Stephen Cheng on Ten Years of Empty Gallery, Jaime Chu, Spike Art Magazine

The founder of Hong Kong art’s black cube on sheltering artists from the system, programming as film-making, and the experimental drug called jet lag.

When I first moved back to Hong Kong as an adult in 2023, a new friend tried to recommend me cool things to do: “During a performance at the closing party for Vunkwan Tam’s show at Empty last year, [owner of noise label Mouhoi] Cedric Ng punched a sink until his hands bled.” They knew what to say, but they didn’t have to try so hard. In Hong Kong, historically an entrepot dominated by blue-chip galleries, unwieldy semi-private institutions, and a constellation of independent art spaces surviving precariously under colossal real estate conditions, Stephen Cheng’s Empty Gallery occupies an eclectic yet somehow exacting niche. It’s where minimalist experimental music, Japanese conceptual art and its heirs, and sculptural and filmic practices at the forefront of the Asian diaspora converge in a renovated industrial space notorious for its dark, cavernous interior. Friends who don’t otherwise care for contemporary art bring themselves to the hour-long queue for the gallery’s annual rave, and its artists have found genuine interlocutors within an industry that does not always afford them time.

Our current solo exhibition of Richard Hawkins, The Garden of Loved Ones, opened on March 23, 2025, and was written up in the following publications:
The best shows to see in Hong Kong ahead of Art Basel, Payal Uttam, Art Basel
Nine Solo Shows to See in Hong Kong, Spring 2025, Anna Dickie, Ocula
7 Shows to See During Hong Kong Art Week 2025, Claire Shiying Li, Frieze
Headed to Art Basel Hong Kong? You Need to Make Time for the City’s 13 Can’t-Miss Exhibitions, Giuliana Brida and Katie Kern, Cultured
Shows to See in Hong Kong, March 2025, ArtAsiaPacific

The exhibition, along with TRST03 Covey Gong, will be on view through May 24, 2025.

Ophela Lai, on the occasion of Empty Gallery’s 10th anniversary, interviewed Stephen Cheng, our gallery founder, in the Financial Times: “A pitch-black art gallery — now that’s a bright idea: Empty Gallery, a ‘black-cube’ arts space situated in a Hong Kong high-rise, has a reputation for immersive, experimental experiences:

Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery envelops you in darkness. The lift doors open and, for the few seconds before your eyes adjust, there is nothing but a void — no walls, no doors, no floor.   Stephen Cheng opened the gallery in 2015 in an industrial high-rise block in Aberdeen harbour. It is a “black cube”: an inversion of the white-walled space that has been the default for showing art since the 20th century. Born in New York, Cheng — the grandson of Hong Kong shipping magnate Yue Kong-Pao — was educated at Eton, and later Harvard where he studied photography and film history (and took classes with Nan Goldin). Darkrooms and cinemas became his favourite haunts. It was in dark spaces where art entered his life “in an irrevocable way”.

There Is No Center at ROH Projects arrives not as a conventional presentation of artworks, but as an event in the truest sense—a disturbance in the usual flow of time. Extending beyond the gallery’s familiar five-week format, the twelve-week-long exhibition challenges the static nature of traditional exhibition-making, embracing a fluid proposition in which artworks enter and exit the exhibition at irregular intervals and for undisclosed periods, and performative actions instigate reconfigurations of how and where works are positioned. These movements establish ever-changing contexts and reconsideration of the works vis a vis in relation to each other, as well as in relation to themselves.

Raha Raissnia will be installing new paintings in the second week of March, and hosting a film-performance on March 9. Read more details at the link below.

Reina Sugihara fantasizes about breathing like a bird—having constant access to fresh air, as she told me, and being able to inhale and exhale deeply as if it were second nature. Inherited from their dinosaur ancestors, the nine to eleven air sacs attached to birds’ lungs allow for oxygen storage enabling effortless and effective breathing. In today’s stress-filled world where we need meditation and breathing classes for their constant reminders to respire deeply and correctly, these small, round, inconspicuous air sacs seem like something that might be as beneficial for humans as they are necessary for birds.

Emerging from the shadows of Empty Gallery’s customarily dark sanctum, Reina Sugihara’s paintings—softly illuminated by spotlights—exuded a quiet primordial force. Her abstract biomorphic forms, rendered in tones ranging from earthy to carnal, resemble blistering encrustations. The thickly painted canvases, some large enough to loom over the viewer, support viscous deposits of pigment and gesso that fissure as they dry. One thinks of scorched terrain, cooling lava, or half-healed wounds and scabs, but the associations are brief—the paintings resist legibility.

The artistic practice of DORIS GUO (*1992 in San Francisco, lives and works in Oslo), spanning a variety of media, is based on capturing moods and precise observations, distilled into multi-layered works and atmospheres. Her materials often consist of used, everyday objects, brought into relation through Guo’s sensitive combinations. For her first institutional solo exhibition Bent at the Window at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Guo develops new works and extends existing ones in dialogue with the exhibition space: among them, self-built projectors that cast static images onto the walls, as well as a new series of sculptures that further deepen Guo’s interest in translating objects into alternative material and mental states.

The exhibition will be on view from March 15 through June 1, 2025.

Curator: Junia Thiede

At MO.CO., Sense Unknown brings together more than one hundred works by thirty artists, offering an open and porous journey between materials, experiments, disciplines, and eras, with the aim of testing reality – or what we know of it. The exhibition will be on view from February 15 through May 18, 2025.

In Chaos : Making a New Science (1987), James Gleick points out that the development of a scientific theory is often based on the repetition of experiments and the recurrence of an event. An isolated event is therefore considered an error. However, in the research process, serendipity, chance discovery, accident, and the acceptance of a twist of faith open up new pathways that were beyond our predictions. We then move from known worlds into the unknown.

The artists in the exhibition Sense Unknown sometimes come from scientific backgrounds, while others have worked with scientists or are simply passionate about one of these fields. They share a common interest in experimenting with the unknown through the reinterpretation of scientific forms and processes.

Participating artists include: Isabelle Andriessen, Art Orienté Objet, Berdaguer & Péjus, Hicham Berrada, Morgan Courtois, HR Giger, Joey Holder, Tishan Hsu, Cooper Jacoby, Yunchul Kim, Josh Kline, Roy Köhnke, Kinke Kooi, Tetsumi Kudo, Emma Kunz, Candice Lin ; Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitris Stamatis & Jasmina Weiss ; Mary Maggic, Guadalupe Maravilla, Nam June Paik, Jean Painlevé, Bernard Palissy, Eduardo Paolozzi, Luboš Plný, Lea Porsager, Josephine Pryde, Victorien Sardou, Jeremy Shaw, Kiki Smith, Alina Szapocznikow, Haena Yoo, Anna Zemánková.

Taro Masushio is participating in the group exhibition Cool Invitations 11, from January 18 through February 2, 2025. The exhibition at XYZ Collective, Tokyo, is curated by MISAKO&ROSEN.

Participating artists include: Maki Katayama, Yui Yaegashi, Ryohei Usui, Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi, COBRA, Futoshi Miyagi, Zon Ito, Ryoko Aoki, Hiroshi Sugito, Shunsuke Imai, Masaya Chiba, Hanna Hur, Trevor Shimizu, John Riepenhoff, Sara Caron, Will Rogan, Margaret Lee, Taro Masushio, Hikotaro Kanehira, MISAKO&ROSEN

The gallery is open Thursday – Saturday from 1pm – 6pm, as well as Sundays, 1pm – 5pm. It is closed on Mon, Tue, Wed and National holidays.

Xper.Xr will participating in a two-person exhibition with Delia Gonzalez at Hot Wheels Athens London, as part of Condo London, taking place 18 January through 15 February, 2025.

Empty Gallery is pleased to participate in the third edition of Dallas Invitational, from April 10–12 at the historic Mansion on Turtle Creek.

Organised by Olivia Shao, Legal Size is a group exhibition at Gandt, New York, from December 7 through February 9, 2025.

Participating artists include: Richard Aldrich, George Brecht, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elise Duryee-browner, Curie Choi, Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Fischli, Jef Geys, Doris Guo, Raymond Hains, Bradley Kronz, Matthew Langan Peck, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Aki Sasamoto, Enzo Shalom, Mike Smith and Rosemarie Trockel.

“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.””

Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT.

In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024.

At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance.

Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison

Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA.

On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform.

For the full schedule, see the link below.

Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details.

“The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and  stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might  experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly  useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I  wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.”

Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.

Jes Fan’s debut New York solo exhibition is now on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space through December 20, 2024.

In his practice, Fan employs the often invisible substances that shape our experiences with the world to explore the often malleable ways in which biology, ecology and identity intersect. Working in close collaboration with biologists, farmers, and medical universities, Fan’s transdisciplinary projects examine how sculpture can be used as a tool to unravel material from its accumulated history.

