Taro Masushio is participating in the group exhibition Cool Invitations 11, from January 18 through February 2, 2025. The exhibition at XYZ Collective, Tokyo, is curated by MISAKO&ROSEN.
Participating artists include: Maki Katayama, Yui Yaegashi, Ryohei Usui, Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi, COBRA, Futoshi Miyagi, Zon Ito, Ryoko Aoki, Hiroshi Sugito, Shunsuke Imai, Masaya Chiba, Hanna Hur, Trevor Shimizu, John Riepenhoff, Sara Caron, Will Rogan, Margaret Lee, Taro Masushio, Hikotaro Kanehira, MISAKO&ROSEN
The gallery is open Thursday – Saturday from 1pm – 6pm, as well as Sundays, 1pm – 5pm. It is closed on Mon, Tue, Wed and National holidays.
Xper.Xr will participating in a two-person exhibition with Delia Gonzalez at Hot Wheels Athens London, as part of Condo London, taking place 18 January through 15 February, 2025.
Empty Gallery is pleased to participate in the third edition of Dallas Invitational, from April 10–12 at the historic Mansion on Turtle Creek.
Organised by Olivia Shao, Legal Size is a group exhibition at Gandt, New York, from December 7 through February 9, 2025.
Participating artists include: Richard Aldrich, George Brecht, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elise Duryee-browner, Curie Choi, Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Fischli, Jef Geys, Doris Guo, Raymond Hains, Bradley Kronz, Matthew Langan Peck, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Aki Sasamoto, Enzo Shalom, Mike Smith and Rosemarie Trockel.
Amid his exhibition at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, the Japanese bricolage photographer presents art as helping us sit with the discomfort of the unknown.
In the last essay he published before passing away on 23 October 2024, Gary Indiana wrote about photographs: “We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity.”
Born in Japan and now living in New York, artist Taro Masushio’s exhibition “Pass” at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong is replete with photographic evidence, but contains little of facts and does not reward undue curiosity. Masushio’s reprinting of his father’s amateur travel photography on the cardboard of care packages shipped across the world from father to son conjures a haptic, material intimacy mediated by impersonal logistics networks. A series of sparing, high-contrast still-life photographs catalogues enigmatic objects sourced intuitively from his father’s belongings and the artist’s own collection – a book of Rimbaud’s poetry, a pair of male Ainu figurines, testosterone supplements, photo paper, a darkroom safe light. The effect is disruption of the impulse towards certainty in meaning-making, the recognizable objects utterly drained of their indexicality, despite their unambiguous familial, autobiographical, and sexual connotations.
“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.””
Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT.
In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024.
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.
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.
Escape Spirit VideoSlime, 2007
Image courtesy of the artist, Empty Gallery, Ratio 3 and Salon 94.
Melter 2, 2003
Untitlled (Pink Dot), 2006
Installation view, Takeshi Murata
Untitlled (Silver), 2006
Flag, 2017
Empty Gallery 隆重呈獻來自洛杉磯的藝術家Takeshi Murata在亞洲的首次個展,《Takeshi Murata: Infinite Doors》。展覽審視了Murata 由2004年到2016年這十多年間的所有錄像作品,包括早期的迷幻動畫作品《Melter II 》到近期傾向電腦特技的動畫作品如《I》, 《Popeye》和《Om Rider》。展覽名稱取自Murata其中一個現成影片作品,《Infinite Doors》同時邀得藝術家參與展覽的設計,並將視之為一個實驗作品,在平面以外的空間維度,擴展並加強其創作所關切的主題。
Murata近年因其具超現實轉向的靜物電腦圖像系列而為人所熟悉,但《Infinite Doors》卻選擇了他藝術創作的精神核心:流動影像。受到實驗電影和藝術錄像如Paul Sharits 的閃現電影,Steina Vasulka的菲林錄像實驗和 Jordan Belson新紀元抽象作品的複合性影響,Murata 運用數碼科技創作出帶強烈感知性的作品,探索意識在參與日常流行文化時所發揮的中和作用。 科技,過程和更大的社會整體性一直貫穿其藝術創作,不單是指表像美學又或是思想主題上,還有其作品可能性的基礎。
遊走於風格化手繪動畫,數碼換置,現成影片和皮克斯風格動畫,貫徹Murata創作的,是對電影形式的實驗,對流行文化執迷和潛在於其作品中的黑色幽默。若把展覽看成一個整體,可以說這次作品彰顯了一種不間斷的探索, 和於內在自主權從未如此脆弱的當下,一種要去勾勒主觀經驗輪廓的慾望。
Takeshi Murata (1974年生,於洛杉磯居住及工作)
Murata於1997年在美國羅德島設計學院獲電影/錄像/動畫純藝術學士。他的作品曾於現代藝術博物館、新當代藝術博物館、The Kitchen、 Eyebeam、 紐約地下電影節、休士頓美術館、芳草地藝術中心、羅森塔當代藝術中心、美國洛杉磯的Peres Projects和東京的Taka Ishii Gallery等等地方展出。早期個展包括於華盛頓赫須巨集博物館的Black Box: Takeshi Murata (2007) 。近來曾於挪威的Kunsthall Stavanger畫廊,費城的Populi Gallery,紐約的Salon 94和三藩市的Ratio 3舉辦個展。