bard recount the adventures of the Trojan War. He is described weeping “Just as a woman would weep while embracing a beloved husband who … has fallen defending his town and his children.”

In my favorite example, he considers murdering the slave girls sleeping with the suitors, “Snarling just as a bitch, circling around her tender newborn pups when she’s faced with some unknown man, will snarl.” In the last instance, he weeps as he embraces Penelope, “Just as the sight of land is welcome to swimmers at sea.” This final appearance, I venture, is hardly as much of a reversal as the other half dozen appearances, but it shares with all of them a radical empathy that I find beautiful. This reversal of male and female, friend and foe, accomplishes two things: it upholds the virtuous cycles of the xenia system of host and guest, and it sanctifies the loyal union of marriage that makes for the foundation of the yearning for home that underlies the whole story.

Icon: Meret Oppenheim

Icon is a new regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

Meret Oppenheim, Daphne und Apoll, 1943. Courtesy of the artist and the gallery.
“You can be a perfect and total and complete woman without kids.”

Meret Oppenheim to her niece, Lisa Wegner. On Katy Hessel’s Great Women Artists podcast, Lisa relates the story: “We were both brushing our teeth in Casa Costanza, she was there for the summer and I came up from Milano. I was about 30. She asked me, ‘What about children, do you want children?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’ She goes, ‘Good, because you can be a perfect and total and complete woman without kids.’ To me that was a real eye opener.” Meret Oppenheim’s work is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Basel. I picked her painting of the legend of Daphne and Apollo because, canonically, only Daphne turns into a laurel tree; in Meret’s version, Apollo enjoys the same fate.

Field Trip: “An Exhibition for Children (and Other People)”

Field Trip is another new regular column reporting on exhibitions and institutions. Some of them will be in-person visits, but I did not make it to Germany this week.

This is an exhibition I was really hoping to take a child to but, as it is closing on 6 July at the Kunstverein Hannover and I am still hard at work in sunny Taipei on 1 July, I have decided to bite the bullet and report on it in absentia. The reason I wanted to bring a child along was to test its premise. It is, after all, what it says on the box: “an exhibition for children.” And other people. But, curated by the artist Jeremy Deller, it also consists almost entirely of pretty canonical post-conceptual art. Is this a compelling proposition for children (and other people) who are used to being pandered to in more direct and more directly interactive ways? I hope so. I guess.

Temitayo Ogunbiyi, You will forge paths beyond you grandmother's imaginings (II), 2025

Obviously museums today have many reasons for wanting to appeal to children. It is summer holiday. We want to get them used to coming to museums from a young age. Also, many adults have the intellectual capabilities of children, and keeping things child-friendly sidesteps some of the thornier political issues that artists are otherwise wont to grapple with. So are playful videos and gestures at age-appropriate humor really fun for children? Or would everyone rather stay home?

Ryan Gander, Do ghosts have teeth? (Your questions in a world that only wants answers), 2025

The exhibitions open with the classic Fischli and Weiss video The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) (1987), their studio Rube Goldberg machine, and then opens toward physical interaction with chalkboards from Rivane Neuenschwander that invite visitors to fill in comic panels, non-prescriptive play sculptures by Temitayo Ogunbiyi, a wall by Roman Ondak against which visitors can record their heights, and room in which visitors can draw from life a weird sculpture-as-model by David Shrigley. There is also a video by Eva Rothschild called Boys and Sculpture (2012) in which her work is played with and deconstructed, as well as one of Francis Alÿs’s many videos documenting the games of children around the world. Ryan Gander fills one room with balls bearing poetic questions asked by children (recalling the Sarah Manguso book we looked at previously), and inserts a mouse with his daughter’s voice into the wall of another.

In what starts to seem like a parody of playfulness at the end of the exhibition, Lara Favaretto hangs a long whip studded with jingle bells on the wall, and recorded people talking about “naivete and consciousness” for publication at a later date. In the same room, visitors find Jeremy Deller’s video Has the World Changed or Have I Changed? (2000), ostensibly, the raison d’etre of this show—to celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of his invitation of a clown to roam the fairgrounds of Expo 2000.

Book Report: Bring No Clothes

Book Report is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

I did not intend for this project to become so focused on Bloomsbury. To be honest I don’t really know how it happened. I don’t really even like the work that much. In theory I could pick up any book off the shelf, there are so many in the queue, and give it a reading about art, biography, and domesticity. There is something in Bloomsbury, however, that keeps bringing me back to it. I picked up this copy of Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion in Paris in January and read it soon after. Charlie’s title is a quotation of the language that Virginia Woolf used to invite guests coming to stay: Bring no clothes. We do not dress for dinner.

Perched between fashion and art, Charlie Porter is a brilliant writer on all of this stuff, and employs no small amount of the biographical interpolation, the productive misreadings between the lines, that make this kind of historical work fun. The very first chapter opens by dangling one of these mysteries, the question of an oversized dress that Virginia wore for a Vogue photoshoot, understood to be her mother’s dress. Charlie doesn’t buy it, labeling it NHMD (not her mother’s dress), and 300 pages later floats a theory that Virginia and Ottoline Morrell were lovers, that it was Ottoline’s dress that Virginia was wearing (the stylistic evidence adds up), that “queer partners can wear the same garments to manifest their love.”

In between we get a torrent of photographs of the crew at Charleston and, in particular, at Garsington Manor, including the legendary image of Carrington hanging nude from a statue that made a dramatic appearance in This Dark Country. The boxy suits, the tailoring, the nudity, the hand-sewn garments, it all presents such an irresistible texture that Charlie designs and crafts a bit of his own rave wear throughout the course of his research. His eye for the lived detail is pure joy, from the dimensions of the wardrobes at Charleston to lines from Ottoline’s diary to the coded poses of John Maynard Keynes in the garden.

