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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney films and Internet memes, the Glasgow-based video artist’s satirical fantasy narratives are held together by a bizarre yet persuasive dream logic We go through the looking glass and into nightmarish pop culture wonderlands, digitally rendered in a pulsating medley of lurid pink, purple, yellow and blue: a fluorescent, feline-themed kingdom inhabited by cat-people with high heels and big rubber breasts in LolCats (2012); a post-apocalyptic burning planet where the few remaining humans squabble over their nation status in A Whole New World (2013) Often accompanied by found sound – sources range from an interview with Katy Perry to a speech by David Cameron – these worlds are at once nothing and much like our own   Feed Me (2015), currently on show as part of the British Art Show, is Maclean’s longest and most ambitious work to date Installed in a room resembling a tween bedroom – which adds the cloying smell of cheap carpet to the already intense viewing experience – it depicts a seedy dystopian city where a sinister toy corporation uses invasive online marketing tactics to peddle plastic ‘happiness’ to the masses Characters range from a voyeuristic, pot-bellied business executive to a schoolgirl social media addict, all played by Maclean Using Green Screen technology, she has populated the film with legions of cloned versions of herself, laboriously filled in the background with layer upon layer of hyper-saturated computer graphics, and overdubbed the dialogue with the voices of professional actors Maclean is in fact the sole performer in all of her works – and is just one among a number of recent contemporary moving image artists using performance, personae, avatars and alter egos to hold a mirror up to society and to question identity in today’s post-social media age   Citing the photographer Cindy Sherman as inspiration, Maclean uses makeup, clothes and her own body to impersonate figures male and female, young and old, animal and human While Sherman recreates recognisable feminine archetypes from film and art history, making portraits that look almost