News Archive

Now online at Artsy: Para Site: Benefit Auction 2020. Founded in 1996, Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications, discursive, and educational projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society. Empty Gallery is pleased to donate two works this year, No Smoking (2020) by John Ziqiang Wu and Dr. Pimple Popper (2020) by Jes Fan.

Simon Wu writes in The Brooklyn Rail: “For the last four decades, Tishan Hsu has worked across sculpture, video, painting, and photography to consider the question: “How do we embody technology?” Hsu was born to Chinese parents in Boston, trained as an architect at MIT, and active in the NY art scene in the 1980s where he worked with gallerists like Leo Castelli and Pat Hearn.”

The Mead Art Museum is partnering with the Department of Art and the History of Art and the Queer Resource Center to host a virtual artist talk and a virtual lunch with contemporary artist Jes Fan. Jes Fan was born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong. Speculating on the intersection of biology and identity, his trans-disciplinary practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into the concept of otherness as it relates to the materiality of the gendered body.

Ysabelle Cheung writes in ArtReview Asia’s Winter 2020 issue: “In these canvases, we also see hints at more subconscious terrain. Shum’s figures are translucent and embryonic, their presence ambiguous among trees, mountains and lakes… This sense of dream logic is further embedded through architectural elements: two archways in a cloisterlike passage, newly constructed for the show, lead only to dead-end walls, and several of the paintings feature similar archways or brick partitions, complicating the viewer’s perception of place in the exhibition. Are we looking into our own psyche, or out into the world?”

Ingrid Pui Yee Chu writes in Artforum: “Shadowy figures congregating in groups and in pairs, on boats and in nocturnal groves, inhabit “Vortices,” Henry Shum’s first solo exhibition at Empty Gallery. Largely rendered in a palette of blue, brown, and orange alongside hints of green, fourteen paintings slowly and steadily captivate the eye through the artist’s restrained repertoire of gestural drips, stains, and veil-like washes, guiding visitors through the labyrinthine corridors and darkened rooms of the Hong Kong gallery. The black box installation, a hallmark of the space, here lends Shum’s compositions a mysterious aura, their subjects adrift among natural and supernatural settings.”

Jes Fan’s Systems II (2018) and Tishan Hsu’s Being Blue (1986) are in THE BODY ELECTRIC, a major exhibition that looks at our fraught relationship to technology, particularly the increasingly inescapable interface between our bodies and screens, opening today at the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College. 
The remarkably varied art in the exhibition examines the last 50 years of artists addressing the way technological mediation has come to dominate our interactions with the world, with each other, and with ourselves. THE BODY ELECTRIC will be on view from Nov. 5, 2020, through May 30, 2021, and was organized by the Walker Art Center.

John Ziqiang Wu’s No Smoking (2020) and Jes Fan’s Dr. Pimple Popper (2020) are featured in Para Site’s 2020 Benefit Auction online on Artsy, and will be on view at their auction preview from November 12 through November 18 at Soho House, Hong Kong.

Closing soon on November 7: “We (You) Are Beautiful” at @shinokubo_ugo「新大久保UGO」in Tokyo. Curated by Kensho Tanbara, the exhibition features fifteen contemporary artists and collectives responding to the context of Tokyo’s Korean Town, Shin Okubo, located near Shinjuku. Featuring Elliot Jun Wright and Michelle Ceja’s 2020 ∞ (2020).

For Mousse Magazine issue 73’s TIDBITS section, curator Billy Tang reflects on ‘Poetic Justice for Yu Man-hon: Cici Wu.’ “New York-based artist Cici Wu is interested not only in the materiality of the tools and machines we use to observe the world, but also in the myriad ways our worldly experiences are propelled by subtle interactions among language, memory, rituals, sociopolitical structures, and different states of awareness and emotions that can be triggered by moving images and their ambient effects. Turning increasingly toward the supernatural, Wu’s work alternates between drawing, film projection, and sculpture, skillfully interweaving the human and the nonhuman into surrealistic, dreamlike installations…”

For Mousse Magazine issue 73’s TIDBITS section, cultural critic and curator Jeppe Ugelvig wrote about ektor garcia’s ‘Psychic Time of Handicraft.’ “Craft has historically found itself thrust into heated disputes relating to the materiality of gendered and racialized labor. More recently, it’s found new currency in the art world, which in turn has developed a proclivity for reducing its makers to simple tropes of identity. In his practice, ektor garcia wrestles with these stratified positions of production with a restless poetry that defies fixed meanings, whether formal or subjective…”

