Project

Modern Monsters

Year

2015

Type

Location

Curated by Anselm Franke, the Taipei Biennial 2012 featured forty-five artists and art groups as well as six ‘mini-museums’. This journal, published two years following the exhibition, allows the biennial to live on in a new form, collecting an archive of documentation and 23 essays and original commissions, functioning as a conceptual and theoretical reader in conversation with the exhibition. Modern Monsters uses the mythological Chinese figure Taowu as a starting point to address the making of modernity. Drawing from the mass-market format of Taiwanese manga, the floppy and lightweight format of the book contrasts with its theoretical weight. An original typeface, black and white bitmap treatment and parallel text flow all refer to the doubling and manipulative effects of translation.