Henry Shum

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Henry Shum, *Ghost*, 2022. Oil on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

Installation view, ‘Hex’, Andrew Kreps Gallery, 2022. Photo: Lance Brewer

Installation view, ‘Vortices’, Empty Gallery, 2020

Henry Shum, *Man, Woman and Child*, 2019

Henry Shum (b.1998, Hong Kong) received his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts London in 2020. Selected group exhibitions include presentations at Andrew Kreps Gallery; New York (2021), Candid Arts Trust Gallery (2020), Fitzrovia Gallery (2019), and Bones and Pearl Gallery (2018), in London. Shum currently lives and works in Hong Kong. His debut solo exhibition with Empty Gallery, Vortices, opened in Fall 2020. He is jointly represented by Empty Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery, and his first solo exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery, Hex, opened in November 2022.

CURRENT:
Bodily Powers
Crèvecœur, Paris
September 19 – December 14, 2024

PRESS:
Alex Jen, “Henry Shum’s Atmospheric Oil Paintings Glow With A Mysterious Inner Light“, Art in America
Todd Lippy, “Henry Shum at Andrew Kreps Gallery“, Artforum

Henry Shum_Bio CV
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Henry Shum press archive
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2024-11-05	Intermissions: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork & Laetitia Sonami at Renaissance Society, Chicago
	At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance. Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA. Read more …
2024-11-05	Vunkwan Tam collaborating with Winsome Wong and Annisa Cheung, HICCUP, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
	On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform. For the full schedule, see the link below. Read more …
2024-11-01	Doris Guo, The Jar at K4, Oslo
	Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details. “The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.” Read more …
2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
2024-10-25	Jes Fan, Sites of Wounding: Interchapter, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
	Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024. In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history. The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it. Read more …
2024-10-09	Jes Fan in Scientia Sexualis at ICA Los Angeles
	Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025. Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex. Read more …
2024-09-27	James T. Hong at Argo Factory, Tehran
	I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing is a new exhibition curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, opening August 16 through October 18 at the Argo Factory in Tehran. Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images. The second chapter of the exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, opens on Friday, September 27, with Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia and Sam Lewitt. Read more …
2024-09-22	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Slipper, Personal Space, Vallejo, California
	Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is participating in the group exhibition Slipper at Personal Space, Vallejo, California, on view through November 24, 2024. Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio. “Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party. Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity.” – Albert Herter Read more …
2024-09-20	Vunkwan Tam in Improvisation at Inside Out Museum, Beijing, curated by Carol Yinghua Lu
	Improvisation is on view through January 19th, 2025 at the Inside Out Museum in Beijing. It was curated by Carol Yinghua Lu with Na Rongkun, Sining Zhu, Cao Liyao, Li Huiyi and Sun Yuhan. Participating artists and collectives include Cang Xin, Chen Liang, Chen Zhou, Ergao (He Qiwo), Gao Fu, He Liping, He Ruijun, Hu Yiyao, Liu Zhan, Luo Lin, M Art Group, Ma Liuming, Pak Sheung Chuen, Peng Xueying, Rong Rong, The Cement Park, Song Xiaohong, Song Dong, Vunkwan Tam, Tong Tianqing, Wang Shihua, Wang Sishun, Yorkson, Zhang Huan, Zhang Wei, Zhang Zhihui, Zhong Yunshu, Zhou Bin, Zhu Fadong, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Improvisation is one of the characteristics of art, as well as a method of creative practice. It highlights an artistic process where the artist finishes their work immediately and swiftly, using everything at hand, when the inspiration, provoked by an external stimulus or an internal impulse, hits unpreparedly and uncontrollably. In the context of traditional Chinese music culture, due to its unique system of notation and inheritance, improvisation was once a ubiquitous technique in musical practice. Improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is probably as old as the human race. This is the reason why we encounter improvisation frequently throughout different historical moments and creative activities in the long history of art. From the Dada’s rejection of logic and introduction of chaos and irrationality into their creative practice, to the Situationists who, out of an ideal to fight against Capitalism’s alienation of the individual, advocated the pursuit of genuine desires, the experience of life, and the sense of adventure. People can see that improvisation is the method, the idea, the principle, and the real life itself. Read more …
2024-09-19	Empty Gallery Staff Announcement
	Empty Gallery is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexander Lau as senior director, and Kaitlin Chan as director. Lau has served as director of the gallery, and its associated label Empty Editions, for over nine years, and been foundational in the development of our exhibition program and artist roster. Based in New York and Hong Kong, Lau also sits on the board of Primary Information (NYC). Chan joined the gallery in 2020 as associate, and has since contributed to over ten exhibitions as an artist liaison, as well as through public programming, communications, art fairs and sales. Chan is also a cultural worker who creates comics and lectures on self-publishing amongst other topics.