EO

In 2003, you conducted a landmark interview with J.G. Ballard. You asked if he’s interested in the art of the times. He responded, “On the whole my views coincide with those of the great Brian Sewell, but I see the young British artists of the past ten years or so from a different perspective. They find themselves in a world totally dominated by advertising, by a corrupt politics carried out as a branch of advertising, and by a reality that is a total fiction controlled by manufacturers, PR firms, and vast entertainment and media corporations. Nothing is real, everything is fake. Bizarrely, most people like it that way.” How has Ballard’s conceit aged?

HUO

When I first started my Instagram, I was focused primarily on noting formulas. When I was interviewing J.G. Ballard, I asked him to write down his formula for working. He wrote, “Sex multiplied by technology is the future.” That interview was the beginning of our collaboration. I haven’t read it in years, but I actually stumbled upon the paper where he wrote down that formula earlier this afternoon.

EO

Most people who interview you always reference your first exhibition World Soup: The Kitchen Show (1991). Who were you before that exhibition? What were you looking for from art? And, who are you now, given all the work you’ve done?

HUO

[Laughs.] Yeah, that’s a few questions. The past, the present, the extreme present, and then the future. Ballard was influential for the books the Serpentine did with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar: The Age of Earthquakes (2015) and The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021). And, it’s true that The Kitchen Show is a kind of beginning because it’s the first show I did. With that said, I was already working in the art world for quite a long time. So, you’re totally right, there is a long period before The Kitchen Show which isn’t talked about.

I started to become obsessed with art in my early teens. I grew up in a small town, Weinfelden, in the canton of Thurgau in Switzerland. There’s a lake there that connects Austria, Germany, and Switzerland called the Lake of Constance. Commuting across the border was a daily occurrence. There is a bigger German town, the University of Konstanz, which we went to for the cinema and shopping, for instance. And, as a teen, you could cross during school for lunch breaks. I could never leave my house without my passport or identity card. But, when I was seven years old, I was in a car accident. It was a near-death experience. The accident played a key role in my development; it was a definitive before and after moment.

EO

It’s strange when something like that happens to you, outside of your control, and yet it leaves you forever changed.

HUO

It was a very strange yet productive time for me. On the commute to school, there was this abandoned, seemingly haunted, Thomas Mann-style house near the park. During school lunch breaks, we would always pass by the house. At some point, I became obsessed. A teacher of mine said it used to be a mental sanatorium of Professor Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, writer, and pioneer in the field of existential psychology. [Michel] Foucault’s first book Dreams and Existence is about Binswanger. My teacher told me that Binswager treated very famous patients in the clinic. One of them was Aby Warburg, the renowned German art historian and cultural theorist. While Warburg was a patient in Binswanger’s clinic, he researched the Pagan antiquity in the Renaissance and the rituals and secret regions of the Hopi community in Arizona. He had suffered from paranoid psychosis and was treated first by Sigmund Freud and then Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, where he started doing research on the snake. He wrote a book, Schlangenritual, that looked at the Hopi and their snake-handling rituals. He also founded the Warburg Library, now the Warburg Institute, which he moved to London during World War II when he had to exile himself. He was the son of a prominent banking family in Hamburg and he didn’t want to take over the duties of the bank. He made a deal that he would not be involved with the family business. Instead, he could buy any book he wanted. He also started this work-in-progress series Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, which featured 63 panels covered in different images. The Bilderatlas series inspired me to start building a collection of postcards, which piqued my curiosity in art. I started assembling my own postcard museum shows in cardboard boxes from 15 to 17 years old. That’s the beginning of my curating.

EO

Let’s talk about Édouard Glissant.

HUO

In 1999, when I met Glissant, he told me that we needed to find new forms of engagement. He said we can’t keep doing art, design, and architecture shows behind closed doors. We have to move towards creating platforms to reach everyone.

EO

What about your foray with night trains?

