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.
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.
Subtitle 01 (Justice and Hope), 2019
Paper, bamboo wire, glue, film prop lamps, bells, wire, raincoat, rabbit lantern, mineral pigment Dimension Variable
Image courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.
Detail of Subtitle 01 (Justice and Hope), Cici Wu
Detail sof Subtitle 01 (Justice and Hope), Cici Wu
Installation view, Cici Wu
Memory Cow (Mother), Subtitle 01 (One Side Different), Subtitle 01 (Forgotten to Forget), 2019
Detail of Memory Cow (Mother)
Paper, bamboo wire, glue, handkerchief, investigation report, photograph, raincoat, silicone
Detail of Subtitle 01 (One Side Different) and Subtitle 01 (Forgotten to Forget)
Paper, bamboo wire, glue, film prop lamps, bells, wire, raincoat
Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon, 2019
Film prop lamp, paper, bamboo wire, glue, video (16mm transfer to digital, 18:35 min) Dimension Variable
Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon, 2019, still
這是不尋常的組合,兔仔燈籠和Bolex攝影機。當我把它們放在手上,一種奇異的親切感在它們之間瞬然而生。 它們透過光的機具與尋找的行動而連繫上⋯⋯
《未完成的歸途》是圍繞以下數樣想像回歸的展覽:
一個香港男孩在2000年經由羅湖邊境離開這個世界(失蹤男孩帶著精神力量的回歸)
二維電影空間(回歸到電影院的螢幕)
對公義的想像和敘述的新想望(公義的回歸)
香港論述(香港身份從非幽靈/非悲觀角度的回歸 )
兒童演員(成年童星繼續螢幕生命的回歸)
回到香港就像重返人世道。我在這裡研究時間感的差異;回想從前的慾望;觀察永恆之愛的意義;家庭犧牲;和徹底的抽身而去。我想每個人的生命中總會有一次『人世道』,而我的碰巧是這個島。
Empty Gallery 呈獻現紐約藝術家武雨濛在港的首個個展《未完成的歸途》。武雨濛的創作常開展自對於一套電影的同心感解構。 武雨濛重新想像這些現成敘述,並視之為一連串詩性的關聯物,她創作的類電影雕塑常以一種與電影蒙太奇等同的空間性並置現成物及創作品。
《未完成的歸途》由一段16米厘影片和一個組燈裝置組成,創作核心圍繞武雨濛近來對庾文翰這人物引起的文化想像研究:一個自閉症男孩在2000年8月24日由香港經羅湖口岸進入大陸然後失蹤。這懸而未破的失蹤案發生於1997年主權移交後不久,至今對不少香港人來說仍記憶猶新:是大陸-香港政府民官僚不義的例子,也是本地文化消失的象徵。武雨濛的展覽嘗試挑戰把文翰視為死亡和失去的化身這個既定詮釋,她提議我們可將他想像為天上的智靈而非鬼魂。
展覽的重點作品是武雨濛最新影片《庾文翰未完成的歸途》。影片在香港和明尼阿波利斯拍攝,擔演成年庾文翰的演員是因著楊德昌2000年的電影《一一》而為人所認識的台灣童星張洋洋。在畫廊中的呈現為一個循環播放的投映裝置,影片的靈感來自結構主義/唯物主義電影傳統中,把對電影的探索視為內在經驗的類推。《庾文翰未完成的歸途》以抽象敘事講述庾文翰回到現世,過程中尋回與自己失蹤相關的遺落記憶。武雨濛的鏡頭在城市無數的行人空間飄浮移動,而又徘徊於某些文翰感到份外親切的地方,鞦韆椅或喜歡的餐店、超級市場或巴士站、渡輪或街市。最終成了這包含著記憶的滲透力與脆弱性的影片,投映機下如光流瀉的影像則成了靈魂移動的隱喻。
《未完成的歸途》同時還包括一個新的組燈雕塑。在影片的尾聲出現,這些燈探索主體性的本質,將之視為零碎的、曾修補物件的家,而同時又偷偷地暗示著電影經驗中光的重要性 。武雨濛繼續其一直以來對於發光物的濃厚興趣,她這次在本地一間片場道具倉找來一系列舊燈。這些退役的工藝品在過去數十年曾經燃亮了無數低成本電影及電視製作,因此武雨濛的興趣即在它們同時作為記憶與影響存庫的狀態,依附在它們身上的不只是塵埃,還有從前觀眾的潛藏欲望。武雨濛的介入將這些燈轉化奇趣混雜的物件,喚起香港殖民往事的同時前望那還未下定義的將來。