The exhibition continues Fan’s episodic project Sites of Wounding, first initiated in 2020. A pool of boiling soy milk is positioned at the gallery’s entrance, and utilized as a projection surface for a visceral video documenting a homemade endoscopy. Upon looking at the congealed skin-like surface of the white liquid, the viewer is not offered a reflection, but instead offered an interior view of the artist’s body. This underscores a larger interest in Fan’s work, of collapsing the membrane that demarcates the external body from an internal space. New sculptures belonging to the project’s second chapter are informed by Fan’s research into Agarwood trees, as well as an interest in how injuries are capable of generating new meaning. Native to Hong Kong, the trees produce a fragrant resin in response to stress, and trauma. In the healing process, the tree’s fibers harden, building density and structure around the wound. To create sculptures in this chapter, Fan 3D prints CT scans of his own musculature and combines traditional techniques such as glass-blowing. Mimicking the formal qualities of the infected Agarwood tree, these abstracted forms point to the transformative potential of trauma carried by the human body. A punctured freestanding wall furthers this inquiry, inviting viewers to peer at the sculpture embedded within it.

Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty. It runs from October 5, 2024 through March 2, 2025.

Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex.

I Am Standing in the Middle of the Information Highway and Laughing is a new exhibition curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, opening August 16 through October 18 at the Argo Factory in Tehran. Taking its title from late artist Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 years of Cinema, a performative exhibition in Tehran will unfold over two different episodes. Its main aim is to celebrate the unbound energy of collaborative work and friendship on the one hand and moments of reflection and stillness on the other. Its point of departure is the Manichean binary between darkness and light, as sine qua non condition for the existence of technologically mediated images.

The second chapter of the exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, opens on Friday, September 27, with Marco Fusinato, James T. Hong, Tiffany Sia and Sam Lewitt.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is participating in the group exhibition Slipper at Personal Space, Vallejo, California, on view through November 24, 2024.

Featuring works by: David Bayus, Lemia Monet Bodden, Kari Cholnoky, Ximaps Dong, Erik Frydenborg, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Albert Herter, Catalina Ouyang, and Elina Vainio.

“Slipping between registers, like prophesy, some excessive field leaves deposits in our shared existence. It takes form, in the shape of slips of the tongue, or a slipped disc, articulated and yet still monstrous. The environment is overpopulated by tools and weapons that encode our lust or aggression into metal, plastic, or paper, infused with the unspeakable. Here is a collection of objects, of various media, that cannot be fully accounted for, that leave a remainder or lapsus, that aren’t completely discrete, and sit like cairns on a landscape, death’s representatives, recording trajectories between past and future. Marking the differences that matter, that can be utilized to situate oneself and guide a famished party.  Small signs, like fragments of fossils, can refer to immensity.”  – Albert Herter

Improvisation is on view through January 19th, 2025 at the Inside Out Museum in Beijing. It was curated by  Carol Yinghua Lu
with Na Rongkun, Sining Zhu, Cao Liyao, Li Huiyi and Sun Yuhan.

Participating artists and collectives include Cang Xin, Chen Liang, Chen Zhou, Ergao (He Qiwo), Gao Fu, He Liping, He Ruijun, Hu Yiyao, Liu Zhan, Luo Lin, M Art Group, Ma Liuming, Pak Sheung Chuen, Peng Xueying, Rong Rong, The Cement Park, Song Xiaohong, Song Dong, Vunkwan Tam, Tong Tianqing, Wang Shihua, Wang Sishun, Yorkson, Zhang Huan, Zhang Wei, Zhang Zhihui, Zhong Yunshu, Zhou Bin, Zhu Fadong, Zuoxiao Zuzhou.

Improvisation is one of the characteristics of art, as well as a method of creative practice. It highlights an artistic process where the artist finishes their work immediately and swiftly, using everything at hand, when the inspiration, provoked by an external stimulus or an internal impulse, hits unpreparedly and uncontrollably. In the context of traditional Chinese music culture, due to its unique system of notation and inheritance, improvisation was once a ubiquitous technique in musical practice. Improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is probably as old as the human race. This is the reason why we encounter improvisation frequently throughout different historical moments and creative activities in the long history of art. From the Dada’s rejection of logic and introduction of chaos and irrationality into their creative practice, to the Situationists who, out of an ideal to fight against Capitalism’s alienation of the individual, advocated the pursuit of genuine desires, the experience of life, and the sense of adventure. People can see that improvisation is the method, the idea, the principle, and the real life itself.

Empty Gallery is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexander Lau as senior director, and Kaitlin Chan as director.

Lau has served as director of the gallery, and its associated label Empty Editions, for over nine years, and been foundational in the development of our exhibition program and artist roster. Based in New York and Hong Kong, Lau also sits on the board of Primary Information (NYC).

Chan joined the gallery in 2020 as associate, and has since contributed to over ten exhibitions as an artist liaison, as well as through public programming, communications, art fairs and sales. Chan is also a cultural worker who creates comics and lectures on self-publishing amongst other topics.

formazione di forme.. curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi at Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, as part of curated by 2024, is on view from 17 September through October 19, 2024. The exhibition features works by Alighiero Boetti, Aria Dean, Taro Masushio, and Samson Young, chosen for their distinct approach to form-making.

Masushio took the Untitled (Youth) pictures in San Francisco in the early aughts, at a time of youthful infatuation with the aesthetics and techniques of formalist photography. He shot the SoMa scene through that lens: analog camera and the zone system, the body flattened and closely cropped in black-and-white symmetries. Finding those negatives in his archive last summer arose feelings of embarrassment toward his puppy love days. An embarrassment that he worked through, coming face to face with that innocent attraction to formalism, and by extension to a younger self, that is akin to kink. So that in the printing process, he treated the negatives to further heighten the compositional elements in ways that replay the darkroom devotion of his youth. Masushio said: “Vis-à-vis my personal history, I want to propose a provocation of (modernist?) aesthetics and the taboo of being a formalist, which I thought was kind of kinky. (A kind of parallel between concept/ form vs norm/ taboo). But there is always a bit of embarrassment about making these kinds of (po-mo) gestures, too.” The form/ affect dyad shifts valence from attraction to embarrassment to kink in the reception of these works. Which is real? This fractal approach to the archive is typical of his overall method. An earlier body of work emerged from fortuitously finding, in a temporary lodging, a box of prints and recognizing them as the work of the late Jun’icha En’ya—an elusive figure and one of the earliest Japanese photographers of homoerotica. A visit to En’ya’s environs in Osaka generated Masushio’s works: photographs of pencil-traced snapshots that he furtively took in En’ya’s archives, and still-life pictures of the objects that En’ya owned or that he might have. Between Masushio and the En’ya “idea” there is no articulated relationship of influence. Form escapes filiation there: the pressure of the archival materials and the pencil pressing against paper.

Tishan Hsu’s solo exhibition Interface Remix at MOCA Toronto opens to the public on Sunday, September 8.

“Interface Remix” showcases key works from the past five decades of Hsu’s career alongside never-before-seen creations that explore themes of transformation and alienation.
In his first ever Canadian solo exhibition, Hsu’s groundbreaking work navigates the intersection of technology and the human body through his multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, and installation.

Hsu will also be in conversation with Alex Da Corte on September 8th at 2PM in an accompanying program.

Cici Wu’s Lovers Revolt, Lovers Resolve (Reincarnations of Lantern), 2020, is now on view at 47 Canal through September 14 in a group presentation with Mickael Marman and Emmanuel Louisnord Desir.

Jes Fan’s Bivalve II is now on view at Dream States, Groundspace of The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, through January 2025.
Artists: Jes Fan, Katharina Grosse, Michael Ho, and Olafur Eliasson.

Special thanks to Tim Tan.

Two new sculptures by Tishan Hsu, car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2 are now on view at the High Line New York, at at Little W 12th St. and Washington St. Hsu first began making these resin-wrapped foam sculptures at the 58th Carnegie International in 2022. The works will be on view through April 2025, and the commissioning curator is Cecilia Alemani.

“All Good Things” at Hulias Norway will be on view through July 7 and is open from 13:00 to 16:00 every Saturday and Sunday during the exhibition.
Participating artists include Spencer Lai (AU), Maria Gorodeckaya (RU,GB),
Giles Thackway (AU),
Doris Guo (US) and
Ewa Poniatowska (PL).  Curated by Marie-Alix Isdahl, the exhibition features a projector artwork work by Doris Guo titled Kitchen Bathroom Confusion (2023).

Stephanie Bailey on Le Contre-Ciel in Frieze Magazine:

“Named after 20th-century French surrealist René Daumal’s writings on death as regenerative negation, ‘Le Contre-Ciel’ (The Counter Heaven) at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, is more revelation than exhibition. Organized by Olivia Shao, the group show opens with the meditative sounds of a gong chiming over softly clanging cymbals. These emanate from a work that is not yet visible: Francis Alÿs’s Cuentos Patrióticos (Patriotic Tales, 1997), a black and white video that shows the artist leading sheep in single file around a giant flagpole in the centre of Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, to form a looping circle. The performance references an event that took place in 1968, amid a student-led Mexican movement for political change, when civil servants ordered to show support for the government bleated in the square in protest. The work’s presence plays with the meaning of ‘The Counter Heaven’ in the context of Hong Kong, given that Chinese emperors believed they had the divine right to rule due to the Mandate of Heaven.”

