ANN ARBOR, MICH.- The University of Michigan Museum of Art opened its fall schedule of exhibitions with three shows. The exhibitions feature a Seoul-based collaborative, African art and an exhibition by Danish artist Jesper Just.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
August 11–December 30, 2012
The Seoul-based art collaborative, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) is known for innovative video works that exist at the nexus of visual art and digital literature. Blurring the boundaries between media, technologies, and cultural histories, YHCHI has gained international acclaim for their "net art" productions—mostly black-and-white videos of quickly flashing capitalized text in a generic font with synchronized music. This exhibition will present a newly commissioned piece by UMMA, which will be added to the artists' website, yhchang.com.

African Art and the Shape of Time
August 18, 2012–February 3, 2013
African Art and the Shape of Time explores how African art gives material form to diverse concepts of temporality, history and memory. African art is often interpreted in Western analytical frameworks as expressions of timeless myths and rituals, interrupted only by the colonial encounter. African Art and the Shape of Time complicates such conventional views by considering diverse modes for reckoning time and its philosophical, social, and religious significance. The exhibition includes 30 works from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, National Museum of African Art, Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as several Detroit area private collections, and is organized around five themes that explore the multiplicity of time in Africa: The Beginning of Things, Embodied Time, Moving Through Time, Global Time, and "NOW."

Jesper Just: This Nameless Spectacle
August 18-December 9, 2012
Visitors encountering Danish artist Jesper Just’s This Nameless Spectacle will find themselves captivated in stages, as the experience of viewing it unfolds over time. In this breathtaking installation, as in much of his work, Just situates the viewer in his signature landscape of beauty, provocation, and a general uneasiness that is as seductive as it is ominous. The storyline is at once deceptively simple and perplexing: a wheelchair-bound protagonist travels through a neighborhood in the outskirts of Paris to her apartment, while a young male character appears to follow her. Once home, she is able to leave her wheelchair but is overcome by a powerful seizure. One of Just’s unique strengths is his ability to engage the viewer in an open-ended, unresolved narrative in a manner that is more intriguing than frustrating. It is impossible to parse but equally impossible to abandon, and this is the essence of Just’s gift for hypnotic storytelling.