HUO

When I was 17 years old, my obsession with traveling all over Europe for studio visits began. I saw an exhibition in St. Gallen by Claude Sandoz with my parents. It featured work by this Swiss artist from Lucerne. I asked to meet the artist, and they said it wasn’t possible but that they would be happy to pass along a letter. This was pre-Internet. I wrote the letter, ended up visiting his studio, and everything picked up from there. The following week, I got in touch with Fischli & Weiss, which was a revelation for me because I got to witness them working on their film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), (1987). Then I went to visit Alighiero Boetti in Rome. He told me, “Art is not only about what artists do; you should ask artists about their unrealized projects and help to make them happen.” I was sent to Gerhard Richter, who taught me a lot about painting and how to install a show, and then Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne. She would say, “The art world is totally neglecting women artists. Whenever you are in a city, you should ask, ‘Who are the women pioneers who haven’t had the exposure they should have’?” I took her advice and just did it. I haven’t stopped since. That’s basically how I met Maria Lasnig in Vienna; decades later, we worked on her show at the Serpentine together. Five years ago, I was in New York and asked around about artists who have worked since the ’60s and haven’t had visibility. Several artists said it’s shocking that the amazing Faith Ringgold has never had a museum show in Europe. I went to see Faith Ringgold and we did a show at the Serpentine. These were the kinds of tasks that artists gave me when I was seventeen years old. I continue to do them today.

EO

[Laughs.] I was going to make a joke about you being the real Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in the sense that you are often confined to the kitchen as an exhibition and narrative.

HUO

[Laughs.] I interviewed Chantal Akerman about it.

EO

Do you still feel a sense of urgency in terms of how you approach work?

HUO

Yes, I do. I think it’s interesting because our conversation began with J.G. Ballard. When he and I started talking, he asked me to describe my work. I was telling him about curating, and he felt that it really didn’t describe my activity. He thought what I was doing was more of a junction of making, so I suppose that’s the first thing I think about when I wake up. I’m focused on creating dialogues to address the challenges of our time. I always connect two people who haven’t yet met with each other every morning. I have a few rituals I practice each morning. I always read fifteen minutes of Éduard Glissant. For me, it’s a toolbox. I want everything I do to contribute to Glissantian ideas of mondialité and archipelago.

The poet and artist, Etel Adnan, who was an important mentor of mine, passed away some weeks ago. She told me we need to listen to each other. That we need to focus on love and not suspicion, the common future, and to not live isolated from each other. I want to work and contribute to the world not only through a curatorial practice. It’s not just about putting objects on the wall. Of course, if I do a group show and I put together different objects in the world, that is a form of junction making, undeniably. But the goal is to also bring people from different worlds together.

EO

In your interview with Ballard, he speaks to this same theme: “Very few people today are old enough to remember how traumatized Britain was by the Second World War (which in many ways we had lost). The British were locked into an exhausted present, and were trying to find their way back into the past, where they hoped they might be happier and discover their former certainties. A hopeless quest. A new future has to be built from scratch…”

HUO

I’m fascinated that you brought the Ballard thing back because I often quote his junction theory, but otherwise, I haven’t returned to his books. For me, Glissant is the author who really is the toolbox for the current moment in so many different ways. We can learn from Glissant because he anticipated the current moment and posed possible answers. Glissant’s accuracy is astonishing. His work has kept appearing throughout my life. It’s almost like all roads lead to Glissant. In the time before The Kitchen Show, my encounters with Alighiero Boetti figure centrally. He gave me the methodology I continue to use today and was also the first person ever to talk to me about Glissant. The reason I’m mentioning Glissant has to do with the extreme period of globalization we’re living in now. There have been numerous moments of globalization, but the world now is experiencing, without a doubt, the most extreme and violent period of globalization in history.

Glissant said that we are sort of caught between two forces. On the one hand, there are the destructive forces of homogenizing globalization that lead to extinction. He also said, three decades ago, that there will be a counter-reaction to globalization which manifests as the new forms of nationalism, separation, and of suspicion. The latter forces have been exacerbated by COVID-19. Glissant asks for a strong resistance to those as well, and came up with the idea of mondialité. What’s particularly interesting in relation to the current moment is that early on, Glissant defined himself as an activist of the environment and natural surroundings. Glissant’s friend, the Malian artist and cultural theorist, Manthia Diawara, who is a professor in cinema studies at NYU, moved to Senegal to a small fishing community to work with fishermen, pebble collectors, and migrants on a film that addresses a series of fatal floods caused by climate change.

EO

You said that Glissant is the author of the moment for you. Before Glissant, who was it? Because his work has been one of your most consistent projects for the last few years.

