Inside the Cabinet of Curiosities: Author Andrew Hui on Itatani, Borges and Leibniz

The paintings of Michiko Itatani conjure old-world fantasies of libraries, studios, cabinets of curiosities, and museums, interposed with sci-fi images of the galaxies. Western culture, ranging from the Library of Alexandria to Google Books, has been haunted by myths of ordered libraries, chaos, and the dangers of yearning to know and possess it all. How does Itatani’s work continue this tradition of metaphysical speculations? Andrew Hui, author and professor at Yale University and National University of Singapore, answers this question by looking at beguiling examples from German philosophy and twentieth-century Argentinian literature, as well as representations of cultural spaces in the photographs of Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, and Robert Polidori.

Andrew Hui is the author of Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2016) and A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019), reviewed in The New Yorker and recently translated into Spanish, with Chinese, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish versions forthcoming. His newest work, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, is under advance contract with Princeton University Press. In the 2023-24 academic year, he will be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.