The verifiable image of the world

When I first entered Sarah Sze’s New York studio space in October 2016, I stumbled in the half-light upon one of the huge prototypes for Timekeeper, and I experienced something akin to the awe the Emperor of China must have felt watching Father Matteo Ricci unravel world maps before the court—images of the Earth the foreigner had brought from the distant Western world. “Yes, this is where we live; this is how we should understand where we are dwelling; this is at last an image of the world that is both simple and superb, and its beauty lies in its strange and paradoxical accuracy.” I think I stayed for more than an hour in front of the artwork, silently taking it in, as if I was witnessing the birth not of Venus rising from the sea, but of Gaia, emerging from nothingness. In my eyes, this multivariate twinkling of worlds within worlds could bear no other title than “Critical Zone.”