HUO

Since we met him in 1999, it’s been at the forefront of my thinking for a long time. But I was reading him for over ten years before I met him—Alighiero Boetti told me about his work in 1986. I’ve read most of his published books and some unpublished texts that he gave me. Before Glissant, it was Robert Walser. But Glissant never went away.

EO

Can you tell me about Walser?

HUO

I’ve read everything by Robert Walser, a German-speaking Swiss writer. He was introduced to the United States by Susan Sontag. Towards the end of his life, he ended up not writing and instead going on long walks. He was an incredible wanderer. He took these extended walks. I’ve always seen myself as a wanderer between routes. Later in his life, he kept writing things down on tiny pieces of paper, and increasingly his writing got smaller and smaller. People thought he was writing in a secret language. My handwriting obsession comes from him. He was never able to support himself from the writing, so he lived in an asylum in the last years of his life. He worked as a copyist, inventor’s assistant, and as a butler. He died in the 1950s. He was found frozen in the snow. Who are the writers you read everything by? Who are your writer obsessions?

EO

I don’t have obsessions, but there are moments where I’ve been changed. I read a lot of Charles Bukowski’s poetry when I was younger. I love Richard Siken’s Crush, which won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize. I’m generally more drawn to books that deal with information about structures and systems, similar to Etel Adnan’s practice. Her writing is so architectural.

HUO

Etel wanted to be an architect at the beginning of her career, but she told me that as a woman in the 1940s and ’50s, it was impossible for her to become one. Once, for a show of mine, she made a plan for a house she wanted to build. It’s very beautiful. I can show the image to you afterward, it’s somewhere here in my flat. It’s kind of a plan for a house. Her big, unrealized, dream was to build that house. I hope that one day, someone can build it. The link to architecture in her work is an important observation. I was magnetically attracted to these leporellos because they bring together poetry, visual arts, drawing, and painting.

Your question also goes back to the previous question about art and poetry and where I stand in relation to that. Clearly, I have a base in the visual art world, because that’s all I did in my early and late teens to my mid-20s. I did obsessive research into visual arts when I met and visited artists. I realized that one can only really understand the forces in visual arts if one also understands what’s happening in architecture, music, literature, and science. I realized that I was really ignorant in these fields beforehand. I actually studied ecology and the economy in the ’80s, so my focus on environmentalism was already there, but I was ignorant about poetry.

When I first started going to Rome, I would ring up Cy Twombly. He said once, “You don’t know anything about poetry?” That was a very beautiful challenge. I started to read poetry obsessively and visit a lot of poets. I’ve had these intense research phases in my life. In a way, I always stayed a student. It’s interesting because that’s also the opposite of the idea that one could ever be an expert. I’m always learning and feeling like I know nothing, and that’s what is so exciting.

EO

How do you feel about the specialist versus the generalist framework?

HUO

I think it has to do with a fluidity of practice, but I think it’s rooted somewhere. Again, Édouard Glissant is relevant. He had his 80th birthday anniversary in a jazz club in Paris, which my friend, Agnès Troublé (agnés b.) had organized. It was a room that was super crowded, and a philosopher asked Glissant, “What are you doing with this guy?” I was obviously not at all an academic in the philosophy world. [Laughs.] Glissant said to him, “Hans-Ulrich, he’s carrying my thoughts into different worlds—spaces where I want my work to be.” At his 80th anniversary, he said there is someone else who does that for him and that he really wants us to connect. For 10 minutes in this tiny jazz club, we were walking around this crowded room, and he was desperately trying to find Manthia Diawara. When we found him, Glissant said to us, “I want the two of you to be friends. I want the two of you to work together.” There we stood, and once more, I was given a task. It wasn’t a task so much as the gift of a new friend. Since then, Manthia and I have worked very closely on a lot of things. Manthia phrased it very beautifully, about the root thing, which is connected to what you just said. He summarized what we both learned from Glissant: being rooted in one’s own country, culture, or discipline is important as long as it does not lead to the exclusion or annihilation of other roots. He said, “It can’t remain urgent or standard if it leads to hierarchization over others. We need to celebrate roots that expand elsewhere, that touch one another. There are no singular roots. Roots protect other roots.” When Manthia said that, it made me think about my roots in the art world. I think we are living at a time when generosity is key and should be a medium no matter what we do.

