The French novelist Raymond Queneau, who passed away on October 25, 1976, published the legendary Exercises in Style in 1947, at the age of 44. In it, he experiments with 99 variations of a single story: a brief encounter with a young man on a bus and again in a square. Inspired by a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue, Queneau applied a similar compositional principle to literature. In sluggish imitation of Bach, and perhaps also in playful homage to Kim Dongshin’s beloved Form Exercises, Min Guhong Manufacturing invites you to practice style—with Min Guhong, through code, about nothing but “Min Guhong Manufacturing.”
The first style: dead center. “Min Guhong Manufacturing” holds a kind of unapproachable authority, and yet is crushed under the weight of space that surrounds it. The paradox of being in the exact middle.