Art Basel Hong Kong

Empty Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in Art|Basel Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on May 19-23 2021 with a group presentation featuring works by Tishan Hsu, Taro Masushio, Xper.Xr., Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, James T. Hong. A combination of our contemporary artists as well as Hsu, a member of the historic avant-garde, the booth presents works that engage with the politics of vision, the imagination of cinema and experimental practices that blur the boundaries between media.

Hsu’s acrylic and silkscreen on linen works, including Thumb-Eye-Extended 1.0, harken to his late 1980s period when he began experimenting with silkscreen printing as a way to replicate the dot matrix aesthetic of early screen technologies. These monumental works signal Hsu’s recent concerns with the gradual warping and distortion of the boundary between humans and technology. Additionally, we will also show a number of Hsu’s early works on paper, which detail his conceptual process around developing the aesthetic strategies he would later use throughout his practice.

Alongside Hsu are selected works from James T. Hong’s “The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend”, a series of speculative storyboards for a science-fiction film in which forces from China, the USA, and other nations engage in military conflict on the island of Taiwan. Hong’s research-based practice operates along the intersection of epistemological and socio-political questions, interrogating the manner in which knowledge is manipulated in the service of power. Hong’s biting investigations into etho-national power dynamics (both in the States and abroad) feels prescient during a moment when rising tensions between East and West herald an uncertain future.

Parallel to Hong’s storyboards are Taro Masushio’s recent photographs from his exhibition Rumor Has It. Probing ideas of Japanese aesthetics and masculinity, these abstract close-up images of miso soup conjure a sense of active mystery that galvanizes the viewer to imagine the hidden strangeness in the everyday. By turning a familiar Japanese motif on its head, Masushio suggests the malleability of national identity.