I think this gets at the idea of curating or exhibition-making. Why do I still stick with that format after thirty-something years? Well, I really believe that it offers amazing possibilities. By being rooted in the art world with this format, I can bring everybody together. For example, we did Utopia Station, which Rirkrit Tiravanija, Molly Nesbit, and I curated for the 50th anniversary of the Venice Biennale in 2003. We invited Agnès Varda to show Patatutopia, which connected the concepts of food scarcity and concrete utopia. I explained to her it was an experiment showing her film but it’s important we do it because we have this platform. She—a pioneering figure in cinema that she spent her entire life at film festivals showing her work and in cinemas—told me that this was so different from anything else she’d been invited to. She said, “I'm always invited to show a feature film or a short film, and you guys just have this platform and don’t even tell me what to do.” Yes, I said, “We want you to change us and not tell you what to do.” Imagine Agnès Varda arriving at the Venice Biennale in her late 70s, dressed as a potato. For 15 years, she did installations all over the world and this incredible one at LACMA. I believe there is freedom in the format of the exhibition.

But, nevertheless, because you asked me about the current moment, I’m also thinking a lot about durational formats. As much as I believe in the freedom of the form of the exhibition, I also believe that exhibition is sometimes still caught up in event culture, no? And deadlines. There's a general evolution in the world that demands me to think about more durational and sustainable formats.

Roman Krznaric wrote a book, The Good Ancestor, about liberating society from short-termism. In the present, it’s interesting to think about concrete practices. I met the artist, poet and writer, Precious Okoyomon, maybe five or six years ago. I was told by Claude Adjil that there is this amazing poet in New York. When I met Precious, I immediately realized that their practice is both fluid and visual. Art that is both writing and installation. Precious constructs gardens, so their work is also architectural. We did a park night in London at the Serpentine and then a poetry show in Manchester. Other artists like Otobong Nkanga, Yinka Shonibare, Adrian Villar Rojas, and the designers from FormaFantasma signal, with their work, the importance of farms. If all of a sudden artists are saying that they prefer to do a garden or a farm than an exhibition, that statement needs to be taken seriously. Maybe, we have to change the way we work.

Another writer I read is Alexis Pauline Gumbs. We’ve done quite a lot of conversations together. She has this beautiful book Dub about Sylvia Wynter. I just interviewed Sylvia Wynter, actually. Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant went to this conference in Wisconsin to talk about ethno-poetry. Sylvia Wynter famously said, “There is no such thing as ethnopoetics, and if there is, it shouldn’t be.”

I always had this unrealized project to interview Sylvia Wynter. It was just realized because, for a while, she didn’t want to do interviews. Manthia and I sent her questions and she answered with handwritten doodles. It’s super beautiful, but sometimes she would only answer one sentence, in handwriting. It was like my happiest moment of 2021, when I got this envelope which was initially sent to the wrong address finally arrived. But, Alexis Pauline Gumbs says that her book Dub isn’t inspired by Sylvia Wynter but rather about thinking with Sylvia Wynter.

EO

Sylvia Wynter is completely under-theorized as a thinker. I spent a sizable amount of time with her work in grad school in a course that Mabel O. Wilson and Saidiya Hartman co-taught on architectural enclosures.

HUO

Exactly. When I visit an artist, I always try to find out with whom do they think with? When I visit an architect, I want to know with whom they make architecture? It’s not genealogical, but about relations. I think that’s what I love about Sartorius, one of my favorite books by Glissant, where these people only exist through relation or in relation. There is no genealogy. That’s a question I always ask: “Who do you think with?” And then I ask, “What is your advice to a young poet or artist? What do you want to transmit to the next generation?” And then, of course, I ask them about the unrealized projects. I’ve got thousands of unrealized projects archived, and my big unrealized project is to do an exhibition of all the unrealized projects. Each time I get close to doing it, something goes wrong, so it’s still unrealized. I really want to do that because I have so much material and it would be a beautiful show. Another one of my unrealized projects is to write a novel. I only ever got to page ten. I’ve also always wanted to get involved in the idea of school, but in an experimental way. If you think of Black Mountain College, there were mathematicians and composers there. I spoke to Dorothea Rockburne the other day, who is still very active. She just had a show in New York, and so I went to interview her about the Black Mountain College. She’d go on walks with scientists in the morning when she was there.

