作者姓名：李昱坤

Opening with Benjamin’s death on the Spanish border in 1940 and the storm of progress described in his theses on history, Li argues that progress continues to pile up ruins. Faithful inheritance means not repeating jargon but choosing, within an art economy ruled by traffic and capital, to be a flâneur, a ragpicker and a destructive character who keeps critical reflection alive.

Treating Japan’s defeat as the decisive condition of Meiro Koizumi’s practice, Li traces how the spiritual vacuum left by the emperor’s declaration of humanity, the national memory of collective victimhood and a crushed salaryman masculinity enter the work. He analyses directed performance, extreme facial close-ups and the collapse of speech as techniques converting the viewer’s discomfort into critique rather than spectacle.

Taking Jason Allen’s Midjourney-generated Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, winner of the digital art prize at the 2022 Colorado State Fair, as its case, Li argues that Beuys’s promise of creative equality has curdled: once algorithms can produce professional images, everyone creates and few are free. He reads the slogan as betrayed rather than fulfilled, and calls for recovering social sculpture under present technical conditions.

Beginning from Mao’s question of for whom art is made and from his epistemology of practice, Li argues that many Chinese artists have retreated into petty sentiment, trivial everydayness and hollow conceptual games, losing contact with the social process around them. He proposes translating Mao’s spiritual core — self-transformation, enquiry and empathy — rather than his period slogans, into a renewed greater self.

Focusing on Chiharu Shiota’s room-encompassing installations of red, black and white thread, Li reads the semiotics of keys, shoes, beds and windows, and argues that a practice rooted in childhood trauma, expatriate identity and a fight with cancer exceeds autobiography to address collective memory, historical trauma and social reality. Memory, in this reading, survives the disappearance of the objects that carried it.