Mingzhu Mu

In my works, I explored the expression of texts/characters in visual art and expressed my thinking of history, memory, time, and stage of life.

My concept is from “Palimpsest” and Walter Benjamin’s viewpoint about the past, present, and future. Every moment of the past constitutes the present, and the present is the manifestation of every moment in the past. They are intertwined and inseparable. And the link between the past and present also indicates the image of the future.

“The future is precisely what Benjamin seeks in the past. Almost every place that his memory wishes to rediscover bears ‘the features of what is to come’……Benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past……he is sent back into the past, a past, however, which is open, not completed, and which promises the future.”

Peter Szondi and Harvey Mendelsohn, Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin

“One moment is added onto the old ones, and thus, when the next moment occurs, it is added onto all the other old ones plus the one that came immediately before. In comparison, therefore to the past collection of moments, it cannot be the same as the one immediately before, because the past is ‘larger’ for the current moment than it was for the previous moment.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Henri Bergson