Join artists Kelly Akashi and Matthew Ronay in conversation with Tishan Hsu on the occasion of Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit at SculptureCenter. Moderated by exhibition curator Sohrab Mohebbi.”We, humans under the influence of technology, are desperately trying to recapture a feel for our skin, to be reembodied, to prove that we are still here.” Matthew Ronay writes in a recent Artforum essay on Tishan Hsu. “But perhaps we aren’t here any longer. We’ve dominated nature completely, and now we’re running a simulation. There is a harmony between the body and the mind somewhere, but not in Hsu’s works, which feel so accurate to me because harmony is so hard to find. His art is not pessimistic; it just offers a humbled perspective—a seductive warning.” Register at the link below.

On Tuesday, October 20, 7:30 pm EDT, Tishan Hsu will lecture online as part of Boston University’s Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series. Hosted by the MFA programs in Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Design at Boston University, the Tuesday Night Lecture Series brings practicing artists and curators to Boston University to present their work. Register on Zoom at the link below.

美報 (Art and Piece), a new Cantonese arts publication established in 2020, has sat down with HENRY SHUM to discuss the process behind his debut exhibition at Empty Gallery, ‘Vortices‘. Read the full Q&A in Cantonese （廣東話）, by CUSSON CHENG, at the link below.

Samwai Lam profiled John Ziqiang Wu for the October 2020 Art issue of MING’S Magazine. Their conversation discusses whether art can be taught, how to live and work as an artist, and Wu’s background as an educator and painter. Read the full interview in Cantonese (廣東話) below.

Many Imaginary Returns: Screening and artist talk with Cici Wu in conversation with Michelle Wong, October 8, 7:30PM HKT. The Unfinished Return of Yu Man-hon (2019) focuses on Cici Wu’s cultural imaginary and extensive research into the unaccountable disappearance of Yu Man-hon, a mentally disabled and an autistic boy who crossed the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border into the mainland and disappeared on August 24, 2000.His case remains unsolved to this day. Filmed in both Minneapolis and Hong Kong, the work follows an abstract narrative where Man-hon returns to the material world, retrieving lost memories of his disappearance in the process. The artist’s camera floats through the city’s myriad pedestrian spaces, lingering at certain familiar places to which Man-hon felt particular attachment –a swing set or favorite restaurant, a local supermarket or bus-depot, a ferry or market. The short film highlights the emotional fragility of our memory, attempts to challenge the familiar interpretation of Man-Hon as an embodiment of loss, and to perceive his image as an enlightened being rather than a ghost.

After the screening, we will connect with Cici Wu in New York with art researcher and academic Michelle Wong for a conversation on the making of the film, Yu Man-hon in relation to lost time and space, and the possible meaning of imaginary returns.

‘100 Drawings from Now’ is an exhibition and benefit event supporting participating artists and The Drawing Center. Featuring drawings made by an international group of artists since early 2020, ‘100 Drawings from Now’ provides a snapshot of artistic production during a period of profound global unrest that has resulted from the ongoing health and economic crises, as well as a surge of activism in response to systemic racism, social injustice, and police brutality in the United States. Together, the works in the exhibition spotlight the urgency, intimacy, and universality of drawing during moments of upheaval and isolation.

Tishan Hsu’s recent painting ‘signal.noise/membrane’ (2020) is included in the benefit ‘Artists for New York’ at Hauser & Wirth until October 22, 2020. ‘Artists for New York’ is a major initiative to raise funds in support of a group of pioneering non-profit visual arts organizations across New York City that have been profoundly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Notes for Tomorrow” is an experimental exhibition conceived by Independent Curator’s International and made up of artworks selected by curators from around the world to reflect on a new global reality ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this cultural moment of transition, each work is a source of inspiration from the recent past and a guiding perspective for the future. Rei Hayama’s film On the colinear and reflected on the water (2018) of a crying emu is included in the exhibition.