Raha Raissnia is participating in Before Thunders, May 10-12 at Taipei Dangdai:

For the first time, Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas will present a curated exhibition within the fair co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture. Titled “Before Thunders: An Exhibition of Taiwanese Artists” the exhibition focuses on the work of a dozen largely mid-career artists selected by four curators who will participate in the Ideas Forum 2024: Zian Chen, Martin Germann, Esther Lu, and Wong Binghao. This project supports the fair’s core goal of bringing art from Taiwan from across the spectrum—from those represented by the leading galleries participating in the fair to those working largely outside the market—to greater international attention and demonstrates the fair’s ongoing interest in building partnerships with public and private organizations throughout Taiwan’s vibrant art scene.

Raha Raissnia’s Untitled (2018) is on view at Nevers, Galerie Khoskbakht, Cologne, May 4 through 30.

Galerie Khoshbakht is delighted to announce Nevers, an exhibition with works by Beth Collar, Keta Gavasheli, Nicole Gravier, Raha Raissnia and Ulrike Schulze. Nevers brings together artists who deal with the question of the representable and the unrepresentable, who negotiate the interior and exterior of reality in relation to their media. Sometimes it seems that reality is too big to be experienced as a whole, that it is perhaps also too cruel to want to experience it directly. Thus, each artist explores the question of representation and the representable, the articulable, in their own unique way by using means of alienation and translation.

Opening May 23 through August 10: Artists Space is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent work by Doris Guo, Matthew Langan-Peck, Isabelle Frances McGuire, and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya.

Artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock
Dates: April 6 – May 26, 2024

Weight of Mind at Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College questions how memory is embodied and given new form in the works of three artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock. In divergent ways, their works—across sculpture and photography—examine how past experiences are transformed through different methods of translation, from molding and casting to pigmentation to digital manipulation. By thickening fragmented memories or past sensations, the artists invite the audience to examine moments of change that otherwise would be fleeting. The exhibition is curated by Thalia Stefaniuk.

Payal Uttam in Artsy: “Amid the glistening neon of Hong Kong’s iconic skyline this week, the M+ Museum façade was alight with an evocative black-and-white film by Yang Fudong—just one of many signs that Art Basel Hong Kong, and a flurry of other art events, had taken over the city…
The first thing that catches your eye at Hong Kong–based Empty Gallery’s booth are Jes Fan’s sensuous organic sculptures made of hand-blown glass and carved gypsum. A rising star in the international art scene, Fan is known for taking CT scans of his body and creating printed casts of body parts to create his work.

Another highlight of the booth is Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s slick kimono-shaped wall sculpture made of stitched poured silicone, a sound-buffering material. The work functions as a “noise blanket” with the thick textured surface deflecting sound.

Taiwan-based Iranian American artist Raha Raissnia’s monumental oil painting inspired by experimental cinema is also a standout. Painted using the traditional method of grisaille, her ethereal painting appears to almost quiver and vibrate.”

Sound art as performance, choreography, and object. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork by Byron Westbrook in BOMB:

“Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s work occupies a singular space at a nexus of visual arts and sound composition. With a multifaceted sphere of influences that includes textiles, club music, archaeoacoustics, and choreography, she has one of the most rigorous and unique practices in what is often termed sound art. Her work manifests as a generous space for audience exploration, where sculpture, sound, and interactive installation environments live and breathe in a symbiotic collaboration with viewer and architecture. Kiyomi Gork’s first East Coast institutional solo exhibition, Poems of Electronic Air, at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center presents an expansive survey of her ideas and work. In the conversation below, I speak with her about concepts explored in the show, including participation, feedback systems, surveillance, choreography, and sonic forms as expressive metaphor.”

—Byron Westbrook

New works by Jes Fan are now on view at Greater Toronto Art, the triennial at MOCA Toronto, from March 22, 2024— July 28, 2024. The curatorial team includes MOCA Curator Kate Wong and two invited guest curators, Ebony L. Haynes and Toleen Touq.

Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) is the second edition of MOCA Toronto’s recurring triennial exhibition, which was conceived in 2021 to look more closely and consistently at artistic practices with a connection to the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Featuring a constellation of twenty-five intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives, GTA24 looks back as much as it looks forward. The exhibition presents work made between the 1960s and the present, allowing the comingling of art created in different decades to provide new ways of understanding the current moment and imagining the future.

Harrison Jacobs, in Artnews: “With Hong Kong Art Week set to take off Monday, art world jet-setters are officially en-route and eyes are squarely on the coastal metropolis…

The Covid years, as Empty Gallery director Alexander Lau told ARTnews in an email, were initially “shattering,” but isolation infused energy into the city, as it “gave every Hong Konger a reality check on how to move forward with life, both philosophically and emotionally.”

The result, numerous art dealers told ARTnews, is a renewed focus on strengthening the city’s cultural ecosystem through new institutions, galleries, and nonprofit art spaces, as well the confidence to invest in and elevate local artists.

“We’ve noticed more of a willingness to take meaningful risks with programming, beyond the typical more commercial route of transplanting blue-chip art trends to Hong Kong,” Lau said of the city’s galleries.”

Empty Gallery congratulates Jes Fan on his participation in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than The Real Thing.

The Seventy-one visionary artists and collectives in the latest chapter of the exhibition—Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing—will follow in the footsteps of hundreds of Biennial artists before them to interpret our current landscape and tell stories, spark discussion, and comment on issues across a variety of media and disciplines.

The curators of the 2024 Whitney Biennial are Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. Even Better Than The Real Thing will be on public view starting 20 March 2024, with previews from 12 through 17 March 2024.

In The New York Times, read Siddhartha Mitter’s coverage: Whitney Biennial Picks a ‘Dissonant Chorus’ of Artists to Probe Turbulent Times.

Now on view at Yokohama Museum of Art, Former Daiichi Bank Yokohama Branch, from March 15 – June 9, 2024: 8th Yokohama Triennale “ Wild Grass : Our Lives”.

The Artistic Directors: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu

Vunkwan Tam and Xper. Xr are two of the ninety-four participating artists in the exhibition.

The Artistic Directors, Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, started conceptualizing the theme with the Chinese writer Lu Xun’s anthology Wild Grass, penned from 1924 to 1926, during a turbulent period in Chinese history. In 20th-century China, Lu Xun was a singularly solitary individual who constantly rebelled against existing situations and simultaneously a thinker who stayed attentive to the movements of the world, contemplating the fate of individuals and humanity within them. In Wild Grass, Lu Xun affirmed his conviction to confront desperation and to find a way out of complete darkness. The exhibition theme Wild Grass: Our Lives aspires to Lu Xun’s philosophy of the universe. It signifies a way of life that elevates the unquenchable force of individuals to a respectable existence that transcends all systems, rules, regulations, and forms of control and power. It is a model for flexible expression of individual subjectivity.

Drawing inspiration from the legendary Zaha Hadid, the architectural brilliance behind The Henderson, the exhibition showcases a collective of eight multidisciplinary women artists from diverse cultures, each forging visionary paths in their use of light as an artistic medium.

Date: 9 March – 6 April 2024
Address: G/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central
Opening hours: 11am – 8pm

Participating artists: Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Carla Chan, Jacqueline Hen, Sarah Lai, Betty Ng / COLLECTIVE, So Wing Po, Raha Raissnia and Liz West. Raha Raissnia’s Nour will be on view.

Cassie Packard profiles Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork in Frieze:

‘This city has a hum – a Manhattan-specific drone music – that I love,’ Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork tells me when we meet in New York, after installing her first institutional solo show on the East Coast – ‘Poems of Electronic Air’– at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. ‘Different parts of the city are characterized by markedly different sounds, down to patches where you can hear whooshes from the subway below.’
Sound – as material, process, system and event – is a phenomenon to which the Los Angeles-based artist is emphatically attuned. Born in Long Beach, California, Kiyomi Gork was ‘one of those kids who was always making art’ to make sense of the world, she says. She cut her teeth in a San Francisco noise band, playing homemade instruments like plastic inflatables rigged with contact microphones. After studying sound art at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, she entered the MFA program at Stanford University, where she researched military sound technologies, and also became involved with the university’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, which was working to reconstruct original experiences of sound at archaeological sites.

Opening March 5th in collaboration with the Secession in Viennia, MAMCO Geneva is proud to present a solo exhibition of Tishan Hsu. The exhibition will be on view until June 9th, 2024.

“For more than four decades, Tishan Hsu (b. 1951 in Boston, lives and works in New York) has used art to explore the relationship between technology and the human body. His sculptures, wall pieces, silkscreen prints and, more recently, videos examine the cognitive, physical and social implications of everyday encounters between people and machines. The spring 2024 exhibition at MAMCO will bring together pieces from various stages of Hsu’s career – from his earliest works in the 1980s to the present day. Developed with extensive input from the artist himself, the show is also a collaborative effort with the Secession in Vienna, which will host an exhibition of Hsu’s newer productions in late 2023. Some of these recent pieces are also on display at MAMCO.”