“The Mother Is Dead, Long Live (m)Othercare: Care as Alterity, an Introduction” in e-flux Journal

iLiana Fokianaki is one of the leading voices in the art world on the politics of care, and this journal article, the first of two, proposes several institutional pathways for resisting “the new wave of far-right racist patriarchy.”

Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT

This research group at MIT develops technologies and communities in creative learning experiences. I’ve gotten really interested in how people are thinking of early years education in the context of AI, particularly as my daughter seems more interested in using it to replace or supplement social connection than anything else. (The ethical dimension over plagiarism, reading, and focus seems comparatively more straightforward.) 

“A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship” in The Atlantic

A look at adults with young families making intentional co-housing choices to live with or near friends. I think this is a brilliant idea and also think it makes incredible amounts of sense to have children on the same timeline as close friends, especially if it isn’t possible to live near family.

Learnings from Adrian Wong

Learnings is a new regular column that digests some of the lessons from the Lives of the Artists column. Lives of the Artists will run on a monthly basis until the fall, alternating with newsletters in today’s format.

Now that I’ve had a couple weeks to let my conversation with Adrian Wong percolate, I wanted to synthesize a little bit of what we talked about. The top takeaway for me is still that line I bolded in the last little bit about how what he wants his daughter to learn from his artistic practice is that she can change the world around her. I think this is something that we can all learn from artists. One of the talks that I’ve given over and over again in the past few years looks at “lifeworks,” the practices of artists who have an overarching way of being in the world. My argument is always that we should approach the details of our lives with the intentionality with which an artist approaches a project—so much falls into place with a bit of thoughtful consideration. In the positive psychology literature there is a line of thinking that children need to grow up with a bit of entitlement, not in believing that they are entitled to more than their peers, but that they are entitled to agency as children in a world of adults. Assertiveness, self-confidence, the right to be heard. This is something that does not come naturally to me as a person, and something I learned about too late to properly convey to my daughter, but it’s a lesson I think we need to keep working on.

The next issue of Lives of the Artists will run on 16 July with Jin Meyerson in anticipation of his solo exhibition “Safe Space” opening at Perrotin in LA.

And with that—may your road home be a long one.

Lives of the Artists: Adrian Wong (Part II)

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Lives of the Artists is a regular monthly interview column profiling contemporary artists, asking them to share the connections between their home lives and studio practices.

Adrian Wong is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches sculpture, and a father of three. This is the second half of our conversation, in which we resume discussing the body of video work in which he traces stories of his family through Hong Kong, and then move on to his approach to collaboration and finish by discussing his approach to parenting.

In the installation in Hong Kong we got to inhabit the mind palace of your grandmother, so to speak, and in a minute I want to ask about the mind palace of your daughter. But first, I understand the video installation is going to the Singapore Biennale this fall. Whats that going to look like?

The project I’m working on for the Singapore Biennale is related in structure, but the content is very different. As a kid I was told that my dad’s dad wrote music for movies. I know that he worked for Shaw Studios at one stage. It turns out they’re one of the sponsors of the Biennale, and when I mentioned the connection in a meeting, we found out that my grandfather composed the soundtrack to over 300 Shaw Brothers films. It turns out he was as famous as my uncle Calvin. When he was working, a lot of the kung fu films were actually composed of off-cuts of footage from other films, or they were shot without a script. You’d see who was available on set that day, bring them in, have them run around, fight, and argue—all recorded without audio. Then it would be edited together, my grandfather’s soundtrack serving as the backbone of the film, and only then would they get voice actors to overdub the action. In some sense these are unscripted silent films, and that structure struck me as exciting. It also helped me solve a budget problem. I hired stunt actors who look like the actors in the soap opera, and I’m going to edit the footage like a low-budget production would have done in the 1960s or 70s. We have a soundtrack, and we’re going to splice stunt footage and soap opera footage into a semi-sensible format according to the soundtrack. I’m going to write the script after the edit is done, then we’re going to get voice actors to overdub, and then we’re going to foley all the audio. It’s a composite film.

Let’s go back in time, to the end of your first cycle of work excavating your family history. You then turned to a series of family portraits.

I was thinking a lot about my childhood home. There were cheesy portraits of my family all over our house growing up, me and my sister dressed up and posing. I worked with David Boyce on this series of “Affective Portraits” (2010). I wanted to see what emotion looks like when it’s captured, so I went back into the psychological literature and looked at different categories of emotions, and the liminal spaces between the accepted emotions—where do they come from, how do we elicit them, and how perceptible are they in other people? We came up with two distinct sets of prompts. One set was completely fabricated, in that we were eliciting aspects of real emotions from people by showing them stimuli beforehand. In one simple one we cut up a tub full of onions, and the studio was so pungent that you started tearing up as soon as you came in. So one family you see their eyes watering. I think we also showed PETA videos and war footage. With one family we pissed them off on purpose by making them wait 45 minutes while we were getting ready, and so they were angry by the time we shot them.

But then in the more interesting portraits we used directed facial action, a technique used in emotions research where you train participants to control the muscles in their face. We would specifically direct people to contort their faces to represent stereotypical expressions of joy, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise. The underlying theory suggests that doing that can actually elicit emotion.

Aside from the human actors, you’ve had a lot of animals. Did they start out as pets or as collaborators?

All the animals came in for the work. It started with a conversation with my gallery in LA, because I’d done a run of disastrous collaborations that made it really hard because there was a long list of people who needed to be credited when I was selling work, and collectors were confused. The gallery said they wouldn’t give me another show until I produced something without collaborators. But this touchstone or connection to the outside has always been really important to me to have, an element of the unknown brought into the process. I came up with the idea that if I started collaborating with animals, there wouldn’t be anything to dispute. At first I wanted to collaborate with a beaver to chew through wood, but it was complicated and as I was on the phone with the wildlife sanctuary I happened to see our first rabbit in a store window, so I Googled whether rabbits chew significantly enough for sculpture. I bought Michael on the spot. I also got rats because I read that they are able to engage with toxic materials by rotating their front teeth. I also taught them to paint with treats and rewards. Then I figured out that parakeets’ poop changes color if you feed them different fruit and seed blends. Hamsters. Cats. A chinchilla.

