Chinese artist Chen Zhen’s Champ de désinfection (Field of purification, 1995) transformed the exhibition space into a trajectory that mirrored the artist’s journey from his native China to France. At the entrance a modest cabin made of wood disrupted one’s usual course through the gallery. Inside its cramped interior, intravenous bottles filled with mud hung next to a bed and a table, as though someone had just been given a soil infusion. The cabin had the standard dimensions of a Parisian maid’s room, evoking the one in which Zhen lived for almost four years when he first arrived in Paris. It

Like the proverbial Spanish inn, Chantal Akerman’s installation “D’Est: au bord de la fiction” (From east, bordering on fiction, 1994) allowed visitors to feast on what they brought with them, from thoughts on the biblical prohibition of images to notions of history without a capital H, by way of the Holocaust, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the art of cinema, and cinema as art. Akerman has been a kind of one-person New Wave in European cinema since the ’70s, and those who were familiar with her films could immediately recognize her signature style and subjects in this first museum piece: the