Eyrie Alzate, Jason de Haan, Nancy Lupo, Na Mira, Malcolm Mooney, Yuki Okumura, Hikari Ono, Francesca Percival, Bea Schlingelhoff, Jo-ey Tang, Cici Wu, Bruno Zhu and u

Opening: February 23, 7 pm

u is part artist, part vessel—a transferable personal alias, and a social interaction. u’s project spaces (2018–ongoing) are small boxes made of clear packing tape that act as a medium for collaborations with other artists and curators. u initiates the process by sending an empty project space to selected practitioners as an invitation to join an artistic dialogue, a new relationship and often a finished artwork. Thus u also performs the role of a curator by providing each participant carte blanche within an exhibition space that is small, but very flexible. As a result, the individual collaborators are foregrounded, while the initiator takes a backseat behind the easily overlooked lowercase letter ‘u’ (shorthand for the English word ‘you’). This collaborative way of thinking and working deliberately resists elaborate, commercial production mechanisms and allows for collaborations far beyond national borders. The heart of the project is to expand the concept of curating to include the interests of artists and to promote artistic exchange.

Petzel is pleased to present Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a group exhibition opening Wednesday, February 21, 2024, curated by Simon Denny. The show will be on view through March 30, 2024, at Petzel’s Upper East Side location at 35 East 67th Street, Third Floor. Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) features works by etoy.corporation, Öyvind Fahlström, Genevieve Goffman, Jack Goldstein, Matthias Groebel, Peter Halley, Yngve Holen, Tishan Hsu, Josh Kline, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Seth Price, Harris Rosenblum, Avery Singer, Suzanne Treister, and Anicka Yi.

When Image Processing Became Painting is a newly opened group exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

The show features paintings and drawings by a group of 13 artists, along with a video work fragment by Jean-Luc Godard. The show will be held at our 88 Eldridge Street space.

At what precise moment in the last hundred years did artists become actively aware that images preceded their efforts to produce new ones? It remains a question for debate, but what is less uncertain is that the ubiquitous and incessant circulation of pictures now constitutes a kind of second nature, a psychological condition shared by all, and by painters in particular.

The exhibition will be on view through March 9, 2024.

For Small World Journal, Taipei Biennial editor William Smith has interviewed Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork on their new work, Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–ongoing.

“Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s piece for TB13, Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–ongoing, is a dynamic work of aural architecture. Black vinyl walls inflate and deflate in sync with a multichannel sound piece playing on speakers placed in precise locations throughout the space. 

Editor of Taipei Biennial 2023, William Smith,  spoke with Gork about the experience of refabricating her project in Taiwan, the avant-garde roots of her interest in sound installations, and the tangled histories of blow-up structures.”

Harry Burke covers Doris Guo’s Back in Mousse magazine:

“Existing in the interstices between embodied duration and affective labor, Guo’s practice coalesces around the cultural and material gestures which structure our attempts to form a communal life.

“Back” centers around a collaborative project of material care which Guo and her mother, Weili Wang, have undertaken to organize and conserve the latter’s artwork. Formerly lodged undisturbed around her Seattle home, Wang’s oil paintings and sketches—mostly executed between 1980 and 1990 around the Yangtze River Delta—bear witness to an artistic life partially abridged by circumstance. These works are presented as diptychs together with Guo’s pinhole photographs depicting the suburban interior of Wang’s study—replete with cardboard boxes, filing folders, and other marginalia. With their crowded, seemingly off-the-cuff compositions, Guo’s photographs channel domestic inertia into aleatory landscapes. Poised somewhere between comfort and claustrophobia, their gauzy surfaces and indefinite forms go beyond merely simulating the ambiance of memory to express something of the unconscious abstraction with which we move through the world. In parallel, Wang’s works in various media bear witness to a series of complex movements between the urban and the rural, the intimate and the official, personal expressivity and sanctioned style—during a now lost moment of social change.”

“Creative Capital, an organization dedicated to funding innovative artworks and promoting diversity, has announced the recipients of its 2024 “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Award. This year, the organization selected 50 projects from 54 artists, 80% of whom are artists of color.

Each winner will receive up to $50,000 in direct project funding, advisory services, mentorship, and community-building opportunities.

Brooklyn-based artist Jes Fan was awarded for “Soy Skin,” combining performance art, sculpture, and video art to delve into the intersections of biology and identity.”

In Issue 78 of Spike Art Magazine, Ramona Heinlein has reviewed Tishan Hsu’s solo exhibition at The Secession, Vienna:

“Deliriously vibrating between wonder and unease, an exhibition in Vienna deepens the artist’s probe into the fusion of bodies and machines.

Experiencing Tishan Hsu’s exhibition “recent work 2023” feels like a rollercoaster ride: You get the rush of dissolving reality, the near weightlessness at the top, but also the nasty contraction of the viscera and the slight nausea that sits in the throat on the way back down. This is surprising as, except for one LED panel with an animated video and sound (grass-screen-skin: zoom 2, all works 2023), there is no actual movement involved in this show. Hsu manages to shake you up with static renderings of creature-like grids and mechanical nudes that combine abject carnality with dizzying digital illusion.”

Jaime Chu has reviewed Doris Guo’s Back for Spike Magazine online:

“What is a child’s duty to a parent’s past, and what is the appropriate distance between two lives? During a visit home to Seattle, the artist and erstwhile art handler Doris Guo (*1992) began preparing for storage a haphazard shipment of paintings her mother, Weili Wang (*1956), had made in Shanghai, before emigrating to the US. Guo, who had previously known little of her mother’s past life as an artist and art professor, said that materially caring for the paintings, while hesitating to organize them into an archive or to call her own involvement documentation, was the least she could do. After that, “I really don’t care what [my mom] does with the paintings,” Guo told me.”

Vunkwan Tam has been invited to participate in 118½, the inaugural exhibition of Emalin’s second exhibition space at The Clerk’s House in London, opening on January 13 , 2024 and on view through March 17, 2024.

The group exhibition will include works by Tolia Astakhishvili, Alvaro Barrington, Matt Browning, Laura Carralero, Nicholas Cheveldave, Adriano Costa, Matias Faldbakken, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Ceidra Moon Murphy, Karol Palczak, Matthew Peers, Coumba Samba, Vunkwan Tam, Sung Tieu, and Marina Xenofontos.

The Clerk’s House sits on the side of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, bearing the street number 118½ – a half-place between the church grounds and the secular world since the 16th century. Its current form, overlooking the cemetery and Shoreditch High Street, has been preserved since 1735. It is believed to have formerly been a watchhouse from which an invigilator looked out for body snatchers during the social, urban and moral turmoil of the 18th and 19th century’s East London.

HG Masters, in Taipei Biennial 2023: The Promises and Perils of a “Small World”, for ArtAsiaPacific:

“Also featuring music as a core element to its experience of space, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s installation’s Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is) (2023) is a near-pitch-black room with a maze of inflatable black walls filled with a medley of songs—the music crescendos and then the walls dramatically collapse and the sounds of air-blowers fill the room with strangely harmonic frequencies. In each of these two works, emotive strands of pop music are expanded and stretched to fit with abstracted sculptural installations about forms of collapse, care, and support at key times in one’s life.”

Stephanie Bailey, in Taipei Biennial Celebrates a World Worth Fighting For in Ocula Magazine:

“Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork‘s installation’s Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is) (2017–ongoing) seems to carry the unbearable weight of that reality. Within a black room, an inflatable black maze inflates and collapses in time with melodic acapella chants coming from six dispersed speakers, expressing sounds evocative of an emotive, dream-pop lament.”

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will present Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s (b. 1982) first East Coast institutional solo exhibition, Poems of Electronic Air, on view February 2 to April 7, 2024.

Thursday, February 1, 2024
Artist Talk, 6:00 – 7:00pm
Opening Reception, 7:00 – 9:00pm

With a background in digital music composition and archaeoacoustics, as well as involvement in noise, electronic, and dance music scenes, Kiyomi Gork creates spatialized environments that operate at the collaborative intersections of sound, communications technologies, sculpture, architecture, and performance. 

Combining recent sculpture with a newly commissioned, site-specific installation made for the concrete spaces within the Carpenter Center’s iconic Le Corbusier-designed building, the exhibition will depart from an array of the artist’s interests, from the sonic histories of club culture and the concert hall, to the protective qualities of clothing, to the resonances of Brutalist architecture.

In a feature by Tiana Reid with photographs by Allison Lippy: Jes Fan is described as ‘Creator of Haunting Sculptures, Manipulates Materials on a Molecular Level’.

““The tears that you cry when you’re sad, when you’re happy, or when you’re yawning are actually different molecular compositions,” Jes Fan explains over Zoom. “Thinking about things at the molecular level excites me.” These are recurrent themes in the Hong Kong- and Brooklyn-based artist’s work: smallness, intellectual engagement, and the biological code that underpins and defines our turbulent emotional lives.”

Sean Burns recently covered the 13th Taipei Biennial, Small World, for Frieze magazine in his article ‘Trailer for a Spectacle: Taipei Biennial 2023’.

