"I don't trust my imagination very much, so I often create works based on things I've actually experienced," says Hewa. "I want to animate those indescribable states where all sorts of emotions get mixed up together." In these micro-animations (that do well on social media, both because of their quick runtimes and windows into varyingly haunted and serene worlds), Hewa animates women dreaming of other realities, dinner guests locked into a perpetual state of laughing and empty streets lined with crooked houses.
People on the island have grown so accustomed to Chinese displays of power that life continues as usual. As China carried out live-fire drills and rehearsed a military blockade in the waters surrounding Taiwan this week, 70-year-old Liao said she wasn't worried about war. She was enjoying life as a retiree, playing mahjong with her friends and keeping an eye on the stock market.
For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.