More recently you’ve been collaborating with your children. Obviously, the looming question is, did they start out as children or collaborators?

When my daughter, Clementine, came along, she was a very high-need child. She slept very little and was very active, very curious, so it made sense for me to invite her to my studio and get her involved. It started off with her just being in a place where she could be creative, where she had art supplies and materials. She learned how to use tools very early. I would work on one side of the studio, and she would mess around on the other side. Over time that started to blur. She was able to see a lot of art at an early age, and she was able to spend a lot of time with other artists and other artists’ kids. She’s always had a real facility with making her ideas manifest, whether that’s through customizing toys or having rich imaginary worlds. There were a few early shows I involved Clementine in. Right when the pandemic hit we repurposed work in storage in my studio—she would have me pull things out of the storage and stack them up, add stuff to them, repaint things.

Let’s talk about the dream palace that we’ve been working on.

I mentioned that Clementine has had these sleeping issues. She had hypotonia as a child, which meant that she had a lot of issues with swallowing and digesting. She also had a pretty bad case of GERD, and so she couldn’t really sleep for longer than 90 minutes at a time until she was three, and had a lot of trouble falling asleep as well. A lot of those early years I would spend hours with her in bed, and we were working with a therapist who taught us a technique that seemed to work where, as she was falling asleep, I would start describing a scene. Usually we would start in a forest. There’s tall trees towering over your head. The ground is cold, but the air is warm. We’re stepping through the woods. You can hear the twigs snap underneath your feet, and you hear a sound. You look to the right. We would talk through this scenario so many times for so many years that we fell into a routine. It would end with us arriving at a castle that we would enter into and explore, or there would be constraints keeping us from getting into the castle. We had to sneak past guards. It dawned on me that we’d done this so many times that the space was coming into clear focus for both of us, that Clementine and I were visiting a private imaginary space that was ours and ours alone. For this forthcoming project, she and I sat down with architectural drafting software to create a concrete record of this place that only she and I visit, and will turn it into a place that other people can also enter into.

We’ve been talking about your family from the perspective of the practice. If you turn that around, could you share how you would describe your philosophy of parenting, or what sort of values you bring to the relationship between your home life and your studio life?

The huge luxury of being an artist is that I’m able to maintain fuzzy boundaries. I’m a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. Some years I only teach one day a week, and some years I’m off for two months in the winter and four months in the summer. A lot of my practice is about engaging and exploring the world on my own terms. Parenting falls into that—I hope to share the values that I have that I attached to my practice with my daughter in that I don’t necessarily want to compartmentalize her engagement with the world as art or non-art. By incorporating her into my practice, getting her involved in the studio, collaborating with her, it’s a way of showing her that she can kind of make her own world. That’s a value that I hold dear: I want her to grow up knowing that her environment is malleable, that the way that she decides to engage with it is a matter of agency, and it’s not something that she has to accept on its face.

Lives of the Artists: Adrian Wong (Part I)

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Lives of the Artists is a regular monthly interview column profiling contemporary artists, asking them to share the connections between their home lives and studio practices.

I am thrilled to share this conversation with Adrian Wong, someone who I have intense respect for as an artist, intellectual, and father. Adrian and I met in Hong Kong 15 years ago and have worked on a number of exhibitions, commissions, and other projects together. Also, our daughters once tried to smuggle a feral cat from the Saronic Gulf to Heathrow. This is the first half of our conversation, focusing on a body of video work in which Adrian traces stories of his family through Hong Kong.

Lets start with your childhood. How did you find your way to art?

Adrian Wong: I went to school with a bunch of tech-focused, entrepreneurial people and started studying a lot of math and physics, but I got interested in the thinking behind these things so I switched to psychology and product design. I was in a master’s program in developmental psychology and got interested in art during my thesis research, when I had to spend a lot of time interacting with kids in an orphanage in Vanadzor, Armenia. The ruse I came up with was to pretend to be an art teacher. When I got back, I kept the art up and ended up with enough credits to get a degree in art alongside my work in psychology, and then when it was time to transition to a PhD I took a shot in the dark and applied for an MFA instead.

Looking at your practice, I see a few different stages, and one of them is this early interest in early childhood that comes out of your psychological research. And then as soon as you establish your studio in Hong Kong, the practice becomes very relational, and you’re working in collaboration with other people.

One of the things that led me away from the social sciences was the realization that the deeper I got into what I was doing and the better I got at what I was doing, the narrower my zone of activity became. If I started to pull things from outside, all of that was cut out by the time my research was approved. It was a complete accident that I came to Hong Kong, but I got really interested in a lot of different things, all of which were outside my area of expertise. The studio became a place where I could give myself license to explore things, to do the kinds of research that I found personally interesting, just to see what happened.

Adrian Wong, Tuhng Gwai Wan, 2007

My first studio was awesome. It was a nightmarish wreck of a place. It was 4000 square feet, so in a space that big I could take the contents of my mind and allocate them real estate. There were whole sections of the studio dedicated to different branches of the practice, and they intermixed in space. I got really into vernacular architecture in Hong Kong. I was looking at local superstitions, doing a lot of stuff on ghosts. I had a section of the studio where I had set up a bunch of apparatuses to invoke spirits to come commune with me. There was a drum kit. It was the first moment where I was able to step outside of an academic context, to completely throw myself into thinking about my environment and process the world that I was living in.

And in a way you were using your practice to investigate or connect with your family history in Hong Kong, right?

I met someone in grad school who was on a teaching fellowship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, so I just accidentally ended up in the place where my mother and father were born. My mother and father were both estranged from their families to the extent that I didn’t really know where I came from. My father’s side was a complete void for me, apart from a few comments that were made over the course of my childhood. I was partially raised by his mother, who never spoke about Hong Kong. It wasn’t until I got into that research that I realized how deep my roots were. For that first project I set out to rediscover a specific person that came up in my father’s family. This was my grandfather’s youngest brother, Calvin Wong, who was a Dick Clark-esque TV presenter in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. I was able to track him down, and found out that his son, my uncle Harry, was a celebrity magician in the 80s and 90s, so we ended up doing some work together. I art directed children’s theater as a side gig for a while for him, and acted in some of his productions.

