The Armory Show

Empty Gallery’s booth for The Armory Show’s Focus section will consist of a presentation of two artists whose practices both encapsulate Empty’s curatorial program and speculate on the complex relationship between the digital and the material: TAKESHI MURATA and TISHAN HSU.

Although in recent years Murata has focused on producing prints and sculptures, for Empty Gallery’s booth he will premiere a new CG film produced in collaboration with the gallery – his first since 2013’s acclaimed Om Rider. This film continues Murata’s recent practice of using Pixar-style CG animation to produce darkly psychedelic, surrealism-inflected détournements of popular media. Functioning in this context as an excavation of the North American media psyche, Murata’s work will be projected in the darkened booth interior.

Opposite Murata’s work, Empty Gallery will present a selection of rarely-seen works by Chinese-American artist Tishan Hsu which address the theme of the digital/physical divide more literally. An architect by training, Hsu’s paintings and sculptures attempt to express the embodied affect of living in an age where the boundaries between the material and the virtual seem increasingly porous. In their expressive goals, Hsu’s works seem to prefigure that of an entire generation of contemporary artists who take these thematic concerns as a starting point for their work. Our presentation will include the newly-repaired sculpture, Virtual Flow (1990-2017), in addition to a selection of Hsu’s monolithic prints on canvas from his Cordless and Interface series.