To Save and to Destroy

For BANK NYC’s final program this summer, we present To Save and to Destroy, a group show curated by independent critic Qingyuan Deng. Inspired by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (2025), this exhibition brings together 15 artists across a range of mediums to examine the complexities of historical truth.

What we deem to be true and close to us might march away from us tomorrow, and those we left behind come back unexpectedly, this much we know, living in these interesting times. So, our memories, sensing this total freedom, devise their own pace, course of action, and form, with a forceful and eruptive velocity that might as well be called compulsion.

And this is not entirely new, art history itself is made of compulsions, according to An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Argentine novelist César Aira’s 2000 fictive biography of the 19th century German master of realism Johann Moritz Rugendas and his Romantic self-exile to the landscapes of Latin America. Aira wrote: “In the game of repetitions and permutations, he could conceal himself even in his new state, and function unseen like any other avatar of the artist. Repetitions: in other words, the history of art.” The writer’s charming psychologizing of the painter’s will to power could be extended as an allegory for our narration of history itself, assuming that one can still stage claims to the political from the position of the aesthetic. Much of art that tells us we need knows no cause and effect and neither do the historical fictions we give ourselves to feel more reassured. These stories always derive their stake from past failures, only to tread the path of revolutionary self-destruction over and over again. At other times, these stories regurgitate promises of future ideals; unbeknownst to our narrator is that futurity, in actuality, is created in each instant of its enunciation.

If you still believe in holding onto certain immutable truths, I can provide one now and right here: the images we have received from history are out of focus, blurred by the intrusive return of materialities supposedly disavowed and never escaping the contours of technological substrates layered beneath. These images are neither utopian nor anti-utopian. As the great Viet Thanh Nguyen—whose novels interestingly toy with the erotic onslaught of revisionism and non-fictions mount arguments against current hegemony’s assault on political hope (well, as much as fiction aspires to do politics, they are two distinct operative registers of imagination)—mused in To Save and to Destroy, memory is “a jagged assembly of shards as much as a thick stream of consciousness,” namely that historical memory is caught up in the haunting theatrics of events and objects that demand remembrance and false allegiances that we nevertheless are seduced by. Or to cite Nguyen’s literary affinity for the conspiratorial, history oscillates between two ontic positions, a private secret and/or an open secret, fracturing subjects of recipient into fragmentary episodes all the while frustrated by its own ethical and affective impasse. The distance between the self and memories inherited from history, sometimes diminishing and other times widening, makes distinguishing truth from betrayal an impossible task. But such is life, and a burden is also a gift.

The time for new life is now, and the now harbors no finality. Its rhythms and waltzes indefinitely play, wrought with deferrals, belatedness, restarts, retreats, incompleteness, and gaps, precisely what opens up the now, hospitable to voices from edges of radical alterity. This time last year, I received thinly veiled love letters in the form of philosophical ruminations from S. The subject matter ranges from the unfinished project of emancipation to the nature of desire. “You’ve taught me that desire is everything.” S declared, delighting in the pleasure of language without bearing the responsibility of using language. What a blessing to not know how we will always fail our desire, to think that we can be complete again. With the same naiveté, some of us move through history clumsily, through speculations that do not resolve, worlds yet to come, and failures yet to be overcome. And failure is beautiful. It suggests another potential for reenacting and replaying, better than nothing. Look toward Diane Severin Nguyen’s An era where war became a memory (2018) or Justine Neuberger’s Hieratic Drift (2025), you will understand: Nothing works as good as melancholia. Melancholia, that which emanates from failures that refuse to be let go, carries us forward, into the vast, uncertain expanse of time being compounded and condensed.

— Qingyuan Deng, July 2025