There is no Black Mountain College today. I feel that a Black Mountain College kind of institute is missing from the world. I feel a great sense of urgency to do that one day. I definitely want to curate a game show. I’m very interested in this idea of a game that hundreds of millions of people play. I think it would be wonderful to curate the group show as a game in a way. I also have this unreleased project with Philippe Parreno in France that harkens to Jean François Lyotard’s show Les Immatériaux, a really important show in the early days of the Pompidou that linked technology and art and science.

EO

Pavilions are an important platform for young architects. Why did this initiative begin?

HUO

It happened in 2006 when Julia Peyton Jones, the former Serpentine director, invited me to join her and the gallery. Julia, together with Zaha Hadid, who also designed our North Gallery space, came up with this idea of a temporary structure. Architecture is slow. Pavilions are relatively fast, and because they don’t have many constraints, there is more freedom for an experiment. We also wanted to create more modality in the English architecture scene. Zaha moved to London in the early 1970s to study at the Architectural Association and graduated in ’77. It wasn’t until 2000, though, when she did the Serpentine Pavilion, that she had built in the United Kingdom. It was very insular. Oscar Niemeyer and Kazuyo Sejima, for example, never built anything in the UK.

The premise was to invite these incredible architects who had never had the opportunity to build in the UK and make the architectural dialogue more international. When I arrived, we continued the series. We worked with Rem Koolhaas, Kazuyo Sejima, Frank Gehry, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, and Jean Nouvel. Six years ago, it became apparent that because the pavilion had been running for a long time and had shown a lot of pioneers who hadn’t built anything in the UK, we missed showing the new generation who had since come of age and who we felt should really have visibility. We invited Smiljan Radic and made the scheme younger. In 2021, Sumayya Vally from South Africa, the youngest architect so far, debuted her pavilion. It was the first structure she made. We also worked with Frida Escobedo from Mexico in 2018, followed by Jun’ya Ishigami, Linaa Ghotmeh, Theaster Gates, and Francis Kéré from Burkina Faso. We really felt it was important to open it up for new generations, for new voices.

Earlier on, I worked a lot with Cedric Price, but a lot of his architectural design work was never realized. He was an incredibly important toolbox to me, especially his Fun Palace design and concept he created with Joan Littlewood. The Fun Palace is another unrealized project; an institution in that vein still doesn’t exist. It was never built, a space where you can have an opera, where the opera space becomes a conference room, which becomes a community center, which becomes an exhibition.

EO

True, though it seems like OMA and Rem [Koolhaas] adopted aspects of the Fun Palace for the Taipei Performing Arts Center.

HUO

Cedric said that “a 21st-century institution has to utilize calculated uncertainty and conscious incompleteness to produce impactful work. The catalyst for invigorating change whilst always producing the harvest of the quiet.” That’s the synthesis of what this institution could be. I was working very closely with Cedric for the last ten years of his life. We did a book of interviews. We did several exhibitions. That was another reason I was excited about the job at the Serpentine in 2006: it gave me the opportunity to produce a new architectural reality every year. I found it so exciting that the Serpentine commissions pavilion architecture every year because it allows the experiment to live on. The first idea when I moved to London in 2006 was that we would invite Cedric Price (1934–2003) to build a pavilion. That would have been amazing at the end of his trajectory, but Price sadly passed away. The Fun Palace wasn’t built. There was The Aviary at the London Regent Zoo. That’s another favorite structure. He built it in 1963 with Lord Snowden. Norman Foster is restoring it now.

EO

What is your relationship to collaboration?

HUO

I always felt skeptical about curating shows on my own. Why would I not collaborate? First of all, I believe we can do more together than alone. It’s not about ego. Second, I grew up in Switzerland as an only child. The combination of Switzerland and being an only child created solitude. My medium is conversations. I develop things in conversations. I think it’s also true for arts organizations. Given the complexity of our world and what it means to run an arts organization in the 21st century, it seems almost absurd that the museum would have one director. That’s why we came up with the co-directorship at the Serpentine. I’ve never run the Serpentine alone. We have this model of the Artistic Director and the CEO. Bettina Korek and I run the Serpentine in very close dialogue.

EO

How do you approach conversations you’re not prepared for?

