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On the occasion of the exhibition Ten Million Rooms of Yearning: Sex in Hong Kong, Para Site presents a talk by participating artist Roee Rosen. More information about the exhibition, currently on view through August 10, can be found here.
“What are you doing after the orgy?” Jean Baudrillard once perversely asked. I would answer: “Just read Roee Rosen.” Rosen came after the orgy, and he knows it. With Sweet Sweat, he is bringing in for a last call all the erotic avant-gardes of the West. But he can only do it with a vengeance – by writing himself into the picture. Erudite, baroque, dazzling, maniacal, and all-encompassing in his approach, Rosen keeps erasing the fine line that separates fiction and truth, imagination and reality, just as Sade and Lautréamont have done before him. But he is also keenly aware that this division doesn’t exist anymore and that all one can do is hallucinate over its existence. What makes his summa erotica erotic is that for him, as for Georges Bataille, pornography is philosophy.
—Sylvère Lotringer about Sweet Sweat, the only novel written by Justine Frank, which features an essay and biography by Rosen.
Venue kindly supported by Asia Art Archive.