Louise Benson in Artnet News: ‘Tishan Hsu’s Art Preceded Internet Aesthetics by Decades. Now, His Prescient Work Is Finally Getting Its Due. A digitally native generation has become captivated by the New York artist, who is in his 70s.’
“Tishan Hsu is an artist in search of his own vision of the future. His creative journey has unfolded over almost five decades as Hsu has refined and honed his visceral interrogation of the collapse between human and machine. Yet, following a handful of solo shows staged in New York during the 1980s, including one with famed dealer Leo Castelli, for over 30 years Hsu rarely exhibited his work publicly at all. Instead, he chose to privately focus on his relentless quest to capture a new kind of embodied technology that had not yet come into being.”
In Artsy Magazine by Christina Ko: Two artists hosting exhibitions at Empty Gallery’s Hong Kong gallery also hold pride of place at its booth. Jes Fan’s aqua resin, selenium, glass, and pigment sculptures, draw from Fan’s glassmaking expertise and are merged with scientific processes to deal with questions of biology and flux states, which relate to the artist’s cultural and gender identity.
Tishan Hsu’s work also explores hybrid spaces, though primarily exploring the divide between tactile and digital. breath 9 is a wall-mounted sculpture made from UV-cured inkjet, acrylic, silicone, and ink on wood, for a final product that teases both the eye and mind.
Caroline Goldstein writes about Jes Fan’s new solo exhibition in this feature tying back to his 2019 Art21 documentary.
“In this age where substances that sustain identity categories can be bought, and sold, and made, and commissioned, how am I, as a vessel of these identities, exist?” the artist asks in the video, which first aired back in 2019. His most recent projects, on view now at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong during the city’s annual Art Week, take even more conceptual approaches to marrying identity markers with the native Pinctada fucata oyster, a native mollusk to Hong Kong.
M+ Museum’s Sigg Prize 2023 will showcase the works of six shortlisted artists for the award. Open to artists born or working in the Greater China region, the award recognises important artistic practices in the region and aims to highlight and promote diverse works on an international scale. This exhibition is the second edition of the prize, which will present a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Through the works, the artists demonstrate their unique visions and approaches to current urgent contemporary issues, fostering the cultural dialogues emerging from the region in response to a critical transitional period of the world.
The six shortlisted artists are Jes Fan (b. 1990, lives and works in Hong Kong and New York); Miao Ying (b. 1985, lives and works in New York); Wang Tuo (b. 1984, lives and works in Beijing); Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu); Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, lives and works in Hong Kong); and Yu Ji (b. 1985, lives and works in Berlin).
The Sigg Prize 2023 winner will be announced in early 2024.
To kickstart Art Basel 2023, Duddell’s Hong Kong presents ‘The Drifters’ from 19 March through May 13. Spotlighting artworks owned by Hong Kong-based collectors, including Alan Lo, Evan Chow, Lawrence Chu, etc., the works present transient memories and fragmented dreamscapes to explore the fleeting moments that straddle between euphoria, freedom, and unnerving vulnerability. Curated by Eunice Tsang. Featured artists include: Christina Quarles, Christopher K. Ho, Gross Arnold, Inka Eissenhigh, Matt Connors, Samson Young, Tabaimo, Tala Madani, Tang Dixin, Taro Masushio, Ticko Liu, Tomo Campbell and Yin Yeung Lau.
From 19 March through 23 July, Human Is is on view at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.
“Distinctions between dystopia and reality are increasingly collapsing in the face of inexhorable tech-nological and ecological upheavals. Against this backdrop, Human Is employs science fiction as a spiritual and aesthetic vehicle to mobilize alternative futures, political imagination and a new posthuman ethics. This exhibition borrows its name from the eponymous short story by Philip K. Dick (1955) and investigates the idea of being human as a contestable and reversible category.”
Artists: Joachim Bandau, Ivana Bašić, Ian Cheng, David Cronenberg, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Tishan Hsu, Laika, Fritz Lang, Mike Kelley, Alexander Kluge, Tetsumi Kudo, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Sandra Mujinga, Mary Shelley, Diane Severin Nguyen, Ovartaci, Analisa Teachworth, Suzanne Treister and WangShui.
