William Kentridge: Welcome inside my head

Highlights include Drawing for Rebus. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Viewers witness imaginative journeys through Kentridge's studio and are invited to experience the different chambers of his mind.

Some of his charcoal drawings are simply pinned on large paperboards that stand on the ground and lean against the wall. The wooden boxes for transporting his works were dissembled and used as screens upon which his noted video work The Refusal of Time is projected.

Kentridge says he is interested in the way in which people build knowledge from fragments, and he enjoys reconstructing the process in his studio.

"The studio is a miniature world. You can think of it as a physical space in which the world comes in the forms of paper cuttings, postcards, prints, e-mails, last night's dreams and a phone conversation.

"They are remade into something that becomes a drawing, a film, a lecture or a piece of theater. The studio also looks like the inside of one's head. You walk across the studio from this photograph on a wall to the letters over there to a drawing in process, and this journey looks like a sorted move from your ideas to your head.

"That process of working in the studio and making artworks becomes a demonstration of how we make sense of ourselves. It doesn't really matter what specific subject (is touched upon) but (rather) the process to show how we make our own meaning and why we can't stop making meaning."