“‘Small World’, the title of the Taipei Biennial 2023, contains both a promise and a threat. It speaks to a stricken, shrinking and interconnected planet but also to a sense of insularity, intimacy and proximity. As with most biennials, the size of the curatorial task at hand – structuring a sprawling show across three floors of the Fine Arts Museum, featuring 58 artists and 120 individual works – calls for a conceit broad enough to feel encompassing but specific enough to hold critical sway…

‘Small World’ has a feeling of lightness about it that I like. The curators haven’t been afraid to programme idiosyncratically (one room contains a spirited small survey of Taiwanese maverick Li Jiun-Yang, replete with glow-in-the-dark drawings and bespoke musical instruments) and according to their fascination with sound and its relationship to visual art. The show contains some exceptional works, none more exciting than Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is) (2023), about whom Wood quips: ‘You can tell she’s a club kid.’ It’s a searing installation of ominous black, rubbery walls inflated by six air pumps. Resonant frequencies from the pumps blast out of six speakers in a play between muscularity, circularity and softness.”

Tishan Hsu’s solo exhibition ‘recent work 2023’ is now open to the public at Secession, Vienna through February 25, 2024.

Titled recent work 2023, the American artist Tishan Hsu’s exhibition at the Secession consists entirely of new works. After his first major retrospective, which opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2020 and then traveled to the SculptureCenter in New York, where Hsu lives, the artist’s work was prominently featured in the central exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. For last year’s Carnegie International, he conceived several large-scale sculptures; the sculptures he now presents at the Secession elaborate on the ideas they articulate. Taken together, these three major exhibitions in recent years threw Hsu’s creative evolution over the past four decades into relief, illustrating both his changing choices of techniques and materials and his methodological constancy and persistent pursuit of key concerns.

Gió Marconi is pleased to announce Motherboy, a group exhibition born out of the dialogue between curator Stella Bottai and artist Gray Wielebinski around the so-called “mammone” (mummy’s boy) – a notion that their own embodied experiences – as mother and son respectively – celebrate, critique, and reconfigure. The exhibition is on view from 24 November 2023 through 17 February 2024.

Artists: Sophia Al Maria; Jonathan Lyndon Chase; Patrizio Di Massimo; Bracha L. Ettinger; Hadi Falapishi; Jes Fan; Apostolos Georgiou; Allison Katz; Leigh Ledare; Maia Ruth Lee; Gaetano Pesce; Jenna Sutela; Gray Wielebinski; Kandis Williams; Bruno Zhu

Solstice, a proposal by the artist Anne Bourse, opened at Galerie Crèvecœur on November 23 and runs through January 20, 2024. The group exhibition explores the meanings of light through sculpture.

Artists: Martine Bedin, Christophe Berhault, Than Hussein Clark, Anne Bourse, Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Alice Gavalet, Karl Holmqvist, Jacent, Cooper Jacoby, Ernst Yohji Jaeger & Yasuaki Hamada, Renaud Jerez, Mélanie Matranga, Jessi Reaves, Louise Sartor, Josef Strau, Cici Wu

The Taipei Biennial 2023: Small World is now on view. Curated by Freya Chou, Reem Shadid, and Brian Kuan Wood, this year’s iteration will bring together over 50 international and local artists and musicians, transforming the museum into a space of listening, gathering, improvising, and exploring alternative ways to perceive and apply what we learned from the recent pandemic. The biennial will be on view from November 18 through March 24, 2024 at Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, C. Spencer Yeh and Natascha Sadr Haghighian in collaboration with James T. Hong are amongst this year’s participating artists.

In a new publication accompanying the exhibition, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Like a Breath of Fresh Water at Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin, the artist was interviewed by Melissa Fandos. Read the full interview at the link below.

‘Form and Function Come Alive at ICA, Philadelphia’ by Stephanie Bailey:

“At the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, form and function merge across works by Jes Fan, Nikita Gale, Hannah Levy, Ken Lum, and Oren Pinhassi.

Riffing off the term for any object within a building that is portable, curators Alex Klein and Cole Akers have created a spectrum that moves from readymade to sculpture in Moveables (18 August–17 December 2023)…

Materially, Levy’s works seem to defy fragility—a resistance that is accentuated by the sharpness of the artist’s sculptural forms. Jes Fan‘s compositions, on the other hand, lean into their precarity. Diagram XXI (2021), for instance, layers fine, leaf-like, sea-green aqua-resin sheets cast from parts of the body on a wall to create wave-like shelves that encase a bulbous blown-glass glass drop within their folds. In Rack II (2022), resin sheets hang like wet towels from a green metal rack alongside glass lumps.”

Tiffany Leung has contributed a new feature on Cici Wu’s Belonging and Difference to ArtAsiaPacific‘s November/December 2023 issue #136:

The pink dolphin of the Pearl River Delta is a lost species, long associated with Hong Kong but now more mythical than real as its numbers have dwindled to the point of extinction. The memory of them, or the imagination of them, as cultural signifiers, returns anew in Cici Wu’s new lantern sculpture Foreign Object No.2 Umbra and Penumbra (Dolphin) (2023). Constructed with bamboo and rice paper, the various shaped lanterns she has made in recent years are central to her practice. They become visionary devices, illuminating the darkness and casting undefined shapes, light, and shadows, as if animating the ways our memories can be transformed and resurface in unexpected ways, invoking the interplay between our identity and memory.

Professor Ari Heinrich will deliver the 2023 A.R.Davis Memorial Lecture at the Australian Society for Asian Humanities  on the topic of Jes Fan’s Sydney Biennale works on October 26th at 5PM Sydney time.

This talk considers sculptural installations at the 2020 Sydney Biennale by the artist Jes Fan that incorporate biological materials like melanin, blood, and semen. But it also considers the Biennale’s decolonial interventions at the curatorial level, and how the significance of using biological materials in art changed with the onset of the pandemic. Heinrich argues that the 2020 Sydney Biennale anticipated this fundamental transition in uncanny ways, perhaps most significantly in its attention to location on Indigenous land and its disruption of linear viewing practices.

Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living is now on view at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo until March 21, 2024. This exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the museum’s founding, and endeavors to ask who we are, and to whom the Earth’s environment belongs. The exhibition urges us to think about environmental problems and other issues not only from an anthropocentric perspective but also by looking at the Earth’s multiple ecologies from a broader, more comprehensive standpoint.

Yutaka Matsuzawa is amongst the 34 artists featured, with works spanning historical pieces to new commissions.

de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands], guest curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, explores the concept of freedom through sensory experiences, alternate and altered realities, and interspecies relationships between human and non-human entities. Featuring over a dozen local and international artists and collectives—the majority of which were culled from the KADIST collection—the exhibition unfolds over three rotations, drawing from the emancipatory potential of repetition and poses the question: how does art affect our bodies and perception, and how does it contribute to and alter our future?

Rotation #1 is on view from October 13 – November 11, 2023 and includes Jonas Van & Juno B, Jes Fan, Duto Hardono, arquivo mangue, Dalissa Montes de Oca, Angela Su, Maria Taniguchi.

Ballroom Marfa’s 20th year anniversary exhibition is Perhaps the Truth, featuring work by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jes Fan, Joel Gaitan, Florian Krewer, Rebecca Manson, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Jesse Murry, Robert Nava, Ilana Savdie, Kiki Smith, Astrid Terrazas, Lucía Vidales, and Issy Wood. The exhibition will be on view from October 4 through March 30, 2024.

At the Visual Arts Center (VAC) of the University of Texas Austin, a new inflatable in the shape of a Japanese stone lantern from Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s personal collection fills the gallery, incorporating sounds collected from the fountain in the VAC’s courtyard. The installation marks Gork’s first representational inflatable work. Together, the sounds of blowers, of flowing water, of visitors, and of the VAC’s interior space transforms the gallery into an interactive indoor sonic garden.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Like a Breath of Fresh Water is on view from September 22  through December 2, 2023.

LMCC’s longest-running residency program, Workspace, is a nine-month studio-based program that focuses on the creative process and cohort development of emerging artists. Workspace nurtures experimentation, creative risk-taking, collaboration, learning and skill sharing through regular opportunities for dialogue with peers and arts professionals. Situated within donated office space each year, Workspace offers a unique opportunity to reimagine what it means to work in Lower Manhattan.

Workspace 2023-2024 Residency Program Includes: Francheska Alcántara, Blanka Amezkua, Lucas Baisch, Elvira Clayton, Francisco Donoso, SaraNoa Mark, Miriam Simun, Corinne Spencer, Alex Strada, Cici Wu

Horizons: Is there anybody out there? is now on view at Antenna Space Shanghai through October 25, 2023. Curated by Robin Peckham, the exhibition features works by: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Dora Budor, Hilo Chen, Xinyi Cheng, Cui Jie, Simon Denny, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Buck Ellison, Carolyn Forrester, Owen Fu, Sayre Gomez, Guan Xiao, Han Bing, Tishan Hsu, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Allison Katz, KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers), Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Josh Kline, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Heidi Lau, Li Ming, Yong Xiang Li, Liu Chuang, Jr-Shin Luo, Nancy Lupo, Mai Zhixiong, Helen Marten, Alexandra Noel, Peng Zuqiang, Tara Walters, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Xie Nanxing, Joseph Yaeger, Yu Honglei, Yu Peng, Zhao Gang and Zhou Siwei.