Curated by Charles Campbell, Freya Chou, Giulia Colletti, Veronica Cordeiro, Allison Glenn, Tessa Maria Guazon, PJ Gubatina Policarpio, Ivan Isaev, Ross Jordan, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, Josh Tengan, Esteban King Álvarez, João Laia, Luis Carlos Manjarrés Martínez, Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, Lydia Y. Nichols, Marie Hélène Pereira, Balimunsi Philip, Josseline Pinto, Florencia Portocarrero, Shahana Rajani, Rachel Reese, Marina Reyes Franco, Mari Spirito, Alexandra Stock, Eszter Szakács, Abhijan Toto, Fatoş Üstek, Su Wei, Sharmila Wood.

ektor garcia is part of sunthread, an exhibition also featuring Astrid Terrazas and Olivia Neal at Gern en Regalia, an artist-run project space. The show space located in the back of Aeon bookstore at 151 East Broadway New York, NY. Open hours from 12 – 8pm Tuesday – Sunday.

garcia is also participating in There Will Come Soft Rains, the inaugural exhibit at Candice Madey Gallery’s new Rivington Street space, on view until Thursday, November 5, 2020. The exhibition examines the tenuous logic of human lexica—such as language, architecture, taxonomies, or timelines—and the anthropic arrogance inherent to systems that are created to uphold existing hierarchies. Artists in the exhibition explore the tensions between structure and chaos, culture and nature, reason and instinct—ultimately embracing a strategy of fissure, decay, chaos, and rebirth. Featured artists: Uri Aran, ektor garcia, Julia Haft-Candell, Adam Henry, Steffani Jemison, Sahar Khoury, Marlene McCarty, Joan Nelson, Em Rooney and Didier William.

On September 22 at 11:00AM – 12:15PM PST, John Ziqiang Wu will speak online as part of Otis College of Art and Design’s Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Click below register for the event. Wu will speak about his experiences as a painter and teacher, and the intersections between art and learning. He currently operates an art tutoring studio, Learning Art & Art Learning Studio, with his wife.

Marking the reopening of SculptureCenter in Long Island, New York, Thursday 24 September is the opening of “Liquid Circuit”, TISHAN HSU’S first museum survey exhibition in the United States. After a celebrated summer at the Hammer Museum, the exhibition lands on the East Coast with over fifty of his most representative works. “Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit” is organized by SculptureCenter, New York, and is curated by SOHRAB MOHEBBI, Curator-at-Large, with KYLE DANCEWICZ, Interim Director. Also look out for Hsu speaking at Boston University’s Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series on October 20.

Rei Hayama’s collaboration with Zai Tang (SG), Dormant Soil / Concrete Reflections (2020, 5.1 channel sound, 2 channel video) in now on view at the 2020 Busan Biennale “Words at an Exhibition —An Exhibition in Ten Chapters and Five Poems”, from September 5 through November 8, 2020. Hayama and Tang’s collaboration is featured in Chapter 3 of the biennale, and is a collaborative response to the poem Haeundae Texas Queen Kong by Kim Hyesoon. This marks the first collaboration between Rei Hayama and Zai Tang with their respective foundations in film and sound.
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Their approach aimed to triangulate between Hyesoon’s text, Rei’s image and Zai’s sound, navigating towards a third space in the middle. Rei and Zai initially engaged in a parallel process: In response to the personal affects and thematic resonances each of them felt from Hyesoon’s poem, both of them collected material from their respective surroundings of Yokohama and Singapore.

The biennale was directed by Jacob Fabricius, and it is located by the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan and hosted by Busan Metropolitan City, Busan Biennale Organizing Committee.⠀

Artist Jes Fan is fascinated by the beautiful and the repulsive. His exploration of the contrast between them leads him to question our standards of beauty, shaped as they are by consumerism. “In the age of Teslas and Brazilian waxes, everything has to be smooth and [without corners]. Beyond feminine beauty, in architecture you see highly digitally rendered curvature,” he says. “Why are we thinking about beauty without edges? It stoops to consumerist needs, it’s a very accessible idea of beauty.”

As an artist and art educator, JOHN ZIQIANG WU finds himself at the nexus of two industries severely impacted by the pandemic. He and his wife, Yinan, co-founded and run an art-tutoring workshop in Chino, east of Los Angeles, while John continues his practice that revolves around different conceptions of art found in society. For the June Art Fair, which is being hosted online during August 20–31 by Hauser & Wirth on its website, Empty Gallery is presenting ten of Wu’s recent watercolor paintings from a 2019–20 residency at the Hammer Museum as well as the early months of the pandemic. ArtAsiaPacific caught up with Wu on the phone last week to talk about his interest in teaching art and in learning other people’s stories.