Adrian Wong, Sang Yat Fai Lok, 2008

Can you introduce the Sang Yat Fai Lok (2008) project?

That was the first proper show I had in Hong Kong. It was a two-person show at Para/Site, one of the first few shows that Tobias Berger put together when he came in. Calvin Wong had a TV program that aired for two decades in Hong Kong, and I thought it was a really interesting concept. It’s called Happy Birthday, and every Saturday he found a kid celebrating their birthday, and then threw them whatever kind of party they wanted. There would be some very surreal, strange requests, like a kid who loved ham so much that he wanted to have a ham party. And they would recruit a studio audience to play out this kid’s fantasy. When I finally tracked down my great-uncle Calvin, I found out that the show was never recorded—it was live from the studio to TVs in people’s homes and public parks. So I recreated an episode of the show, using it as a structure through which I could reinvestigate my connection to my family, with details drawn from what I learned about my father’s childhood, my grandfather’s childhood, the show and its role in my family.

Adrian Wong, Sang Yat Fai Lok, 2008

Recently you’ve returned to researching your Hong Kong family with a project that loomed large in my understanding of your practice because I heard you talk about it for so many years. Can you describe your grandmother and how she entered your work?

I grew up in Park Forest, Illinois, which was the pinnacle of postwar suburbia. My grandmother lived most of her life in extraordinary privilege. My grandfather’s family fortune was vast. She gave birth 16 times. My mother was the 16th of those. Eight were viable, all eight are still alive. My mother’s oldest brother, my uncle Joseph, is over 100. My mom is 73. Her mother was not a traditional mother. I interviewed a lot of them for this project, and they barely knew her. They barely saw her. My mom has very few childhood memories of her mother. She was a socialite and spent most of her time throwing parties. My grandfather died relatively young. My grandmother did not have any formal education and got the keys to the kingdom after he passed, and spent decades burning through the family fortune. My mother’s siblings all expected some kind of inheritance, but she lived a very, very long time and ran out of money. My understanding is that she came to the United States because she couldn’t sustain herself, so she ended up landing with our family.

She took over the lower floor of our house and didn’t really want anything to do with us. She routinely wore these beautiful gowns and cheongsam, full face of makeup every day, and drifted around hardly acknowledging us, like a ghost living in our house. But she was fully immersed in daytime television, watching American soap operas religiously all day long. When she passed away she left a rack of composition notebooks, where she had kept notes on the soaps. For a long time, given the work that I was doing, I thought that if I had the opportunity to translate her notes, I would have some kind of outline of her version of the stories that she saw, and I thought I could get into that space and create a surrealistic soap opera based on her notes as a way of getting to know her better.

Unfortunately, when I was able to go back into those notes and have them translated, it was all gobbledygook. The project that I showed at Oil Street this spring mostly uses my recollections of that period of her life, but also tons of interviews with her kids, trying to get the bottom of what her life experience was like. Much like Sang Yat Fai Lok for my father’s side of the family, it became a loose retelling of my grandmother’s life from birth to affluence to her later years living with our family in suburban Illinois.

You’ve shown this in Hong Kong in a reconstruction of the sets.

AW: I replicated the sets, which were huge. I built four sets, with the help of an incredibly talented scenic designer, G Tsui. One set was a daipaidong, which is where she was first seen by my grandfather. My grandmother was from a lower-class family in Zhuhai, and while she was out buying the fabric for her annual new clothes at Chinese New Year, she was spotted by my grandfather, a little prince who saw her and said, “I want to marry her.” He picked her out from the crowd and arranged for a proposal to be delivered to her home. She was plucked from her family and never saw them again. There was a first wife from a notable family who was immediately demoted to maid. She worked administratively for the family and supervised the maids and drivers. My grandmother didn’t know she was actually his first wife until he died. Of all of the eight living children, not a single one of them could remember her name. Then there was a recreation of what her childhood home might have looked like, and finally a dual set split between my grandmother’s home in Hong Kong and our home in Chicago.

Shorts: Juergen Teller, Yiyun Li, Proust, Collecting with Kids, Artist Homes, and Sarah Manguso

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.

Juergen Teller (Talk Art)

On one of the millions of artist interview podcasts I listened to last week, Juergen Teller introduced his summer exhibition “7 ½” at the Galleria degli Antichi and the Palazzo del Giardino in Sabbioneta. The show is titled after the duration to date of his relationship with Dovile Drizyte, who has become a creative collaborator as well as a romantic partner. Last year they released a beautiful Steidl book together called The Myth consisting of 97 photographs of Dovile posed with her legs in the air in allusion to the idea that the pose improves the odds of conception, one in each room of the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como. Juergen also described a new project in which he photographs the pourover coffee he has made for Dovile each morning for the last seven and a half years, then photographs the environment around the coffee. This series caught my imagination for its tenderness and simplicity, but I haven’t managed to find any images yet, save these screengrabs I’ve borrowed from a report on the exhibition by Mantova TV.

I always enjoy the contrast between the high gloss of commercial fashion photography and the offhanded nature of the personal and art images that fashion photographers take. Juergen Teller has never been afraid to put his children in front of the camera: Iggy, his daughter with Dovile, is the star of this Document Journal portfolio recreating some of his iconic shots while Lola, his eldest daughter with Venetia Scott, was a part of some of these shoots the first time around. Ed, his middle son with Sadie Coles, is the heart of the 2006 photobook Ed in Japan. For his retrospective at the Grand Palais Ephémère a year and a half ago, Teller put together an eerie triptych: on the left, a photograph of himself as a baby taken by his father; in the middle, an enlarged copy of a newspaper notice of his father’s death, “Mit Auto den Freitod gesucht?” (“Suicide by car?”); at right, a photograph of his mother hamming it up with a taxidermied alligator.

