In April 2022, Le Sigh launched quietly as a multilingual online exhibition space and art magazine. Out of curiosity and sheer pandemic ennui, we wanted to make a publication: a platform for different voices that, rather than providing more conventional critical writing, offered creative conversations around time-based contemporary art practices. How could the landscape of art magazines and online programming challenge us to experiment and broaden the ways in which we experience and write about art?
Le Sigh is meant to be an expressive exhalation, a breath, a longing, a laugh. Each issue encourages slow looking and reading, pairing one written response to an artwork. We hope you will enjoy this special edition featuring Julian Yi-Zhong Hou and Shane Krepakevich for our very first hybrid print and web-based issue in collaboration with BlackFlash. In this issue, Krepakevich generates a text in relation to Hou’s series of stained glass works and accompanying sound piece Prayer for 4 speakers, shown initially in 2022 at Artpace in San Antonio and later at the Music Gallery in Toronto. According to Krepakevich, “this transcription—crafted through improvisation and typographic elaboration—became at once a cipher and an after-the-fact graphic score.” The result is a field of incomprehensible notations, unless we open our minds to read it in another way.
BlackFlash’s 39.3 print edition features the ephemeral prints of Julian Yi-Zhong Hou’s stained glass works and the typographic iteration of Shane Krepakevich’s Prayer for 4 speakers. Listen to Prayer for 4 speakers and view the second part of this collaboration on the Le Sigh website.
Feature image: Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, XVI. Peace, 2022, copper foiled stained glass, 28 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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