Out of This World

Brave New Worlds, opening this month at the Walker Art Center, offers up the world as a subject, with artists on five continents working in all types of media. Curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond offer their insights on this variegated view of the shared human experience.

The show includes work dating from the early 1990s to the present. Why that time period?
Chong: The earliest work in the exhibition, a photo mural by Chinese artist Zheng Guogu, is a [larger than] life-size image of the artist squatting in the street with a madman/beggar and having a hearty laugh. [Guogu] sees his life and art as one, turning his everyday existence and immediate environment into a “brave new world.”

The show’s title references Aldous Huxley and Shakespeare. Why?
Chong: Huxley’s dystopian future society is one possible dead end of our technological modernity. I thought of Shakespeare—specifically, Miranda’s speech in The Tempest—as the other bookend to the Huxley reference. It’s written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the time of the acceleration of European imperialism and  the “discovery” of the New World.

If you could visit one of the “worlds” represented in this show, which would it be?
Raymond: All the “worlds” presented in the exhibition are available to all of us to “live in” through the act of looking. These are not worlds to travel to escape or to visit as tourists, for me these are worlds of the mind, of gripping creativity, unconventional curiosity, and critical engagement with art.

Opens Oct. 4. Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-375-7600