The exhibition was titled “I Need to Live” in reference to the ongoing choice to not follow his father. In 2003, Teller shot a series of photographs at his father’s grave. In one, Mother and Father, his mother faces the camera, partially crouched down, arms outstretched like a keeper in front of a goal. In another, Father and Son, Teller himself holds a lit cigarette and a bottle of beer, one foot resting on a football, completely nude.

Yiyun Li (New Yorker)

I did not particularly want this to become a theme for this week, but Yiyun Li’s writing on her sons’ suicide gives us some of the most eloquent lines there could be on what it means to choose to live, and what it means to create the conditions to allow others to carry on with their own choices in life, whether they choose to live or not:

If I train my mind on the happy moments, the framework for living seems sturdy enough. And yet it is not an indestructible shelter from catastrophes. A mother dedicating herself to the framework for living is like a ship-builder building a vessel, not asking whether the voyage is to be through calm seas or tempests, not pondering whether there will be a tomorrow or not.

Proust (Personal Canon)

In her newsletter, Celine Nguyen quotes Roger Shattuck on the meaning of Proust: it’s about “human beings faced with the appalling responsibility of living our lives.” The whole essay is wonderful and very much worth reading.

Art Collecting with Kids (Art Basel)

A collection of really cute photographs of collectors’ children tagging along to studio visits and helping to install artwork in vacation homes.

Artist Homes (The Guardian)

Katy Hessel writes on visiting artist homes, and understanding domestic space as an environment every bit as important as the studio to the conception and production of the work. She mentions artists we have looked at here: “Ruth Asawa looped her wire sculptures on the kitchen table surrounded by her six children,” and “for Bourgeois, her house—both a prison and site of freedom—was her muse.” I think this would be a great topic for a book.

Sarah Manguso (LARB)

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Sarah Manguso’s new book Questions without Answers, which collects replies to “What’s the best question a kid ever asked you?”. This short interview touches on the book itself as well as her philosophy of education, and includes a couple gems:

Before I was a mother, I thought of my life as my very own masculine-coded hero’s journey. Now I raise my kid and I write, and I find both of those practices so much more interesting (and more heroic?) than the life I wanted when I was young.

And for this week, I’ll end with this:

There’s a huge overlap between making art and raising a child—and there’s an overlap between making art and being a child.

Projections: REM

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Projections is a regular column on films that touch on living in a creative family.

We tend to look on with something less than generosity when people make art too directly or too biographically about members of their family. Earlier this week Kaitlin Phillips described Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold as “pure hagiography by an underemployed nephew.” (I don’t know Griffin Dunne as a director, but he played an excellent Sylvere Lotringer in I Love Dick and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say I spent an inordinate amount of time with him in This Is Us.) Perhaps we should not expect critical engagement with the work from these kinds of projects. What we watch for instead is the anecdote of intimacy, the tendency of the lesser-known relative to share trivial moments of family life—celebrities have them, intellectual giants have them—in a way that somehow illuminates our own reading of their work. Our relationship with the work, after all, is our own. The work does not belong to us, the person certainly does not belong to us, but the way it lives with us, the experience it creates in our lives—that belongs to us and to us alone.

Tomas Koolhaas shot REM (2016) over the course of three years during which he followed his father through the far-flung offices of OMA, onto construction sites and into completed projects, and to the opening of the Venice Biennale the year that Rem curated it. Kaitlin’s criticism holds here, too: what we see is pretty anodyne. It can’t be easy to shoot your father the way you see him, the way you want to see him, the way he wants you to see him, the way you want him to see you seeing him, and the way he wants the world to see him all at the same time. As viewers, we get some well-considered quotes on architecture and urbanism from a great designer looking back on his career and beginning to think about the end of an era. He looks at the grand sweep of OMA over 50 years from New York to China and now to the Middle East, with Europe inevitably as a home base that acts as foil to whatever else he is working on. He describes his practice as a willingness to engage with impure things and look for the rigor within them.

In the opening shot, young people skateboard in front of Casa da Música in Porto, where my father lives. The building is perhaps more iconic as a skate spot than as a music venue. Later on in the documentary, intertitles will relate: “A building has at least two lives—the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward—and they are never the same.” Like a child, a building has to live out its own independent life. This becomes increasingly evident as Rem and Tomas visit completed OMA buildings: they interview the unhoused about the formal qualities of the Seattle Central Library, then meet with the daughter of Jean-François Lemoine, the late publisher for whom the Maison à Bordeaux was originally designed. Full of custom mechanisms to enable the partially paralyzed man to live an active life, the house is a bit ghostly without him to activate it; we watch Rem stare into space as he moves up and down on mechanized platforms while doors open and close around him. The challenge, says the daughter Lemoine, is to give new meaning to all of these automations now that her father is gone.

There is an interesting attention to the language of the body. One scene focuses on Rem’s daily swimming practice, and the expectant and open state of mind that results after he has had his swim. In another, he talks about observing the workers on the various construction sites he visits, noting not only cultural differences in how they work individually or together but also differences in energy and morale. Aware of the criticism of starchitects, of the fantasy of globe-trotting designers plopping down their weird signature forms wherever they go, Rem says that it is not that he is interested in making the same thing everywhere, but rather that he has been allowed to do different things everywhere. My friend Jacob Dreyer wrote recently in Artforum to question the logic of OMA in our new political era: “Now our governments are more radical than our artists, who tag along behind asking the government to be careful, to consider unintended consequences.” I feel that the utopian logic that Jacob ascribes to OMA’s past work is inaccurate and ahistorical; the point has always been to engage with messy realities and, if anything, the mess to be engaged with now is only proliferating. 