HUO

I had a long conversation with Vitalik Buterin, who invented Ethereum. Five years ago, when I did that talk, I really didn’t know that much about blockchain, so I had to prepare and read about it. I can’t meet with someone and have no idea what I’m talking about. Then, I’m wasting his time and my own time. I genuinely want to learn and understand. Each conversation is like a crash course on someone’s world.

EO

I love interviewing people because it creates the conditions for me to learn new things.

HUO

It’s super exciting. To return to the idea of the ‘production of reality,’ I’m reminded of one last unrealized project idea of Barbara Steveni and John Latham of the Artist Placement Group. When I was in the ’90s in London, I spent a lot of time with Latham and Steveni. They had this fantastic idea that every company, every brand, and every government should have an artist in residence. Mark Bradford goes even a step further and says, “Artists need a seat at the table where decisions are made.” I think that goes beyond the museum and the exhibition space. Every major company should have an artist on the board. I would love to make that happen, and help curate that by matching the artists and the companies.

A lot of artists right now have a desire to do public art projects for different communities. That’s another unrealized project: to create the agency for public art commissions. Of course, there are great organizations for public art, like the Public Art Fund in New York. It exists in many cities, but I do think that there is great potential for a more global agency for public art, which you know could create public art situations—in cities, in the countryside, in many unexpected locations. I have always had a dream of doing a solo show with David Hammons and Jean-Luc Godard.

Another unrealized project of mine is to curate a brand. I’m working with a few brands because they want to do something with an artist, but I think it would be really exciting to curate an entire brand. It goes back to my conversations with Virgil [Abloh]. He had a very curatorial approach to how he lived his life and how he ran Off-White and Louis Vuitton. Then, of course, there’s also the projects which are too big to be realized. I’ve always been curious about decentralization and the blockchain. I was interested in what it would mean to curate the city, because 20th-century cities have been run from the top down. I’m not interested in that. We need to think about more effective bottom-up approaches to curating a city and worlds.

EO

Where do you feel the most at home?

HUO

Maybe night trains are my home. As Deleuze said, “Être au milieu des choses mais au centre de rien,” which translates to, “To be in the middle of things but at the center of nothing.” For the convenience and the books, I would say London is where my work is now. Before that, it was in Paris for 15 years because I was working at the museum Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. I haven’t really spent much time in Switzerland. In between London and Paris, there was an episode in Rome when I curated the Villa Medici for three summers. At that time, I was also working as a professor in Venice, so I would go from Paris by night train to Venice, so it was Paris, Venice, Paris. Then I moved to London. Throughout the lockdown, I started to spend a little bit more time in Switzerland again. You define home as where the books are, which I think is another definition of home. Books have always been so central in my life. I have a sort of a slightly obsessive way of writing, editing, and curating books. I usually edit one or two a month. Obviously, in order to make books, I need to always be surrounded by them because, in a way, books come out of books—not only in terms of content but also in terms of form. If home is the place where the books are, my books are in London, they are in Zurich. Also, a majority of my books are now in LUMA Arles, because that’s where my archive is. There and Chicago.

EO

Tell me about Chicago.

HUO

I have an archive in Chicago because of Joseph Grigely, an amazing American artist. In the early ’90s, we worked on a show, and he decided that he wanted to archive me. I wondered why, because normally a curator would archive an artist. He said that his artistic practice is to archive other people. He also did work with Gregory Battcock. Gregory Battock was an American critic who was murdered in Cuba, so the archive was abandoned. Grigely found his archive and started working on it. He had experience archiving and wanted to make more of a practice out of it, so we made this agreement that whenever I write a book, do a lecture, or write an article in a magazine, the publication goes in a box, and then at the end of the month I send Grigely the box. It’s called the ‘Grigely Box’ in my office. We’ve done this since 1992. At the art school of the University of Chicago, generations of students have been working on this archive, building a bibliography, but also much more than that because it’s an artistic project. There’s a one year exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Porto that’s showing the Grigely archive and the work he’s done on it with the students. That’s really an art project by him, where I give the raw material, so it’s slightly unusual. You see, that sounds very different from my own archive.

EO

Do you ever feel like material to yourself?

HUO

No, I feel like I’ve just begun. It’s all about beginnings. I'm only ever beginning.