X Museum launches second triennial in Beijing

“Haunt” in the exhibit’s title is inspired by “hauntology”, a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, in which he argued that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave.

The term was taken up by theorists and critics like Mark Fisher in the 2000s to criticize contemporary culture’s persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms. Today, hauntology is widely invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism.

Noting that history infiltrates the current through memory and heritage, through possession and obsession, the curators handpicked a group of multicultural Chinese artists growing up in a globalized world, whose fluid practices bestride cultures and fuse past and present. The works on display shine a spotlight on the hauntological dimension of their practices.