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.
Empty Gallery 很高興呈獻畫廊與香港藝術家譚煥坤合作的首個個展《F》。譚煥坤的藝術實踐類似於現成詩歌或cento, 一種拼湊前人詩句而成新作的文學體裁。譚煥坤把現成物和(大部份取自網上的)片言碎語組合成簡化性空間敘事。既是場域感應亦為半即興,這些稍迅而過的編排以全新的方式重用已然絕跡的符號資本主義事物,從而進行一次公共情感的挖掘──一場當下的情感考古之旅。
展覽標題取自一個常用於聊天室的回覆方式,當中「F」這簡寫表達的是對意外,失敗或災難悲劇的哀悼,這個字母以作為一種密碼形式與城市的當代時刻進行互動──穿越生活中各種複雜模棱的情緒,並照亮諸如疲憊、退棄及落空此等卑微情緒藝術行為中潛在的可用價值。
甫進展覽,觀者先會碰上一組以神秘符碼命名的作品〈78i78〉,看上去像是莫里斯或La Va 散湊作品 中棄置物料的殘餘部份。這作品是一塊單獨濕透的布片鋪蓋在畫廊暗下來的地面。當中滲滿一種獵人 用來吸引角雄鹿的人工尿液與水的混合物,每天更新,〈78i78〉表演出的是一種同時疲憊和情緒飽 和的狀態,一種永遠濕透的 sadboi 極簡主義。合成尿液的存在作為一種潛在的引誘劑──取決於各自 的物種──同時作為對當代藝術話語內部指涉和以哀悼表演的戰略功能作為一種社會關係模式這兩者 的參照。
移步再入畫廊,作品〈lest you-will-strike against-the-stone your-foot〉挪用了《枕邊故事》專輯發行時 期那個麥當娜的一幅砌圖。她雙膝托手,炯炯的眼神直視著畫廊中的空無,這在在是一種不可能的 (西方)形象──令人嚮往之美、自由、自決;她光亮的表面因缺塊而破碎,因熱情的觸摸而弄皺變 髒。相比之下,這些主題在一旁的作品〈 XXX 〉中似乎被倒翻過來。便攜式攝影用反光板裝飾上十 字架的碎片,這些碎片以一種潦草散亂的筆觸勾勒出作品標顯的字母,〈 XXX 〉似要激起後福特式 勞動(特別是與時尚和生活風格產業連接的自我剝削式自由職業經濟)既不穩定亦為主觀的盤繞,在 其喚起新自由主義疲憊和偽宗教狂熱的同時,其環形正暗示著一個無止盡的自食其果式消費循環。
在《F》中略經微調的現成品是作為虛耗勞力的無聲遺痕而出現,它們已用舊了和抽空了,被耗盡 了生產力(不論是在認知上還是身體上的)和符號意涵,然而它們卻繼續在一種暮色煉獄裡不斷地 輪迥。〈L.O.(“liquid ownership”)〉,把兩件從汽車維修店不問而自取的物品 (一件浸滿機油的 T 恤和一根經過切割的 PVC 管)組合成一個意義模棱的圖騰,暗示一個半圓或字母「U」的形狀。在 〈無題(IIIII,A Quiet Life)〉中,一堆黑色的草帽就像掉在地上一樣,讓人想到無名與退卻。 在 一個看起來像香港但實際上是其他地方(或任何地方)的現代城市背景下,眾包影像〈無題(You Control Climate Change)〉和〈無題(A Shadow Falls Upon My Leg)〉強化了這些主題,表達了脆弱的 理想主義和憤世嫉俗莫名不安的這雙生情感兩極。
《F》代表了一種對創傷的反應,但是卻是種會在距離和親密、諷刺和誠實、本土和全球之間模棱 兩可轉移的印記——敢居住於各種絕對之間的不安空間。譚煥坤對各樣挪用物件、影像和文字斷句 (有些是在本土城市景觀找到的,有些是搜集自國際電子商業平台或是在網上留言板看到的)的隨意 混合,似乎是要繪製出對後批判慾望情感困惑不安的贅述。棲身於擾攘不安的熟悉感中共有的空間 裡,它們反映了全球流通的一個時刻,在當中網絡媒體消費的不穩定速度與各種人員、貨物和建設更 緩慢更頑強的流動共存,印證了特定與普遍兩者的一層沈積層。由此,它們或許會在不知不覺中捕捉 到一個稍𣊬而過的片刻快拍,縱然暗淡,其自身終會隨著即將到來的歷史而消逝。