Modern Monsters: Death and Life of Fiction

Modern Monsters: Death and Life of Fiction is the reader that followed the Taipei Biennial 2012, gathering the essays, images, and source texts that shaped the exhibition Anselm Franke curated under the same title.

The biennial took its starting point from the Taowu, a monster from Chinese mythology that the literary historian David Der-Wei Wang reads as a stand-in for history itself, a figure said to foresee and thwart human intention, later invoked by writers to describe the violence buried inside China's project of modernity. Franke and co-editor Brian Kuan Wood built the 300-page volume around that figure, pairing scholarly essays with artists' texts and images from contributors to the biennial's exhibition and its six "mini-museums," including Chen Chieh-Jen, Joachim Koester, Eric Baudelaire, and Mark Fisher. The book is thread-sewn, illustrated with roughly one hundred black-and-white images, and published by Spector Books in Leipzig.

Franke, a curator and writer based in Berlin, is Head of Visual Art and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt; his research addresses the relation between subjectivity, animism, and biopolitics in art and architecture, and he later served as chief curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale. Wood is a writer and editor associated with e-flux journal.