Miki Kanai was born in Tokyo and studied Aesthetic and Art History in Japan and UK. She is based in Berlin and has been working as a correspondent and writes about art and creative subjects for Japanese and English magazines, and has edited art dictionaries and exhibition catalogues. She has also coordinated several international exhibitions.
History is often treated as a single, official narrative. In his works, the artist IM Heung-soon looks beneath the surface of such monolithic narratives and searches for the personal histories and unique experiences of the many individuals that lie at its basis. He speaks with Miki Kanai on the importance of interviews for his work, on stories that cannot be told with words, and the meaning of respect. To article...
For his installation in the exhibition “2 or 3 Tigers”, Chia-Wei Hsu, together with the frog god Marshall Tie Jia, reconstructed his temple in Wu-Yi that was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. In the journal interview the artist discusses the common features of spiritual and digital worlds, his process-driven work with local communities, and the valuation of multiple variants of history. To article...
The division of Korea has far-reaching consequences to this day – for the people both sides of the border in every imaginable area of life. The artist Minouk Lim speaks about how the traumata of the South Korean population has (not) been addressed in the media, about collective memories resulting from shared television experiences, and her own engagement with media technologies. To article...
Who has the sovereignty of interpretation over history? What new perspectives and approaches to it are possible? The artist, filmmaker, and theater creator Ho Tzu Nyen on the tiger as a metaphor for the historical entanglements between man, nature, and culture in Malaysia and Singapore, the meaning of language and song in his work, and the uncertainties generated by engaging with (colonial) history. To article...
How to develop a non-essentialist conception of identity? What strategies are conducive to decolonize the imagination? Anselm Franke and Hyunjin Kim, the curators of the exhibition 2 or 3 Tigers, discuss the colonial beginnings of worldwide surveillance, the dangers of nationalism in history and today, and the possibilities for emancipation from understandings of tradition in both East Asia and the West. To article...