These markers ring true to my experience of OMA projects: they embrace the impure, they celebrate the rigor of internal logic, they are more platform than stylistic statement, and they create possibilities for unexpected forms of movement. Later this week I will be back at TPAC, affectionately nicknamed the egg-on-tofu, for a performance of Łukasz Twarkowski’s Respublika. This production will, for the first time, open up two of TPAC’s three theaters to each other, creating an unexpected mega-space that has taken quite a bit of time and engineering to realize. A couple months ago, when I toured the building with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Chiaju Lin, who directed the project on behalf of OMA, Rem phoned in with excitement to hear our feedback. Living in Beijing during the construction of the CCTV tower, I heard a lot about the circularity of media production, and how the design of the building would allow for a public loop providing visibility into the circulation of the image. That being Beijing, a lot of the transparency was eventually dropped from the program. But in Taipei, TPAC has the Publicloooooop, a route that runs through the building offering glimpses of backstage production facilities as well as views of the surrounding neighborhood. Like buildings themselves—like children—ideas have afterlives of their own, popping up in unexpected places.

In Venice for the Biennale, Rem speaks of a full-circle moment to see both of his children engaged with his professional life and with the creative world. Aside from Tomas, director of the documentary, Charlie is a photographer and artist. Their mother is Madelon Vriesendorp, a co-founder of OMA and the brilliant artist behind many of the defining images of the OMA universe, like Flagrant délit (1975), seen on the cover of Delirious New York. Madelon and Rem divorced in 2012. Rem’s partner Petra Blaisse has collaborated on many OMA projects through her firm Inside Outside, including both the landscape architecture and interior concepts for TPAC. Rem D. Koolhaas, nephew of Rem, is the founder, with Galahad Clark, of footwear brand United Nude.

Editor’s Note: Luxury is Having Kids and Still Being Cool

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about the intersection of art and life. Editor's Notes is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

In the New Luxury Pyramid, the Ultra High End is defined by having kids and still being cool.

This graphic made the rounds in 2024 and, given my vocational interests in core values, came back to me over and over again. It comes from Edmond Lau, the strategist/ designer/ meme guy who mostly circulates on LinkedIn (which itself might make an entry somewhere in the diagram). Lau offers his own explanation:

The New Luxury Pyramid: In the time of the 'Oat Milk Elite', status signifiers can be difficult to decode. What once might have been a universal signal of wealth like a Rolex or a Chanel Bag, now can under certain circumstances instead ironically communicate the lack thereof. These days, it seems like we prefer signs that are harder to fake. Taking a photo with a Birkin? Easy. Maintaining your yuppie deluxe lifestyle with two kids and a mortgage? A little harder. Think caseless iPhones, 10.30am fitness classes, not having roommates.

I see his point about how these things signify an economic and social elite. Kids are expensive, but even more expensive is the bandwidth to continue living on one’s own terms while also caring for kids. The idea of status signaling is not so interesting for me, however. What I’m interested in is how this is framed as luxury, because that’s what this life is: it’s pure luxury. I’ve worked with a lot of luxury brands throughout my career, first in publishing and more recently in art fairs. What’s fascinating to me about their events and activations and communications with their clients in general is that so little of it is about the product. Much more of it is about the experience, the intangibles around everything. Luxury is care, attention, and intention.

Or there’s Derek Guy:

This line hits hard because I am so fond of referring to myself as a “Mrs.-Dalloway-said-she-would-buy-the-flowers-herself” kind of guy. Lauren Sands writes on her Substack that selling luxury involves defining what luxury means to you and then figuring out who else would define that as a luxury. She offers a list of her favorite luxuries:

A heated toilet seat (bonus if it automatically raises) / Jewelry made by a friend / A piece of clothing I have had for years and worn innumerable times / Reliable high-quality healthcare / Living amongst things that reflect my style / Site-specific artwork / TIME / Reading / A vintage coat that I spent months tracking down on eBay / Friends that I have had since childhood / A long lunch with an artist I admire / Happy children / A pair of shoes that look good with almost any outfit / A hand massage from my husband as I fall asleep / Help (with children, work, carrying a heavy bag, really anything) / Writing a substack newsletter / Hosting a dinner party / The right kind of vacation / A handmade piece of pottery / An obscure watch that is hard to find

Having kids and still being cool. The luxury in the lifestyle I’m talking about, I think, comes in through the excess of meaning. Working in art and culture it is easy, too easy, to feel fulfilled—to feel that we are creating something of value to the human experience. (And I will insist to the death that this is a feeling that everyone deserves, and should actively seek out.) And raising a child, it probably goes without saying, comes with an inbuilt sense of purpose, one that I would extend to caring for a loved one with intentionality regardless of whether he or she is a child, a parent, a romantic partner, or a dear friend. To have both at once—it’s often overwhelming.

This week I read Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico and laughed at myself for how accurately some of the signifiers of the millennial lifestyle he’s skewering describe my choices in furnishings, hobbies, and vacations. I haven’t read Perec’s Things but somehow suspect I would feel equally called out in those pages. And yet as ennui kicks in for our protagonists I can’t help therapizing them just a little bit. They aren’t able to find quite enough meaning in their work, but only because they aren’t really trying to. And they aren’t able to find it in their family configuration, but only because they haven’t looked it in the eye.

Between the New Luxury Pyramid and these meditations on lifestyle and meaning, there is clearly a difference between working for meaning and working for sustenance. We lead lives of wild privilege. To do work because it is a pleasure, to put something out into the world. Luxury.

With the conclusion of my six-part essay on “Real Paintings and Fictional Painters,” I hope I have shared a bit of the motivations and inspirations behind Nostos. Moving forward, I’ll continue to write once a week on Wednesdays. On a regular rotation, I’ll share letters from the culture: the books I’m reading, movies I’m watching, exhibitions I’m seeing, links I’m sharing. Once a month, I’ll also share a conversation with an artist or creative focused on how they position their professional practice in relation to their personal lives, particularly their families and friends. This will be the heart of this newsletter going forward, and over time will constitute an archive in support of what it’s all about: having kids and making culture is indeed the ultimate luxury.

