Lecture | The Hollow Man: Adeena Mey on Artist Hu Yu

For the public program of Hu Yun's exhibition Mount Analogue currently on view at the museum, scholar, editor and curator Dr. Adeena Mey gives a presentation on the exhibition, followed by a conversation with Hu Yun. Mey analyses Mount Analogue with questions concerning the development of epistemology as a discipline, the production of museum knowledge and its practices, and situating it with the works of Hu Yun and other artists.
Mey organises his presentation in three parts:
- the artwork Hollow-Men (2024), its spatiality and its relationship to exhibition history;
- the artistic strategy of “naming” in Hu Yun's practice;
- the criticality at work in Hu Yun's work in relationship to the exhibitionary context.
In their conversation, Hu Yun reflects on his creative processes that go against the linear way of telling his findings, and how he works with the "gaps," "cracks," and "leakages" in those findings through a fluid way of making new associations between artworks.
"The epistemologist must set to work, going back to the very problem itself, to the apparatuses, primary documents, sketches, debates and controversies of a specific time, and to the milieu, in order to sort things out."
Mey, Adeena, trans., François Dagognet, Les outils de la reflexion: Epistémologie (The Tools of Thought: Epistemology), 1999