Sammlung at TOWER MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin runs August 22 through May 30, 2021, featuring works from their collection including TISHAN HSU’S Cordless (1989). “The exhibition highlights works dating from the early 1960s to the present, including some of the museum’s newest acquisitions.” Hsu’s earlier works examine how the pressures of an increasingly technological world acted on the body of the individual subject.

Empty Gallery is pleased to present our inaugural presentation of works by Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and educator, JOHN ZIQIANG WU at this year’s online edition of June Art Fair. The fair opens on August 20 and will be on view through to August 31, and is co-hosted by Hauser & Wirth and ArtReview Magazine. Founded as an independent project by galleries VI, VII (Oslo) and Christian Andersen, (Copenhagen), June Art Fair is an initiative led by pioneering galleries working at the forefront of contemporary art. It is a platform to promote the work of emerging artists and to encourage rediscovery of more established but under-recognized figures.

A photograph by DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN, Coral Offspring, is now in an online exhibition When Sun Comes Out hosted by our friends at Blank Forms NYC through September 18, 2020. The show is their “first benefit exhibition including works by over 40 artists, nearly all of whom are collaborators or friends of the organization.”

Right before the pandemic hit the U.S., C. SPENCER YEH adopted a cat: Mikki. His photograph, Mikki’s Mansion, is featured in the New York gallery Carriage Trade’s new exhibition: Social Photography VIII (until September 20). Check out Yeh’s print for sale at in the link below.

Through video, installation, sculpture, poetry, performance and archival documentation, the works on view explore constructions of self and nation by sifting through the unstable terrain of the past. Drawing on histories and archives of feminist, queer, and Third World liberation movements and responding to the uneven forces of neoliberalization, the artists suggest the pursuit of a new life that is concomitant with new ways of being together. Curated by the 2019–20 Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program,”After La vida nueva” consists of an expanded catalogue, available for download, and an online component, hosted by Artists Space, where a weekly series of “spotlights” of different works in the exhibition will include screenings, archival documents, images, and text. On view August 7 – August 31, 2020.

JAMES T. HONG was invited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin to participate in a new digital exhibition titled CC: World: “Artists and researchers from all over the globe compose personal letters sharing their takes on the [current moment].” Hong shot a film in Taiwan of “his stories of a nihilist, a dog and a pathogen”, which premiered on August 6. “Can ideas make you sick? Who will control the narrative in the end?”

Featuring some of DIANE SEVERIN NGUYEN’S photographs from the Reoccurring Afterlife exhibition at Empty earlier this year, “Materia Medica” curated by Kelly Akashi is now on view by appointment at François Ghebaly until September 4, 2020.The exhibition questions: Can nature be a part of the human community? The artists in Materia Medica reject or critically amplify anthropocentric perspectives to interrogate the idea that humans hold authority over the natural world.

Empty Editions is pleased to release “Mein Corona,” a new single from legendary Hong Kong-based provocateur and pioneer of Cantonese industrial noise music XPER.XR. His first official release since 2006, “Mein Corona” is an ecstatic, darkly humorous, and ultimately hopeful document of life amidst the ongoing global Coronavirus pandemic.⁣
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The release was inspired by The Knack’s “My Sharona” written by Berton Averre & Doug Fieger (1979), produced by Empty Gallery and Xper. Xr., with saxophone by Jean-Luc Guionnet and additional arrangement from Alok Leung. Midi-sequencing, recording, mixing, and mastering is by Alok Leung at Lona Records Studio, Hong Kong, April 2020. Artwork is by Xper.Xr. and Michael Yu. Special Thanks to Feaston.⁣
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All proceeds of “Mein Corona” will be doubled through a matching grant from Empty Editions and donated to the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at The University of Hong Kong. The release can be listened to and purchased on Bandcamp.

SEAN RASPET and Shengping Zheng’s Hyperflor© (2-benzyl-1, 3-dioxan-5-one) (2018–19) takes the synthetic nature of parafiction further still through the creation of a new molecule, a fragrance to be commercialized under the brand name ‘Hyperflor’. Invisible yet immersive, Raspet describes the scent as something between flower petals and overripe vegetation. As part of the 2019 Okayama Art Summit, Hyperflor© (2-benzyl-1, 3-dioxan-5-one) was ‘exhibited’ via electronic diffusers placed across the city to function as ‘scene transitions’ between different spaces.