Essay: Real Paintings and Fictional Painters (Part VI)

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Essays is an occasional column that teases out in greater depth how family life appears in culture.

It’s something that is repeated often about the occasionally codependent relationships artists have with their work: they couldn’t have lived otherwise. They couldn’t have lived, otherwise. I have no doubt that this is true, that artistic practice plays a constructive or even therapeutic role—that creativity and making and putting something out into the world is one of the things that makes life worth living. But it also seems to be trotted out a bit too often as an excuse for the bad behavior of artists, as if the artistic impulse were in control of their life decisions. This impulse, certainly, is a powerful thing. Over time my interest in what art can do has drifted into the camp of the pro-social, into forms of practice that are inherently social and relational. We want art to shatter our illusions, to break things, to fail spectacularly and in doing so show us the limits of what we are able to imagine, and there are ways for this revolutionary, violent impulse to be channeled into the practice. We have spent a lot of time with Alice Neel, whose two sons had an ambivalent relationship with their mother’s practice and bohemian lifestyle and took their lives in another direction. To conclude this series, I want to turn to the work of Kim Lim, a sculptor a generation or so younger than Neel whose radical work was intertwined with a life of love and cultivation, and whose two sons carry on her legacy both directly and indirectly, continuing to advocate for her profile by shepherding her estate while also developing their own pro-social creative practices. She said of the configuration of their relationship in 1966:

I virtually ceased to be an artist when the children were born and while I felt they needed my full attention. I don’t regret one moment of that time, but since one is now at school, and the other will soon be going, I have returned to art. Of course, it’s different being a woman—but it needn’t be a disadvantage. What one needs is tenacity to keep on working-to sculpture without denying domesticity.

This winter I had the immense pleasure of viewing her retrospective at the National Gallery of Singapore in the company of these two sons, Alex and Johnny, and I have to say there may be no more beautiful way to understand art than listening to brilliant creative minds speaking about another creative mind of which they have intimate knowledge. The retrospective, titled “The Space Between,” was the most comprehensive survey of Kim Lim’s work to date, and faithfully tracked the chronology of her sculpture and printmaking across four distinct chapters from her early wood constructions through her experiments in industrial minimalism to her return to wood and paper and negative space and then to her later poetic work in stone.

Born in Singapore in 1936, she moved to London in 1954 and became one of a small number of women active in the postwar British art world. One of the others, albeit a generation older, was Barbara Hepworth, who as a single mother of three left us one of the best lines about the parallel work of raising children and making art:

I think this idea of a working holiday was established in my mind very early indeed. It made a firm foundation for my working life – and it formed my idea that a woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind.

You see all of these photographs of Kim Lim with her work in the 1960s looking extremely stylish next to her sculptures, the life and the work all of a piece together, completely of their moment and also completely of our moment. It’s easy to imagine how the work found the audience that it has and even easier to imagine everything it had to go through to get here. In one anecdote related by the exhibition timeline, we learned that Lim was the only woman and the only non-white person included in the first Hayward Annual; she was invited to the all-female jury of the second the following year. A figure balanced on a precipice.

True to the title of the exhibition, some of the most touching moments on our tour of the show came in the spaces in between. The estate contributed a number of maquettes and archival material from the studio, materials that gained a particular resonance through Alex and Johnny’s familiarity. A wall of photographs became one of my favorites. At first glance, they looked like tourist snapshots. Upon closer examination, they revealed themselves as a highly curated collection of formal aspects of archaeological sites and monumental structures, many of which appear as references in Kim Lim’s work—from Stonehenge to Giza to Angkor Wat to Kyoto to the Cyclades. Then, with the added layer of personal narrative, they became a family photo album, opportunities for thinking about and sharing the aesthetic experience within the complex universe of the emotional life of a young family.

Alex and Johnny explained that these were study trips and working holidays, really, something that their parents started before they were born, seeking out direct access to art historical references that could be fruitful for their separate practices. Study trips but also honeymoons; study trips and then also family vacations. Growing up in this environment—and with a working stone carving facility for a backyard—it is no surprise that Alex and Johnny should have engaged with the creative life from a young age. To quote Alex:

There was an incredible respect and love between them [Kim Lim and William Turnbull]. You see in these amazing photos of them when they were young—both striking individuals. There was clearly a physical attraction but also a profound intellectual and artistic connection. They were drawn to each other not just as people but as artists, deeply inspired by each other’s work. Bill always said she was the best artist he knew, and I think he found as much inspiration in her work as she did in his. Though there are intersections in their art, their work remains distinct. … It’s fascinating that my parents came from such different backgrounds—Bill from a shipyard in Dundee and Kim from a well-off family in Singapore. Despite growing up in environments without art, they were somehow put onto this planet to do precisely what they did.

For all of these reasons I have always known that Kim Lim would play an important role in Nostos, but it was only when we arrived at the last chapter of the Singapore retrospective, the rooms about her later work in soft stone, that I started to understand how she would fit into this first essay. Titled “The Weight of Line,” this part of the exhibition draws explicit parallels between her mark-making practices at the foundation of her work with prints and the approach to form that we see in her best-known stone work made after 1979. (I say best-known, but in point of fact the resurgence of museum interest in her work has largely manifested itself in the other lesser-known bodies of work, particularly the wooden constructions, so perhaps this balance has already shifted.) Again the work came to life through Alex and Johnny, who described how their mother would go through cast-off blocks of stone from British quarries looking for a form she could work with, bringing them home to continue muscling them around in the garden. They pointed to a few specific lines that they found particularly weighty, instances of negative space inserted into reality. For me these lines and the phrase, “the weight of line,” called to mind something I have said about my dog’s collar: “the weight of belonging.” It’s a distinctly heavy chain, but she enjoys wearing it—whenever she hears someone pick it up off the counter she trots over and wags her tail and waits for it to be put back around her neck. My theory is that she bears its weight as a reminder of the affection and the mutual responsibility that comes with making a home together.