October 7, 2:30PM at M+ Cinema, Hong Kong: In this special screening, Wu will present her 2019 film Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon from the M+ Collection, followed by a compilation of short films that have influenced her creative practice. The screening will be followed by a talk in English, where the audience will be given a rare opportunity to hear from the artist herself. The talk will be moderated by Silke Schmickl, CHANEL Lead Curator, Moving Image, M+. Tickets are now on sale.

On view from September 1 through 21 October, screen-skins-2 at Galerie Max Mayer, Dusseldorf: “Tishan Hsu’s practice conveys an embodied technology, centered on the cognitive and physical effects of transformative technologies on our lives. To address these issues, Hsu consciously chooses to use traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, which evoke a feeling of ‘slowness’ that resonates with the viewer’s direct physical experience in perceiving the works. The works create a sense of illusion of body and screen, while at the same time becoming objects in their own right. It is in this paradoxical situation that a hybrid experience of two and three-dimensional spaces begins to take shape. Often, Hsu’s works seem to float, at times hovering over the floor, detaching from the walls or mounting on wheels. Their curved corners, already introduced in the 80s, feel like precursors to the app icons on our smartphones.”

Cassie Packard recently profiled Jes Fan in the September 2023 issue of Artforum: In 2018, Jes Fan, then in residence at Brooklyn arts nonprofit Recess, approached a local for-hire synthetic-biology lab with an unusual request. The artist, whose conceptually and materially complex work often showcases his facility with glassblowing—which he sharpened while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design—commissioned the laboratory to synthesize eumelanin for use as a sculptural material.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has been awarded a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Every year, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship awards fifteen artists working in the fields of painting and sculpture with a significant financial support, granted over five years.

On view August 18th through December 17, 2023 at ICA Philadelphia: Moveables brings together the work of five artists—Jes Fan, Nikita Gale, Hannah Levy, Ken Lum, and Oren Pinhassi—who are rethinking functional design and its intimate relationship to the human body. Whether reminiscent of a living room, lighting rig, toothbrush holder, or chandelier, these artworks invite us to imagine new possibilities for the objects that shape our daily lives, including who they are made for and how they might be used.

Tishan Hsu is participating in the fourth edition of the Future of Today Biennial at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. To Your Eternity, the fourth installment of the Today Art Museum’s art and technology-themed biennial, zooms ever slightly away from an obsession with the now and the next, but revels in unlikely, luminous juxtapositions across geography and time. It will be on view from July 23 through November 12, 2023.

And the Moon Be Still as Bright recently opened at Harper’s Gallery New York in collaboration with Civil Art and The Here and There Co. The exhibition will run through August 18, featuring works by Joeun Kim Aatchim, Vincent Cy Chen, Hyegyeong Choi, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Mimi Jung, Ho Jae Kim, Antonia Kuo, Ajay Kurian, Heidi Lau, Jennie Jieun Lee, Cole Lu, Erica Mao, Suchitra Mattai, Jacqueline Qiu, Pauline Shaw, Kyungmi Shin, Astra Huimeng Wang, Ye Qin Zhu.

Tales of Soil and Concrete is a new exhibition opening at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery London from July 13th to August 12th, 2023. Participating artists include Anselm Kiefer, Arturo Kameya, Alison Saar, Jacob Littlejohn, Yun-Fei Ji, Brett Goodroad, Henry Shum, Sophia Loeb and Allison Janae Hamilton.

Tales of Soil and Concrete traces various artistic approaches to myth and mythmaking in rural and urban contexts, examining how these environments affect the origin and propagation of such narratives. With an emphasis on cyclical systems – growth and harvest, construction and destruction, appearance and disappearance – the exhibition interrogates how productive processes give way to memory and nostalgia for that which is lost, leaving scarred landscapes, physical and psychological, which we make sense of through narrative, representation, and ritual.

Tishan Hsu appears on the cover of Numéro China Summer 2023 issue, featuring an interview with Venus Lau.

Wong Binghao explores Jes Fan’s Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1 in e-flux.

“In one corner of Jes Fan’s latest exhibition is a glass globe that fits snugly into a receptacle resembling a half-opened, upright clam’s shell. Titled Left and right knee, grafted (all works 2023) and installed on a ledge in the curve of the staircase that leads down into the gallery, the sculpture’s treasure is only visible from above; from below, only its undulating, opal façade can be seen. The body parts and procedure referenced in the artwork’s title are hardly, if at all, discernible in the artwork’s form; an obtuseness compounded by its relatively inaccessible position in the exhibition space. Like the “pearl” it protects, this artwork reveals its meaning only in glimpses.”

For Art Papers, Stephanie Bailey has reviewed Jes Fan’s Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1 and Tishan Hsu’s screen-skins.

“Arriving at Empty Gallery is always an experience. There’s getting to Tin Wan in the first place a part of Hong Kong that feels like a world unto itself on its peripheral downtown perch along the edge of Aberdeen Harbor. Then there’s the lift that takes you up to the 19th floor of a nondescript high-rise that hosts this two-floor black box space where art functions as the light in the dark. Such was the case with works by Tishan Hsu and Jes Fan, whose solo exhibitions each occupy one floor.”

As part of Art in America‘s New Talent 2023 issue, Alex Jen profiled Henry Shum.

“Henry Shum paints under dim overhead light in his childhood bedroom. His parents’ home, where he started painting at age 14, is in the eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. He left the island for a few years to study at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, then returned in 2020 as the pandemic broke out. Given the subdued radiance of his paintings, the poorly lit studio is surprising. But Shum likes it this way, reasoning that “if you can see the painting well in a harsh environment, then in a setting where the light is proper and the wall is clean, it should look good.”

‘Drummer’, a solo exhibition by Taro Masushio, opened at BIS-Zentrum on Friday, 23 June, and runs through July 16.

The exhibition will present new works by Masushio, made over his six-month fellowship in Mönchengladbach, and is supported by the Josef and Hilde Wilberz Foundation.

Address: BIS-Zentrum, Bismarckstrasse 97, 41061, Mönchengladbach
Opening hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 12-4pm

Where We Stand is a new exhibition at the Kim Geun-tae Memorial Library-Archives, Seoul, Park Xun, Cici Wu, Chan Hau Chun, Fai Wan. Opening June 13 through August 6, 2023.

“The Hong Kong pro-democracy movement and the Jeju April 3 Incident are two different events in terms of geographical, historical, and political contexts, but they are both movements of resistance against state violence and citizen-led movements for democracy and human rights. The exhibition “Where We Stand,” which features a Korean artist and three Hong Kong artists, may allow for mutual understanding of and empathy for each other’s experiences through these similarities.”

Tishan Hsu’s conversation with the independent curator Miao Zijin for Artforum China is now live.

X Museum is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition ‘X PINK 101’ in its new location in Beijing, from May 28 to August 6, 2023. Centred around the colour pink, the exhibition brings together 49 works from the museum collection in its newly restored historic building, marking a fresh chapter of the museum’s inspiring programs.

Jes Fan’s Function Begets Form (2018) is on view.

More Than Human is curated and produced by DOSSIER and in collaboration with, and supported by, EUNIC (European Union National Institutes of Culture), Blanc Art Group, Choi Centre – Cloud House and other local and international partners. More Than Human will be on view at Blance Art Space A1 from 27 May to 23 July 2023.

“In More Than Human, we challenge the very idea of “humans” itself. We begin by asking who actually is a human. But in trying to figure out the “who,” we cannot neglect the “how” — the process of becoming (non-)human. How, for instance, do humans order the world? And how are the problems facing the world the result of the humanist norms and structures that order our world today? Most importantly, we look at how a post-anthropocentric world would look like — one where human beings do not reign supreme and acknowledge their interdependency and entanglements with other species.”

Participating artists include: Andrew Thomas Huang, Anna Raimondo, Artor Jesus Inkerö, Anna-Sophie Berger, Black Birds Creative Co., Dai Chenlian, Die Ge, ErGao, François Chaignaud, Hu Wei, Jes Fan, Jake Elwes, Konstantin Zhukov, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussens, Martina Menegon, Melanie Bonajo , Miriam Cahn, Otay:onii, Prinz Gholam, Tao Hui, Zheng Bo.

Opening in May 2023, Hardcore is a group exhibition including 18 artists’ whose works centre on the power dynamics of sex, the diverse nature of intimacy, and our reaction to it.  The era of cancel culture has produced a timidly lower volume for discussions around difficult and more nuanced examinations of sexuality, and the works in this show unapologetically test the parameters of the human experience, challenge social convention, and create space for psychological exploration.  These artists provoke reaction, thought and important discussion around essential human questions: Darja Bajagić, Monica Bonvicini, Miriam Cahn, Elaine Cameron-Weir, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Maryam Hoseini, Tishan Hsu, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Bruce LaBruce, Tayeba Begum Lipi, Monica Majoli, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman and Andra Ursuţa.

Hardcore is curated by Sadie Coles and John O’Doherty. The exhibition runs from 25 May through August 5, 2023.

