The contemporary is a recursive enterprise. It marshals the absorptive, parasitic

power of late capitalism to reinvigorate moribund and overused archetypes to

renew its relevance. This installation plays with the recursive potentials of the

Chinese word “又”(you), meaning “again”. In Chinese reduplicatives, the

morphological repetition of a word inflects its semantic. Doubling the word “又”

produces “双” (shuang), meaning “pair”; tripling it produces “叒” (ruo), meaning

“solidarity”; increasing it fourfold produces “叕” (zhuo), which, ironically, denote

“lacking”. The recent internet expression “又双叒叕” furthers the irony, for it

points to the constancy of change through repetition. The morphological potential

of the “又” produces various recombinant and synthetic states. It is perhaps this

inflation of again-ness that delineates the cosmology of the contemporary. The

whizzing of time and the loss of temporal gravitation push the society into

overdrive. The contemporary synthesizes the old and new, the historical and

speculative, the global and local, to create a sense of recursivity and timelessness

that is the contemporary. As if expunged from the material present, the

contemporary is time without teleology: it returns, revisits, rethinks, revises itself.

Contemporaneity is not so much the crisis of capitalism, but a capitalisation of

crises, again and again.