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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

‘I crawl over the photograph like an ant, and I document my crawling on another surface,’ Vija Celmins has said of the way she transcribes photographs of vacant spider webs, choppy ocean surfaces, and pointillist night skies into delicately rendered drawings and paintings Throughout her sixty-year career, the Latvian-born artist has often been mischaracterised as a ‘photorealist’ who mechanically reproduces found images, but such a reading would elide the multitude of sensations contained in her work, which simultaneously depicts its subject and captures her own labour From afar, her constellations and waves can resemble impersonal, monochromatic screens; yet up close, they reveal expressive streaks of choppy ink With your nose against the glass, you can even see the seams on her paper, or a watermark in the shape of a lily Viewed as a whole, Celmins’s works constitute an exercise in learning how to look anew at our own surroundings   That range is on full display in the more than one hundred works now gathered at the Met Breuer, for her first large-scale retrospective since the 1990s The career-long survey, which travelled from San Francisco and Toronto, excavates the personal history behind a practice that can seem exclusively formalist Before the age of ten, Celmins had lived in three refugee camps, in Leipzig, Mannheim, and Esslingen She has described her process of  ‘crawling’ over photographs as an act of ‘redescribing’ – translating an image from one medium into another, most often from photographs into charcoal, oil, or graphite, but also from found objects into three-dimensional sculptures, made of bronze and wood In the resulting works there are echoes of a poet she admires, Czeslaw Milosz, who after being exiled from Poland described how ‘imagination can fashion a homeland’; through the act of ‘redescribing’, Clemins seems to inscribe her own, lost world into the present, even as it recedes from memory   Born in Riga in 1938, Celmins was soon displaced by World War II, eventually relocating to Indiana with her family In 1962, she graduated from the Yale Summer School