“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.
Nour, 2022. 16mm film, wood, scrim, 3 mins. loop. Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.
Mycenaean Dream, 2022. Oil, acrylic medium and gesso on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.
Doric, 2022. Oil, acrylic medium and gesso on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.
展覽開幕: 12月10日, 下午6 – 8時
Empty Gallery 很高興為大家帶來伊朗裔美藉藝術家 Raha Raissnia 在東亞的首次個展《نور》。
Raissnia 多方面的藝術實踐把繪畫、電影和表演融合成一個密集緊湊的對話陣列。她把已有素 材如自己的照片、畫作及影像片段微調、重疊,借用已存於各媒體間模組元素的一種網絡性 存檔,透過複製、組合及刪擦進行創作;並以建築、自然和技術形式構成異殊句法,建構出 多個內在景觀,當中貫穿著過去和現在、記憶和想像、短暫的時刻和匍匐積累的時間。
展覽標題取自波斯語نور(發音為nour),意思是光,在畫廊兩樓層空間展出的是藝術家近期 的繪畫與其流動影像裝置交織而成的組系作品。在名為「Nour」的一組作品中,Raissnia把一 部16米厘環形影片投映於一個巨大而浮動的立方體螢幕上,畫面看似盡是神秘莫測的建築細 節。由半透明麻紗布組成的這個混雜影像雕塑把投影表面從牆上拉展下來,為藝術家的影像 注入帶空間動律及微妙含蓄的即興特質;壓擠、倍乘二維的影像畫面使作品變成一個複雜的 想像空間。「Nour」是由切割的金屬、有穿孔的表面和帶金絲飾面的影像組成的一組流動抽 像作品,這些電影素材似乎以倍增的方式反映著投影幕自身的幾何形狀。Raissnia挑戰對於光 的一種純科學或功利主義式的概念,她不但以其為照明來源的這個角色把光帶進場,更將其 化為一種煉金術式的量度,超越其作為難以掌控的生成原則、光影反差的創造者的這個假設 功能。
Raissnia的創作質變了,或者更準確而言是引爆了紀錄式現實基本素材這術語的圖解意義。她 由個人藏有的照片片段開始,透過對它們進行重複、提取和疊加的遞迴過程,以或已被概念 化成為由複樣程序和設置構成的原始環路滋長它們。這種由存在於鏡頭和肌肉纖維、感光器 和菲林沖曬機之間充斥情感能量的介面所組成的具體化回饋循環放大了、扭曲了Raissnia的 創作素材,使其成為雜音與信號的載體。直接觀察和歷史性時間的光環沒有被除下而是被砸 碎、被反映往自身,並倍增成一個類似於無數可能現實的萬花筒影像。Raissnia 沒有嘗試帶領 我們超越所謂的指示性,而是去圍繞它們,以求瞥見一個無差別的多樣性。這是一個強大的 再神秘化而不是去神秘化的過程。
同樣是取材自其個人藏有的照片庫,Raissnia的畫作亦參與了這場素材的變革過程。在過去的 二十年間,Raissnia不斷探索靜止與運動、再現與抽象之間的張力,打造充滿活力的情感空 間,作家Milton Cruz 稱之為「心靈一種有機生活空間的體驗調製」。自她之手,在傳統意義 上指向著凍結時間的畫布平面變為一個自相矛盾的電影空間,並在她痕跡創作的能量和密度 激活下栩栩如生。作品如「Tympanum」和「Doric」棲身於具象和抽象間的間隙區域,壓縮多 種時空景況進單一的巴洛克式建構。在這些攝人心神的畫面裡,能辨認出的主題如迴廊、浮 雕和塔架等似乎在觀者的感知中來回顫動。它們的特點既有一種循環的內部運動,也有一種 在對閃爍、振動和耀光的繪畫類比編排中近似於實驗電影形式語言的搭造。寬幅彩色作品如 「Scholiastic View」中強烈的密度與如功筆般細膩的線條使畫作表面注滿了閃耀、振動的特 質。這些新作品畫面中滿佈彷如突觸或電路的形態,可視作為一種模控學的蔓藤花紋,未來 與古老的合二為一。