“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.
“Olistostrome: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork” installation view at Empty Gallery, 2021 Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery Photo: Michael Yu
Empty Gallery 很高興為大家帶來Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork(原為Gordon)在我們畫廊舉行的第二個個展《 Olistostrome》。Gork 多元混雜的藝術實踐往往意在重整觀眾、表演者和展覽建築間的接收分類等級制, 她的作品存身於雕塑和聲音裝置間含糊多變的規界縫隙中。Gork對聲音世界如何規範和塑造我們的主體內在性有敏銳的察覺,故她運用和顛覆遺存的控制論,創出多個反饋具現化系統,試圖動用存在於基礎建設、日常物料以及聆聽行為中有助解放的可能潛力。
展覽的名稱 「Olistostrome」 是地質學名詞, 指由半流體沉積物塌瀉堆積而成的岩體;是次展覽將展出一系列新創作的聲音雕塑組合,並將設置在Gork以Supercollider開發的聲音裝置當中。 Gork透過以特定方式排列的多組麥克風、揚聲器及特設訊號處理軟件,把畫廊19樓的上層空間轉化為一個包含了設備機具、雕塑、建築和觀者的不穩定環路裝置。 她如網絡般的潛在聲音事件,佈置在意喻乾涸觀景園又或硒廣袤的敏化河石床間,引發具體互動。身體在這樣一個實體與虛擬同場的空間內所產生的噪音,透過一系列現場計算式的轉換在空間上和時間上呈現出怪異的脫置。這些脫置令人質疑我們思想、身體和如內/外、主動/被動、因/果般的線性二律背反環境刺激間的主權關係,並展現聲音經驗在保持這些文化建造時所發揮的作用。
介入這個視覺與聲音景觀的是Gork另一組雕塑作品〈Attenuators〉。乍看之下,這組作品讓人想起聖石、希羅式雕像以及地誌學排列式,當中如謎般的結構(像是在河石儲存庫上分散的島嶼)是古典意義上的雕塑,但亦同時是Gork心理聲學環境的音波定語。作品以氈毛加上巧心的人手針織技巧製成,Gork在當中貫徹了她對手工藝、編織藝術(特別它的女性主義及後極簡典型)和工業隔音物料的持續探索。這些看似是同質的雕塑表面,隱含了疊褶、細孔和毛線受限於裝置振動影響複雜躍動的幾何形狀,就像我們身體褶起了的薄膜。〈Attenuators〉是這次展覽結構的重要參與者而非被動的基建成員,它戲劇化及具體化勞力吸取這無形的行為,它能在空間中吸引聲音能量,減低空氣中某些頻率的存在。
在Gork的創作實踐中, 聲音處理專門領域的概念如回饋、反射、聲濾等皆成為了具作用的比喻,指向世界中主體的心理社會時刻。揚聲器與麥克風,房間與紡織,甚或是身體與耳朵,只是不同複性與規模的環路,微觀與宏觀系統多孔而脆弱的混合。《Olistostrome》中展出的作品要求觀者重新定義其自身能動性的邊界,挑戰主動參與和被動觀看、智性物質與愚材的分界。它們試圖探索如何,集體地,我們或能抑制互為主體性物化、重要沉積物石化為堅硬再現的悚然過程。