Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian artist who is internationally known for his paintings that engage equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter, frequently cast in unfamiliar and eerie light. Painted from preexisting imagery, his works often appear slightly out of focus and sparsely colored, like third-degree abstractions from reality. Whereas earlier works were based on magazine pictures, drawings, television footage, and Polaroids, recent source images include material accessed online and the artist's own iPhone photos, printed out and sometimes re-photographed several times. Since the 1980s, Tuymans has steadily exhibited in the United States, Europe, and abroad, and his work is represented in major museum collections. Joshua Cohen's books include the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (2007), A Heaven of Others (2008), Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017); the short-fiction collection Four New Messages (2012), and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction (2018). Cohen was awarded Israel's 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His most recent novel, The Netanyahus (2021), won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

He lives in New York City. Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His books include Techniques of the Observer (1990), Suspensions of Perception (1999), 24/7 (2013), and Tricks of the Light (2023). Éric de Chassey is the director of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, and a professor of modern and contemporary art history at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the director of the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici. He has published extensively on American and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Lynne Tillman writes novels, stories, and essays. Her most recent work is Mothercare (2022), an autobiographical book-length essay.

Tillman's essays and stories are published in Frieze , Aperture , Tank , and N+1 ; her essays on contemporary artists, such as Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Dennis Cooper, Amy Sillman, Robert Gober, and On Kawara, have appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues. Tillman is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and, in recognition of her contribution to literature, the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra. Su Wei is a curator and art critic based in Beijing. He is the senior curator of Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM), Beijing. His curatorial projects include the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012); No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985 , Videotage, Hong Kong (2016); Permanent Abstraction: Epiphanies of a Modern Form in Escaped Totalities , Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Crescent: Retrospectives of Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu , IOAM, Beijing (2018); and The Lonely Spirit, IOAM, Beijing (2018). His recent work focuses on thick descriptions of China's contemporary art history, excavating its legitimate origins and rupturing nature.