Rice paper

JANUARY 3, 2012 -  Very Short List

INSTALLATION “Books on Rice Kernels”

You can buy books-on-tape at the supermarket, at airport shops, and at truck stops. But you’ll have to visit an art gallery to get a good look at Trong G. Nguyen’s books-on-rice art installations.

Nguyen—a mixed-media artist in New York City—writes entire texts (by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Roland Barthes, and others) out on individual rice kernels, one painstaking word at a time. Then he groups the chapters together (in Mylar packets) and hangs them up in very neat rows. The works are coolly beautiful, shading toward the antiseptic—they’d look right at home on the walls of some high-tech hospital. But they’re also thought-provoking, in ways that would have surprised and, we think, delighted the original authors.

To  view exhibition.