The Garden of Loved Ones

Opening: Sunday, March 23, 4–7PM

Empty Gallery is pleased to present The Garden of Loved Ones, the first solo exhibition by Los-Angeles based-artist Richard Hawkins in Greater Asia. Since emerging in the early 1990s, Hawkins has developed an idiosyncratic practice centered around the intense pleasure of looking and the dynamics of projection and desire which animate both sexual and art historical expression. Employing collage as an underlying mode structuring his work in painting, sculpture, and various other media, he juxtaposes and intermingles low culture with high art––operating in that fertile and unobserved intersection between graverobber and archaeologist, fanboy and connoisseur, degenerate and avant-gardist.

For his show in Hong Kong, Hawkins stages a return to his long held obsession with the figure of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), the enigmatic founder of Butoh dance. A suite of new video works are inspired by, and presented alongside, a series of collages in the manner of Hijikata’s scrapbooks. These bizarre and hermetic documents appropriated and disfigured fragments of the Western canon––Picasso, Bellmer, and Francis Bacon amongst others––in order to translate them into choreographic instructions, contorting history in order to broaden the ways in which we might contort our bodies. In his homage to these scrapbooks, Hawkins emphasizes the surreal juxtapositions, distortions of context, and interpretive perversity which enabled Hijikata’s radical transformation of movement––suggesting a queerer and more promiscuous reading of art history––one unbound by linear notions of influence and origin.