Back to ‘The Art of Ground Zero’ – War, Plague, Nuclear Energy On March 11 this year, eleven years after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, I was standing on a piece of vacant land in Tomioka, Fukushima. However, it was not the first time I had visited this site.View More >

Text: Jung-Yeon Ma Ho Tzu Nyen’s solo exhibition “Voice of Void” was presented at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] from April 3 to July 4, 2021. At the beginning of the talk with the artist and the production team held at the opening of the exhibition, the question was posed: “Why the Kyoto School now?” …View More >

EVERYWHERE DIFFERENTLY (CONDENSED) — By Andrew Maerkle
“I think of androgyny more as a multiplying than a doubling per se. I never had a strong identification with the two genders I was offered when I was growing up. I see shades of gender, degrees toward the masculine and degrees toward the feminine and everything in between. And I was somewhere in between, feeling like I had the best of both sides without being either.”View More >

NEVERENDING NEVERENDING STORIES — By Andrew Maerkle
“My idea was to produce a reportage painting that would chronicle Japan’s relationship with nuclear power. I think it’s the same for anybody, but something that starts out as a shocking event will fade from memory over the years. In order to resist that, I wanted to make a reportage painting ghastly enough to immediately recall the terror and foreboding of the time for viewers.”View More >

LEAP BEYOND VOID – By Andrew Maerkle
"How does Buddhism get wrapped up in the techniques of violence and killing of samurai culture, which in many ways culminated in kamikaze culture? This led me to a kind of inconsistency at the root of Kyoto School philosophy. For example, Kitaro Nishida’s foundational concept of zettai mu, or “absolute nothingness”: it is absolute but nothing at the same time."View More >

DOUBLE WHISTLER — By Andrew Maerkle
“In recent years I’ve been struck by the affinities between astronomy and cinema. On one level, both engage with concepts of light, time, and distance. Indeed, it could be argued that both astronomy and cinema are essentially composed of only these elements. On yet another level, both can be understood as sharing, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation.”View More >