With this book, Hsia-Fei Chang presents a mid-career retrospective. Born in 1973 in Taiwan, living and working in France for the past twenty years, graduate of the Bordeaux School of Art and having acquired an international Post-Diploma in Nantes, the artist has built a singular link between performance, photographic and video works that take the form of performances, sculptures and conceptual drawings. His work illustrates one of the most current practices on the question of personal identity, its impossibility in the contemporary world, and even the biased, creative and disrespectful paths necessary to the reconstruction of the very possibility of the idea of identity. His work, supported by important authors (in this volume: Sofia Eliza Bouratis, Mehdi Brit, Enrico Lunghi) and institutions of the same rank, still remains to be discovered in its true place, as proceeding from one of the most important approaches of the generation born after 1970.

This artist's book is conceived as a summary, with the always incongruous remarks of Hsia-Fei Chang, of several personal exhibitions. Mixing texts by the artist -the volume begins with the fictitious funeral oration of her last lover-, texts of performances and images that form over the pages, the book gathers a multitude of ideas exploitable by thousands of artists or art students. In itself, it is an open source book. In this artistic proposal, the personal commitment and the work on the fiction of the "me" or on the non-existent border between image and word in the new audio-visual forms are permanently linked with a fierce criticism of oneself. This always self-ironic tone makes this work (deceptively) light in relation to inspirations such as Viennese Actionism, the Californian performance art of Paul McCarthy -whose gesture and radicalism Hsia-Fei Chang takes up- and the French tradition, from Gina Pane to Sophie Calle, of which she is heir. This mid-term retrospective, as Anglo-Saxon or German-speaking institutions are quite adept at doing, with international repercussions, is fortunately presented here in a monographic book that will count.