Fall 2023 Issue
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire, replying in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment of 2023, we are honored to present the poet Kim Hyesoon.
Photo: courtesy Kim Hyesoon
Photo: courtesy Kim Hyesoon
Hans Ulrich ObristWhat is your most recent work?
Kim HyesoonFind my mom’s smell on a map of my country, smell my country.
HUOWhat is your unrealized project?
KHCreate my own periodic table of the elements.
HUODo you write poems?
KHI don’t write poetry. I do poetry.
HUOWhat have you forgotten?
KHMy milk teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeth.
HUOWhat is time?
KHThe desert, the rhythmic entity that pushes me into annihilation. The pain of infinite sequences.
HUOWhat is the first entry in your catalogue raisonné?
KHThe scene of my dad dying. My mom yelled at my dad in his coffin, What the fuck is this, then me yelling, What the fuck is this to my mom in her coffin.
HUOWhat is your favorite book?
KHAlways changing, but right now it’s The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, where the main character is named Macabéa, which means Don’t die.
HUOWhat is your favorite movie?
KHAlexander Sokurov, Whispering Pages. This movie is a book.
HUOIs the mirror broken?
KHThe mirror isn’t broken yet. When the mirror is broken, there is no me, there is no you, there is no world. But when I write poetry, I enter a room without a mirror.
HUOWhy is there something rather than nothing?
KHWhy is there something rather than nothing?
Kim Hyesoon has published fourteen poetry collections: From The Autobiography of Death (2016), Phantom Pain of Wings (2019), and After Earth Dies, Who Will Moon Orbit? (2022), among others. Her anthologies have been translated into many languages and she has received multiple literary prizes.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Ahead of Alex Israel’s exhibition of four new Fin sculptures at Gagosian, London, the artist spoke with Susan Casey, author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean (2010), about the ocean, surfing, and Los Angeles.
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
The Singular Experience at Gagosian’s Le Bourget gallery is the largest exhibition of Walter De Maria’s work in France in several decades. Organized by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition marks the first time De Maria’s final sculpture, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), is being shown outside of the United States. Here, De Salvo speaks with artist Lucy Raven about her evolving kinship with De Maria and more.
Ed Ruscha sits down with the author and explorer Erling Kagge to discuss existence.
Following the debut of her Fall/Winter 2026 collection at Dia Chelsea, New York, Ulla Johnson met with Sarah Godfrey to discuss her recent collaborations with the Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner foundations, her upbringing in and dedication to New York City, and her nonhierarchical approach to collecting.
Andrew Durbin’s dual biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tracks the convergences and divergences in the lives of the two artists, from their first meeting in Coral Cables, Florida, in 1956 through their generative romantic and creative partnership in New York, Italy, Fire Island, and beyond. Ahead of the release, Durbin met with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to speak about the development of the project, the sublime noncompliance of these two artists, and the motifs of love, death, and rebirth that weave through the telling of their story.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, met with the Quarterly’s Derek C. Blasberg at the maison’s historic headquarters at 21 place Vendôme, Paris, following the Schiaparelli Fall/Winter 2026–27 ready-to-wear show. Since taking the helm in 2019, Roseberry has been credited with advancing the heritage of the house through unpredictable sculptural designs that carry Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist spirit into a new century. The pair discuss the much-anticipated exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, as well as Roseberry’s early exposures to art, his continued dedication to drawing, and the enduring legacy of Elsa Schiaparelli’s daring vision.
Helter Skelter—an exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina—marks the first creative dialogue between two visionaries of American art, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince. The show explores the grit, grift, violence, and ingenuity of American culture through more than fifty works, including photography, video, and large-scale installations that interrogate themes of race, gender, media, and politics. In the interview below, Nancy Spector, the exhibition’s curator, speaks about the shared motifs—from apocalyptic sunsets to a fascination with “monstrosity”—that led her to pair these artists for the first time.
A conversation between Theaster Gates and Jessica Bell Brown, with an introduction by Sydney Stutterheim.
Valentina Castellani speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about her new book, Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery. The illustrated survey traces the evolution of the Western art market from the medieval era to the present day.