Yesterday my friend Elisabeth and I were talking about vision. And Elisabeth mentioned that moment when you’re walking in the darkness late at night and you see something you can’t make sense of immediately. It’s a fearful, but also an exciting moment: Is it an animal? Is it a branch of a tree? Or is it a person? Until then recognition sets in, and with it comes categorization (which goes along with a value and a hierarchy) - things are “safe” again. The artist Wolfgang Müller once told me how everything that comes into existence in the world gets categorized. I was thinking that maybe art finds itself in that fearful, exciting moment in the darkness before categorisation takes place. You see, talking with the artist Ming Wong last Monday, I got another perspective on what is happening in Europe nowadays. Ming has been spending a lot of time in Asia lately and he was excited to be back in Germany. There’s a lot happening, he told me, with Brexit and all the refugees coming to Europe. Also in Germany things are changing, and with it German identity is changing, which is kind of exciting. It was the first time that I heard somebody address current times in a positive way and I’m liking the tone of it. “The future is dark,” Viriginia Woolf wrote in her journal on January 18, 2015, “which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