This weight of line brings us full circle to Alice Neel and Suzanne Valadon, to the distinct mark they share, the heavy dark outlines of their figures, one of the defining visual features of this practice of portraiture—a line that creates a relationship between the viewer and the viewed. In the case of Kim Lim I believe the weighted line holds together her practice across media, from the deep cuts in her stone sculpture to the physical weight of the pressed object that composes her prints. Throughout Lim’s work there is a play of rhythm and repetition, positive and negative space, a work of rocking back and forth to loosen and tighten, as if each time a form is repeated it settles further into a groove and deepens further its line. Art is a practice of discovering gravitas through experimentation.

Both of Kim Lim’s sons are highly creative people who have forged their own idiosyncratic practices and paths through art, music, film, and fashion across Europe and Asia. Alex Turnbull most recently completed the documentary Kim Lim: The Space Between, featuring a soundtrack by his brother Johnny Turnbull. Through this triangulation, they open up for all of us the rich matrix of ideas, forms, and love that they have spent their lives building.

Counterclockwise from upper left: Kim Lim, Johnny Turnbull, and Alex Turnbull

Shorts: Matt Copson, Kasia Fudakowski, Sylvia Sleigh, La Pausa, Christopher Adams, and the Penghu Perennial

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.

Matt Copson (KW Berlin)

Matt Copson, the artist whose laser animations are instantly recognizable, has his first major exhibition up in Berlin at KW with “Coming of Age. Age of Coming. Of Coming Age.” The main work is a trilogy following a baby that grows into / attempts to swallow the world, an everyman character born out of the fundamental contradiction in which we exist today: everything is horrible, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Matt Copson, Coming of Age (Trilogy), 2020-5

And also, it’s an opera. The baby is an artist, a politician—all of us. Last weekend Copson and the writer Dean Kissick invited three children to join them on stage for a panel conversation on “Art and Meaning in the Contemporary Age.” It sadly doesn’t seem to have been filmed but perhaps we can cajole Dean and Matt into sharing some of the highlights with us.

Kasia Fudakowski (ChertLüdde)

This work popped up on my feeds last week and I’m not sure exactly why, but since we’re on the topic of art and children in Berlin exhibitions I thought I’d share it here. I like how the pro and the con are presented side-by-side with no resolution, making permanent the state of the question, the debate, rather than the decision or the outcome.

This was initially part of a solo exhibition by Fudakowski a couple years ago that was thinking about energy in the context of art, and she made some really interesting comments about how the question of reproduction becomes an energy sink at a certain age, to say nothing of reproduction itself. “You will dilute your energy just when it reaches prime levels.”

Sylvia Sleigh (Lévy Gorvy Dayan)

Rather unexpectedly the artist of the spring has been the late Sylvia Sleigh, whose solo exhibition with Ortuzar Projects ended in early April and then has been quickly reaffirmed by the tightly curated Lévy Gorvy Dayan group exhibition “The Human Situation,” which puts her alongside Alice Neel and Marcia Marcus. As with Neel, one of the most engaging aspects of Sleigh is the network of relations that is embedded into the portraiture.

Sylvia Sleigh, Annunciation: Paul Rosano, 1975

If Neel’s talent was for leveling and humanizing, sympathetically stripping everyone down to a psychological essence, Sleigh’s was more like a drag show, swapping familiar figures into new and surprising roles. She’s been getting a lot of attention, for instance, for the way she strips down her male colleagues and lovers, turning art critics into odalisques, turning he who gazes into something to be gazed upon. In many pictures the textures of body hair and tanlines sit against foliage and patterned textiles, a delicate riot of sensation and experience.

Sylvia Sleigh, The Bride (Lawrence Alloway), 1949

And sometimes it’s a literal drag show: this is her husband Lawrence Alloway in a wedding gown, to my eye the very face of Orlando. There’s also a great episode of the Great Women Artists to listen to.

Coco Chanel’s La Pausa (New York Times)

Coco Chanel’s residence in the south of France has rejoined the house of Chanel after a half-century detour through Texas. Initially designed by Robert Streitz with reference to the Abbaye d'Aubazine where Chanel spent some of her childhood, the house has now been restored by Peter Marino to what is described as its 1936 state. From what we can see in the photographs released so far it is minimal and modern but not radically or dramatically so, of a piece with her mirrored Paris showroom, and seems like it would have made for a naturally informal and lived-in mode of entertaining.

Wolfgang Vennemann, Salvador Dali reading on the mantlepiece at the Villa La Pausa, 1938

Her many guests included Dalí, who lived and worked there in an unofficial artist-in-residence capacity. It will be exciting to see if Chanel’s art and culture programs will reinvigorate it in an interesting way—it says there will be a literary program in the fall and perhaps more to come.

Christopher Adams

Finally, as we are coming out of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas this week I want to share a couple projects by friends locally in Taipei. The first is “Island of Another Scene,” a stunning small-scale solo exhibition by Christopher Adams, which I somehow knew nothing about until it opened. I was blown away by the work and by its framing: Christopher presents some dozen portraits of artists, sometimes their faces, sometimes their work, sometimes a combination of the artist in the work.

In the introduction to the project he talks about how the idea of relational aesthetics changed our understanding of what art is, and how the relationships that constitute art and its audience become a part of how we see the art. You could call it a practice of relational portraiture.

Penghu Perennial (PILL)

The day after Taipei Dangdai closed I flew to Penghu, an outlying island off the coast, for the inaugural edition of the Penghu Perennial hosted by the Penghu Institute of Labor & Leisure, a new art space founded by the Paris-based multihyphenate Item Idem. We gathered for the premiere of the new film Joss Joss by Cheng Ran and Item Idem, and I moderated a talk between these two brilliant artists while food designer Slow Chen conceptualized a hospitality experience using foraged local ingredients.

I think this can become an exciting place to gather and look forward to future iterations of the Perennial—but it will also be a great spot for artists and particularly artist families to rest, recover, and make new things.