William Kentridge
Taipei Fine Arts Museum

For William Kentridge, history is a verb. Taunts, hints, and suggestions of the past show up recursively in his drawings, tapestries, animations, films, collages, sculptures, and even operas, cementing a body of work that is impossibly referential—to history, of course, but also to himself, to his artistic process, to the lexicon of symbols and motifs he has established across four decades. Persistently reimagining the gray truth into a black-and-white world of signifiers, Kentridge’s work continues to serve as a distorted mirror to reality, in which all absolutist frameworks—past versus present, good versus evil, here versus there—dissipate into ambiguity.