Curated by Wang Shuman, The New Survivors opened on May 20 at Three Shadows Photography Centre. Participating artists include: Harun Farocki, James T. Hong, Jazmin Lopez, Meiro Koizumi, Ana Mendieta, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Moe Satt and Tang Chao. The exhibition will be on view through July 2 and features James T. Hong’s Three Arguments About the Opium War (2015).

Opening May 10th: “Each Modern is pleased to present Daily Pictures, a group exhibition of new and earlier work by Kevin Weil, Cici Wu, Max Guy, Margaret Lee, Mari Eastman, Arnold J. Kemp, Gaylen Gerber, Peter Fischli David Weiss and David Diao, curated by Alex Jen. Spanning generations, these nine artists apprehend the world in curious and humble ways, often via meticulous inquiry into their own materials and processes.”

Ophelia Lai has reviewed Jes Fan’s Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1 for Spike Magazine’s Spring 2023 issue #75:

“Sculpting in nacre-like glass, the ashes of shells, and casts from his own body, Jes Fan looks to a pearl oyster for guidance on thwarting and absorbing foreign power in Hong Kong.

Across the road from Empty Gallery, at the Aberdeen waterfront, fishing boats unload their catches every morning at a local seafood market. This briny atmosphere is vividly conjured within the gallery at Jes Fan’s (*1990) latest solo exhibition, “Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1,” which takes pearl farming as a starting point for the artist’s expanding inquiry into extractive industries.”

Diana d’Arenberg has reviewed Raha Raissnia’s Nour for Texte Zur Kunst online: “Iranian-born New York–based artist Raha Raissnia’s first solo exhibition in East Asia, staged at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, sees visitors step into a theatrical pitch-black gallery space in a high-rise industrial building. Eyes and mind are deprived of visual clutter and distraction, left to focus instead on the softly lit artworks that take center stage in the gallery (the only illuminated objects in the entire space).”

Qu Chang has named Cici Wu’s Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge at Hordaland Kunstsenter as a Critic’s Pick in Artforum China.

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.”

Our new exhibitions, Sites of Wounding: Chapter I by Jes Fan and screen-skins by Tishan Hsu have been featured as must-see shows by Ocula, Artsy, Business Times and Tatler. Our presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong was also listed as a best booth by Artsy.

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.”

Read the full feature in print or with a digital subscription.

Opening February 19 through July 23: One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas.

The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others.

Organized by Veronica Roberts, Former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art.

Opening at the Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway on February 25, 2023: Cici Wu with invited artists: Chan Hau Chun & Chui Chi Yin, Taro Masushio, Xiaofei Mo, Park Xun, Fai Wan, Emilia Wang

Can we multiply realities so that it equates to a fiction? An orientation of difference. A repetition’s anathema. Two indifferences in brackets. Liquid vision.
– Taro Masushio 

Repairment has to be dispersed, but together.
– Jaime Chu (Hong Kong-Mainland Relationship Repairment Study Group)

In the center of the gallery space, a floating bridge made of paper and bamboo wires is illuminated from within by a projector, screening Cici Wu’s new black-and-white stop motion film. The exhibition’s titular work refers to Tsaiyun Bridge, which Wu first encountered in the art historian James Cahill’s personal clippings. Originating from an English edition of China Pictorial (1962), a state-sponsored periodical with roots in the very beginnings of propaganda efforts from Communist China. Struck by the translators choice to render Tsaiyun (彩雲) which translated literally would mean “colorful cloud”–– as “Rosy-Cloud”, perhaps this interpretative choice speaks simply of a translator with a romantic approach to language, but perhaps it also speaks of one who feared to not indicate the color red for political reasons. Sensing the traces of a peculiar affective and ideological world expanding behind this minute linguistic gesture, the artist began to meditate on the contours of a historical time marked by the violence of idealism and erasure of reality.

Francesca Aton for ARTnews: “Inspired by the music of Los Angeles’s techno warehouses, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has created a visceral site-specific work that plays with the embodiment of sound.

Situated in in the ICA LA’s project room (through May 14), the installation Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop pulls audio from the neighboring exhibition about Milford Graves, the drummer and artist who died in 2021. This includes the sounds Graves made for the ICA show, as well as any visitor interventions. One can, for example, scream in the galleries and Kiyomi Gork’s audio equipment will pick it up in her installation in the adjacent room.”

February 11 – May 14, 2023: This presentation marks the first solo museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, CA), whose practice engages sound as both conceptual and literal material. Building on her ongoing explorations into sound as an architectural form, Kiyomi Gork has transformed the Project Room into a maze, revealing the integral—yet invisible—role that sound plays in shaping one’s perception.

Titled Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop (2023), the installation features an electronic beat generated from live audio pulled from the surrounding galleries. Inside, the rhythmic pulse of the beat is amplified and distorted through spatial and material interventions, such as speakers and sound blankets, reflecting the artist’s sculptural use of objects commonly associated with noise control. The circuitous structure of the maze underscores the feedback loop inherent to hearing, wherein, according to Kiyomi Gork, “What you hear affects how you move and how you move affects how you hear.” As its title suggests, Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop describes the multifaceted nature of the feedback loop, speaking to simultaneous sensations of agency and loss of control, collectivity and isolation. Here, soundwaves vibrate through the body and orient the visitor as they navigate the maze’s twists and turns—at once transported away from, and brought back to, their own embodied experience. In calling attention to the somatic quality of sound, Kiyomi Gork blurs the distinctions between audience, performer, audio, and architecture to create a heightened awareness of the dynamics of perception.

Cassie Packard reviews “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center for the February 2023 issue of Artforum.

Brady Ng in Artomity: “Jes Fan’s 3D-printed, enlarged resin human organs in a “punch-out” plastic grid that is familiar to model hobbyists, Visible Woman (2018), was striking in the final section of Myth Makers. The artwork takes its name from an assembly kit first released in the 1950s that featured removable parts in an anatomical model of a woman. Fan takes this concept to its ultimate conclusion, clinically presenting the essence of a woman’s body in its barest form, ready to be reshaped and sculpted…”

Curated by Michelle Song at the Abrazo Gallery at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, “Dear Alien, Dear Doppelganger” presents photographs, videos and installation works that explore queerness as performances of doubling. The inter-generational group of artists rework archives, popular culture representations, family photos and dominant constructs of race and sexuality through the duality of intimacy and alienation. Featuring artists Jaguar Mary X, Taro Masushio, Luna Luis Ortiz, Lisa Ross. On view: January 15 – February 26, 2023.

Curated by Yang Beichen as part of their “Who Owns Nature?” series, Multispecies Clouds is now on view at Macalline Arts Center in Beijing, through April 16, 2023.

Artists: Carolina Caycedo & David de Rozas, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Sheryl Cheung, Rometti Costales, Patricia Domínguez, Jes Fan, Fei Yining, Liu Chuang, Long Pan, Uriel Orlow, Rice Brewing Sisters Club, Pamela Rosenkranz, Yi Xin Tong, Wu Chi-Yu, Trevor Yeung, Zhang Wenzhi, Zheng Mahler

“Multispecies Clouds” marks the first chapter of a three-part research-based curatorial project, “Who Owns Nature?” forthcoming at the Macalline Art Center. In this exhibition, we seek to present a metaphor for new interspecies relationships, which on the one hand, point to the networked structure of different life forms and, on the other hand, involve a global system of exchange, within which species in the Anthropocene move about through information, material, and energy. Within the “clouds”, the boundaries of species blur, effacing the distinction between the center and the periphery; hence their “identities” constantly intermingle, reshape and transform, and this interweaving process gradually evolves into a sprawling and vast open world.”

Co-presented by Sunpride Foundation and Tai Kwun Contemporary, Myth Makers “circles around the core notion of “queer mythologies” and delves into modern and contemporary mythologies along with practices of the body, by gathering a diverse range of artistic idioms related to LGBTQ+ perspectives from over 60 artists from Asia and its diasporas.

The exhibition draws inspiration from artists addressing “queer mythologies”, who highlight either same-sex love and desire or gender fluidity as found in ancient belief systems and traditions in Asia. At the same time, the exhibition also highlights the “new traditions” of our times, of spectacle and celebrity, playful and/or transgressive, along with non-normative bodily practices and histories in artworks by contemporary artists.”

Jes Fan’s Visible Woman (2018) is on view from the Sunpride Foundation Collection on the third chapter 3/F of the exhibition, Queer Futurities.

Curators: Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong

Curated by Jeppe Ugelvig, Memory of Rib is now on view at N/A, Seoul. Featuring Rinella Alfonso, Jess Beige, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Tishan Hsu, Eusung Lee, Jack O’Brien, Jordan Strafer, Reina Sugihara and Sun Woo.

Tishan Hsu was recently interviewed by Dean Kissick for Highsnobiety magazine. See more of the interview at the link below.

“Tishan Hsu’s compositions are disorientating. They are screens you could lose yourself in. Everything is warped, or melting into something else. Bodies are disassembled. Eyes, noses, and ears are scattered Picasso-like about the place. They might seem cold and impersonal, dehumanizing even, but they come from his very personal experience of living through momentous and ongoing changes we have yet to understand. They seem to embody some of the keenest questions of the 21st century: like how has digital technology transformed our experience of reality? How has it affected our sense of selfhood? What level of agency are we able to retain as the tools we create spiral out of control, and where is art in all of this?”