Taipei Biennial is pleased to announce the curatorial concept for the 13th edition of Taipei Biennial, running from November 18, 2023 to March 24, 2024 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Curated by independent curator Freya Chou, writer and editor Brian Kuan Wood, and curator Reem Shadid, this year’s Taipei Biennial is titled “Small World”. In this iteration, a number of artists are selected to produce or premier new works including Pio Abad (London), Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Nesrine Khodr (Beirut), Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (Los Angeles), Lai Chi Sheng (Taipei), Li Yi Fan (Taipei), Jen Liu (New York), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Berlin/Tehran), dj sniff (Los Angeles/Tokyo), and Yang Chi Chuan (Taipei).
Xper.Xr is a sui generis Hong Kong artist, noise musician, event organizer, as well as an expert storyteller, and this exhibition features his creative archives and activities since the late 1980s. Curated by Empty Gallery, this exhibition previously toured Hong Kong and New York. It is scheduled to be on view at TheCube in Taipei from 11 March to 14 May 2023. TheCube specifically juxtaposes the timelines of Xper.Xr and Taiwan’s noise movement for reference in the context of this exhibition.
Co-organised by TheCube Project Space and Empty Gallery. Sponsored by the National Cultural and Arts Foundation.
Of Mythic Worlds brings together more than fifty rarely-seen works by a diverse group of artists to highlight the ways in which rituals, myths, traditions, ideologies, and beliefs can intersect across cultures, histories, and time periods. Curated by Olivia Shao, the exhibition will be on view at The Drawing Center New York from March 8 through May 14th, 2023.
Jes Fan’s work is the subject of a new feature ‘Precious Wounds’ by Mimi Wong in ArtAsiaPacific issue 132, March/April 2023. “In late 2022, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was able to fly the 15 hours from the United States to Hong Kong with my mother to visit our family. We had been planning the reunion with my relatives for more than one year. Still, I could not have anticipated how emotional I would feel to be able to travel again to a place that had always felt like a cultural home. Just three months earlier, artist Jes Fan was making a similar journey from New York to reunite with his immediate family, whom he hadn’t seen in three years. He landed the day after the government ended Hong Kong’s quarantine measures. “I arrived with a full plane of babies,” he remembered, alluding to the many parents bringing their one- and two-year-olds back with them for the first time. “They were crying, but it was adorable.”
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Empty Gallery 懷著興奮的心情宣布，我們將參與於今年5月19-23日假香港灣仔會議展覽中心舉行的香港巴塞爾藝術展，為大家帶來徐梯善、增鹽太朗、Xper. Xr.和Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork以及洪子健的多組作品。結合我們兩位當代藝術家和歷史前衛一員的徐梯善，這次展示的作品，兼具政治視野和實驗實踐，模糊媒介之間的界線。
徐梯善多幅塑膠彩絲印亞麻布本作品包括《Thumb-Eye-Extended 1.0 》，藝術家回到他1980年代未期的創作實驗，嘗試以絲網印刷作為一種複製的方式，模擬早期螢幕科技的點矩陣美學。這些標誌性的作品預告了徐梯善近年來的關注，在創作中逐漸包裹及扭曲人類和科技的界線。再者，這次展示亦包括了徐梯善早期的紙本作品，詳細展現了他及後用於藝術創作中美學策略 的發展概念過程 。
同場展出的亦有洪子健的作品《我的敵人的敵人是我的朋友》，乃是一齣科幻電影的一系列想像分鏡圖， 電影圍繞中國和美國，及其他參與台海軍事競賽的國家。洪子健的創作由研究出發， 落墨於認識論與社政問題的交疊層面，質問權力操縱知識的行為。洪子健對種裔民族權力能動性（在美國及海外）的尖銳調查，在這中西關係愈趨緊張並預告一個未知未來的時刻， 可說別具前瞻性。
而增鹽太朗展示的攝影作品選自他近期於畫廊的展覽《聽聞說》。探源日本美學及剛陽之氣的概念，這些抽象特寫照像裡的是散發著神秘味道的味噌湯，挑起觀者想像日常生活隱藏的陌生感。增鹽透過反轉日本人熟悉的事物，暗示民族身份的延展性。
Empty Gallery 是一個四千五百平方呎的黑盒畫廊空間，位於香港仔海畔的田灣。畫廊由鄭成然創辦，展出包括成名及新晉藝術家的作品，並同步進行一系從先鋒多媒體委約計劃、表演及音樂項目。Empty Gallery 著重具時間性、短生及非以物為本的藝術實踐，致力推動各文化、地理和特定媒介間的跨界對話，並同時作為一個區域樞紐以躍活東亞藝術圈。