“Next Act: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong” features research-based works by 10 local artists (including CICI WU) that respond to the shared history and collective memories of Hong Kong. Throughout the creative process, each artist focused on different research methodologies as a starting point for their inspiration and thinking process. This process culminates in a collection of exciting works that are visually impactful, interactive, and performative. We encourage visitors to open their senses and imagination when viewing the works by delving into the past to form new perspectives, savor the present, and contemplate what the future holds.

TISHAN HSU’s paintings and sculptures evoke nightmarish visions of the body’s forced integration with its technological surrounds. After a spate of exhibitions in the 1980s at venues including Pat Hearn Gallery and Leo Castelli, the artist’s work largely disappeared from public view. Now, New York’s SculptureCenter has organized the survey “Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit.” The show debuted at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, this past winter and was slated to open at SculptureCenter in May before being postponed in the wake of Covid-19. To mark this occasion, Artforum invited artist MATTHEW RONAY and art historian LANE RELYEA to reflect on Hsu’s dark, prescient, and singularly weird oeuvre.

The Japanese Artist Turning Fruits and Vegetables Into Sculpture. Ikebana’s most irreverent practitioner, the 80-year-old Kosen Ohtsubo, finds beauty in the banal. On a January afternoon, in his stained-wood-floored studio in the Tokyo suburb of Tokorozawa, the artist Kosen Ohtsubo fingered a large cabbage leaf, its edges a bit too curled and droopy for a salad. “It’s about three days old,” he said. “Great material.”

‘A journey has to be arduous’ says Jes Fan, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s BMW Art Journey, alongside sculptor Leelee Chan and artist duo Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien. Since 2015, BMW and Art Basel’s joint initiative enables an artist to develop a new project almost anywhere in the world. Previous winners have visited Jerusalem, the Bikini Atoll, the Southern Indian state of Kerala, and Ghana.

Book: In Praise of Shadows (1933) by Junichiro Tanizaki

This book-length essay led gallerist Stephen Cheng to reconsider what’s missing from our daily aesthetic experiences. In the work, Tanizaki—a famous Japanese novelist who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1964—espouses a mindful appreciation of the world around him. Tanizaki embraces darkness and obscurity, which can be deeply disconcerting to many of us—especially in times of crisis. Cheng’s favorite quote from the essay reflects on this theme. Tanizaki writes: “To snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes.”

Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit is the New-York-based artist’s first museum survey exhibition in the United States. The exhibition traces Hsu’s key ideas and demonstrates how they clearly resonate in the works of younger artists coming of age today. In the mid-1980s Hsu began a series of works that considered the implications of the accelerated use of technology and artificial intelligence and their impact on the body and human condition.

Perspectives: shaping the world through visual culture

The first talk of the program will be led by New York-based artist Jes Fan, with his lecture titled Leakages, Puddles, Discharge, Infections and Bubbles… Jes Fan’s trans-disciplinary practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into the concept of otherness. Primarily working in the field of expanded sculpture, Fan navigates the slippery complexities of identity as guided by the tactile and material histories of his chosen media.

Since its inception in 1973, the Biennale of Sydney has showcased the work of nearly 1,800 artists from more than 100 countries and holds an important place on both the national and international stage. JES FAN is exhibiting his sculptural and film works Form begets Function (2020) and Xenophoria (2020) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia until September 6, 2020.

James T. Hong, an Asian American documentary filmmaker based in Taiwan, also makes sculpture and video projections. At Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, Hong shows boxes made from frosted glass, illuminated from within and ostentatiously padlocked. Shifting shadow-play hints at creepy, undiscernible contents of a vaguely taxidermal sort secreted inside the boxes. A luminous video projection on a side wall is little more than a glowing blur.

Since the 1970s, Tishan Hsu’s practice has been nurtured by a cosmology that perceives a unity of heaven and humanity. His works often present clinical trials and tribulations where one can see the body exploded. The concern is not to locate the body in relation to technology, but to reconstitute the body anew. By Hera Chan

Co-organised by Empty Gallery’s long term friend Xper. Xr. and The Xevarion Institute. Tickets are available from the link below – hope to see you there!

January 22, 2020, 7 – 10PM

Chan Shu Kui City Hall, North Point 北角 陳樹渠大會堂

The gallery will be closed on 23 – 26, 29 – 31 Dec 2019 & 1 Jan 2020. Normal opening hours will resume on 2 Jan 2020.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!