“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.
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.”
Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.
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.
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.
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.
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。