Upon winning a fellowship in 1991, Franz Ackermann chose to spend a period of time in Hong Kong, where he lived in a tiny hotel room. The artist then made a series of small works on paper, maps that he called “mental,” in order to emphasize their intimate and private scale. Almost like transpositions of views obtained under a microscope, each of these works on paper has a structure that can be traced back to that of a nerve cell, in this case organized around a nucleus that includes architectural details pertaining to the reality of the place. This process coincides with the transformation of the unknown into more familiar territory and into a gradual deployment of the artist’s imagination over the complex urban grid. [...]
