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.
“Rumor Has It: Taro Masushio” installation view at Empty Gallery, 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery Photo: Michael Yu
Empty Gallery 誠意帶來最新展覽,來自紐約藝術家增鹽太朗與畫廊合作的首個個展《聽聞 說》。在 增鹽的概念實踐中,攝影被視為本體論命題又或是涵蓋散文、錄像及雕塑間連串關 係的推測機器。他 探究影像的容納能力,但這並非指要去記錄一個底層現實,而是去操控和 無限延伸我們自有的知覺— —動用空間、時間和情感領域,將其視之為造形特質,以雕刻進 對其他可能世界的追逐當中。
《聽聞說》展出的作品皆是增鹽對存置於東京一所公寓裡的特殊同性戀檔案日夜沉迷研讀 之果。增鹽 被這些珍貴的底片和檔案、這些充滿著永遠年輕無名男孩們慾望的儲存庫、這 些對隱藏在他們外表下 另個一存在境域稍瞬即逝的瞥見所發出的氣味吸引,他發現了豔冶 (En’ya)這個人物,並將其成為他 執念的理想導管。《聽聞說》由攝影、錄像和單件石雕 作品組成,展覽圍繞著人們稱為「大阪叔叔」 (Uncle from Osaka)的豔治順一(Jun’ichi En’ya) (1916-1971) 這位謎樣的人物而開展。豔治有眾 多身份(父親,丈夫、攝影實驗室技 術員以及不為人知的其他角色),而其中一個是日本最早期同性 戀攝影師之一。一個受到內 心強烈衝動的鞭撻,拍攝大約二千個男人裸體的遊盪攝影師;個人慾望圖 集的作者。增鹽沒 有試圖喚起這個人物無法企及的歷史真相,反而是透過對其生平與作品一個儀式性 的勾勒( 或重覆),召喚其中一個可能的豔治魂魄——透過其自身的揮發性媒介而上演的那個。
這方式在一系列圖畫的再拍攝作品中清楚可見。增鹽花了很多功夫用石墨仔細描畫豔治多張 單獨作品 ——每幅素描都是叔叔檔案裡的一張影像。透過這(再)創作行為,可以想像,當 中所捕捉的現實不 只刻畫於攝影底片,還在遙遠的過去,在叔叔的視網膜表面之上(也因而 在其細胞的化學反應之中), 並通過增鹽的神經系統和肌肉纖維,再經歷溫度和構成的細微 變化。增鹽嚴格堅持對原影像要有某種 中立性和實際的忠誠,而這更突顯兩者本質上的分 別——兩位扮演者間無法橋接的空間;一道只能靠 思考以跨越的鴻溝。得出的作品是精妙的 重寫紙,散發自一個不合於時的混雜又或是雙重存在:豔治 −增鹽、增鹽−豔治。
是次展出的其他作品均呼應著這種重疊的過程。一系列靜物作品記錄即耗現成物,既是真實 也是想 像。當中有些是增鹽在前往豔治舊居附近(那裡有部份記下的軼事和地址)的朝聖之 旅時所收集的 ,他嘗試把自己的出現加進這個男人曾棲身的空間;而有些是純粹虛構的家用 道具,或可想像,佔 據它們當中的,是一個生命割裂的不同瞬間。像是把背景剝掉了,這些 雜亂平常之物出乎意料地成 了展覽中暴露得最徹底,並因此而色情的影像。一塊廉價的肥 皂,一瓶開了的七寶札幌啤酒,一碗 玉子蟹——所有這些看似簡單的商品都隱藏了一個充滿 潛在意義的隱蔽空間。它們同時作為豔治所 居的昭和時代物質文化的虛構文獻、攝影形式本 質自我反思的評註,以及下流的圈內笑話。它們迴 避形塑,但仍暗示某種與一個不在場身體 的節奏、其無法壓抑的衝動與需要的貼近或親密。
另一系列照片拍攝的是牽牛花,有時日本學童需要照料它們以學習某方面的民族特性和美 德。在增 鹽的其他靜物作品中,文化的無處不在又或對題材明顯的冷漠乃作為對其他潛在意 義的某種偽裝。 雖然牽牛花在日間盛放而晚上則花蕾緊閉,增鹽選擇拍攝這個循環的尾段, 留待觀者去想像在緊閉 花蕾內發生的這些隱形活動。這些於密閉中的盛放同時意味著花在履 行社會角色的具體時間和對私 人世界的維護。因著對這些花朵的窺視和專注地捕捉它們片刻 的夜間萌動,增鹽把我們的注意力帶 到一個在場與不在場、 展示與回退、 隱藏與揭示的混 雜辯證——使觀者意識到某些簡單事物如匆匆 一瞥,一個姿態又或一個觀看方式,都可隱藏 一道進入一個宇宙世界的門。
關於增鹽太朗
藝術家增鹽太朗生於日本,現居紐約。他先後畢業於柏克萊加州大學及紐約大學的學士及碩士課程,及後曾於這兩所大學任教。他的作品曾於各地展出,包括 47 Canal、胶囊上海、Immanence 及太平洋電影檔案館等。