NEW-NEW-OLD-NEW-NEW
NEW-NEW-OLD-NEW-NEW MANIFESTO
It is the experience of old–new transitions that concerns us.
The exigency of the impossibility of such experience today imposes itself upon us.
It is only in relation to this experience that the category of art matters.
But one must take heed: art by no means guarantees the experience we seek. More often than not, it leads us further away—unless we restore to it a sensibility attuned to this experience.
This restoration entails nothing less than a new definition of art: one predicated on a new artistic subject and a new social function assigned to that subject.
Everything hinges on the sensibility for old–new transitions: the becoming old of the new no less than the becoming new of the old. This is neither a sensibility for the new nor for the old. Neither the new nor the old is at stake. The categorically new and the categorically old are false concepts, instrumentalised today to undermine the experience of old–new transitions.
A new product, a new commodity, a new service, a new show, a new business—
these are emblems of the regime of the new that governs us, a regime in which the production of the new is indistinguishable from the infinite production of difference. Hence, the dictatorship of the new—indistinguishable from the dictatorship of the old.
What we seek is a sensibility that enables the authentic experience of old–new transitions. Such experience is singular, and bears equally on the new and the old, without presupposing an overriding direction. Within this sensibility, flashes of truth spring forth and become accessible through their resonance with the subject.
Because we are not concerned with the new, the sensibility in question diverges from the avant-garde and its legacy. For the time being, and for the purposes of the present undertaking, progress is bracketed, so is any nominal vanguardism which, voluntarily or not, is in the end pulled into the orbit of the status quo.
Instead, we are concerned with the condition of possibility for movement—any movement—away from the perpetual stasis maintained by the new. A movement backward is as authentic a historical experience as a movement forward, insofar as both are unfastened from the linear projection of time. Backward and forward do not correspond to regression and progression; they designate different ways of manoeuvring historical experience.
The experience of old–new transitions is itself a historical experience. This is precisely the schema of history we propose: history is constituted by old–new transitions. To enter into an authentic relation with history is to experience old–new transitions in their singularity; and in turn, such singular experiences constitute participation in history.
This schema of history gives rise to a practice—foreign to art as we know it. This practice consists in cultivating and putting into operation the sensibility for old–new transitions. It produces and transmits the experience of old-new transitions in their singularity. This practice alone is capable of subverting the existing art history–art museum nexus—the very nexus that administers the distinction between old and new, feeding on this reified difference as a matter of institutional function and, in so doing, pasteurising the experience of old-new transitions at the level of subjectivity.
Against the institution of art that accepts the art history–art museum nexus as its destination, we propose to institute a menpai (school).
This menpai, enacting the schema NEW-NEW-OLD-NEW-NEW across scales, designates a multiplicity of things:
· the milieu to which the aforementioned practice belongs
· a site for the production of subjectivity
· a paradigm of art
· a field of study, developing a new mode of research apropos of art
· an operative social construct with a specific social function
— Weitian Liu, September 2025