“Artists in the World uplifts artistic voices and explores multiple histories, geographies, and current events while creating space for new ideas and possibilities.

Hosted by Carnegie Museum of Art’s director of education and public programs, Dana Bishop-Root, and WQED-FM’s artistic director, Jim Cunningham, the new podcast series features cross-disciplinary conversations, artist talks, readings, and performances that position artists in conversation with individuals across disciplines, practice, and place.”

Listen to episode 2, with Tishan Hsu and Ryan Inouye, here. “Episode two explores the cognitive and physical effects of technology. Tishan Hsu, an artist whose work examines the implications of the accelerated use of technology and artificial intelligence, and Ryan Inouye, associate curator for the 58th Carnegie International, discuss transformative technological advances on our lives.”

“Ari Larissa Heinrich’s “Ejecta” takes as its subject Jes Fan’s melanin sculptures and the geology of metaphoric language.”

“Ejecta” is one of five pamphlets forthcoming from The Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Grant’s new pamphlet series, titled Cookie Jar. Volume 1, Home is a Foreign Place, which includes “Ejecta”, will be published on November 15, 2022.

Exhibition dates: Thursday, November 10 — Sunday, January 29, 2023

“The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the twentieth iteration of Vienna — Los Angeles Garage Exchange: Maruša Sagadin & Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. Vienna-based artist Maruša Sagadin collaborates with Los Angeles artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. The artists respond to each other’s work to develop an exhibition for the Mackey Apartments’ Garage Top gallery.

[Live event] At 7:30 PM PST on November 10, Jes Fan will present as part of the UCLA Department of Art Lecture series at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

On November 11, 2022, at 2:00-4:00PM GMT +8, Ari Heinrich will give a talk on ‘Melanin in the Art of Jes Fan’ at National Chengchi University Taipei. Registration: https://linktr.ee/queer_taiwan

Heinrich’s new pamphlet on Jes Fan, titled Ejecta, will be published by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant on November 15.

Opening November 5, 2022 through April 10, 2023: “The American writer Ray Bradbury said: “Science fiction is the art of the possible.” Under the guise of anticipating the future, it speaks to us of the present. It is a laboratory of hypotheses that manipulate and extrapolate the repressive norms and dogmas of today’s world, its ambitions, social afflictions, opportunities and perils. A Gateway To Possible Worlds exhibition brings together over 200 works from the late 1960s to the present day. Art & science fiction whisks visitors away to a 2300m² sci-fi world. It puts the spotlight on the bonds between imaginary worlds and our reality with the help of artists, authors, architects and film directors. It builds on current demands for 21st century utopias to spark debate, inspiration and a form of hope.”

Tishan Hsu’s Breath 4, 2021 will be on view.

A conversation between Tishan Hsu and Ryan Inouye, associate curator for the 58th Carnegie International. Free to attend, on November 3rd at 6:30pm at the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater.

Henry Shum’s debut in the United States, Hex, opens November 4 at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 55 Walker space. He was also featured in the latest issue (#131) of ArtAsiaPacific in a Where I Work profile by H.G. Masters, with photographs by Peter Chung.

Curated by Cédric Fauq, Barbe à Papa (Cotton Candy) opens on 3 November (7PM) at the CAPC Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is on view through 14 May 2023.

“Every year in March and October, you can hear from the windows of the Capc Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux the echoes of the funfair that has been taking place on Place des Quinconces since 1854. This echo, amplified, gives rise to the exhibition Barbe à Papa. It takes up residence in the central spaces of the Capc – nave and mezzanines – in the form of a funfair in slow motion and deconstruction, thanks to the help of artists whose works maintain material, formal or cultural connivance with elements of the funfair.”

Participating artists: Bogdan Ablozhnyy, Alfredo Aceto, Lutz Bacher, Bertille Bak, Ericka Beckman, Meriem Bennani, Kasper Bosmans, AA Bronson, Chila Burman, Julien Ceccaldi, René Clair, Mathis Collins, Matt Copson, Jesse Darling, Kevin Desbouis, Eliza Douglas, Dr. Eugène Doyen, Marcel Duchamp, Cécile di Giovanni, Anders Dickson, Natacha Donzé, Stano Filko, Nicholas Grafia, Ram Han, EJ Hill, Carsten Höller, Agata Ingarden, Silas Inoue, Ken Jacobs, Gregory Kalliche, Matthew Langan Peck, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Ghislaine Leung, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Johann Lurf, Fabrizio Milani & Andrea Dal Molin, Arash Nassiri, Gyan Panchal, Russell Perkins, Harilay Rabenjamina, Pierre-Lin Renié, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Diane Severin Nguyen, Israel Urmeer, Julie Villard & Simon Brossard, Kristin Walsh, Bri Williams, Mara Wohnhaas, Cici Wu, Dena Yago, Vivien Zhang, Jenkin Van Zyl.

Empty Gallery has donated an edition of Taro Masushio’s Asagao 7 to Asia Art Archive’s Annual Fundraiser. View the work at their online auction until November 3rd, 2022.

“Asagao 7 captures a morning glory flower at night, when it discreetly seals its petals. The work derives from a larger project by Taro Masushio that explores the personal archive of Jun’ichi En’ya, one of the earliest homoerotic photographers in Japan. Reflecting on the hidden parts of En’ya’s life, Masushio uses this flower as a metaphor to consider the broader experience of concealing parts of oneself to comply with social norms.”

Xper.Xr’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Cacophon, opens tonight (October 28) at Loong Mah, NYC. Curated by Olivia Shao. Cacophon will be on view until January 15, 2023.

James T. Hong’s Apologies 2022v1 is on view at Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt through December 30, 2022. “Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) is an exhibition that speaks of continuities among cosmologies and origin myths across space and time, only to upset, against this backdrop, the standard narratives of the modern era and its place in history. Ceremony refers to the writings of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter, for whom the “underside costs” of modernity, from dispossession and slavery to extractivism and climate change, are intimately linked to the “mutations” of Christian cosmology into the secular discourse of modernity.” The exhibition was curated by Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons and Zairong Xiang.

“Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere brings together over a dozen international artists whose work prompts us to reexamine our human relationships to the planet’s biosphere through the lens of symbiosis, or “with living.”” Jes Fan’s Systems II (2018) is on view, and the exhibition runs until February 26, 2023 and is accompanied by a publication.

From October 19, 2022 through Masrch 5, 2023, “In the Balance: Between Painting and Sculpture, 1965–1985 brings together artworks from the Whitney’s collection that cross boundaries and upset conventions. Regardless of whether they pour across or sit on the floor, the sculptures included here explore painting’s domain through investigations of color, surface, and optical perception. The paintings, conversely, engage with sculptural concerns by taking up ideas long associated with three-dimensional art, such as balance and objecthood.”

In the Vulnerability issue (#73) of Spike Art Magazine, Ophelia Lai reviews Vunkwan Tam’s F in The Last Laugh:

“I had not envisioned spending my Saturday night looking up body bags on Amazon, but that’s what I found myself doing after encountering Vunkwan Tam’s Untitled (The traffic noise arched over a bubbling mass of public conversation and pattering footsteps on concrete) (2021).”

James T. Hong’s Apologies v2016.2 will be presented at the Jewish Museum Vienna from October 13, 2022 until February 12, 2023.

Chris Wan has reviewed Vunkwan Tam’s F as a Critic’s Pick in the Chinese edition of Artforum.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
 will host a Visiting Artist Lecture for Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts
online on Wednesday, September 28, 2022, 7 PM EST

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James T. Hong is amongst the artists announced for the 14th Gwangju Biennale soft and weak like water, curated by Sook-Kyung Lee and slated for 7 April to 9 July 2023.

Vunkwan Tam’s F was recently reviewed by Cassie Kaixin Liu in Frieze magazine. “With simultaneously mournful and irreverent works, ‘F’ at Empty Gallery is haunted by our inability to process grief in the internet age.”

The opening of Signaling, a new group exhibition at KinoSaito NY, coincides with their one-year anniversary (September 10, 2022). Curated by Alexander Provan, the exhibition will run through 11 December. Participating artists include: Vivian Caccuri, Raven Chacon, Nikita Gale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, L’Rain, Nicole Miller, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

“To signal is to convey meaning through a gesture or expression—to communicate directly and artlessly, with the clarity of a traffic light or siren. In the realm of online posting and positioning, however, signaling has come to stand for the sharing of generic, fashionable statements, as opposed to genuine convictions, much less complicated opinions. Behind this new, negative definition is the strange expectation that every utterance somehow relay the speaker’s true meaning, or even true identity. But why should signaling be either sincere or performative, reflecting selfhood or groupthink? Why should people always reveal (or even know) what they mean and who they are, rather than expose or conceal themselves based on who is listening and what is at stake?”

Susanne M. Winterling’s new solo exhibition, A threshold-game of proximity, cluster and heat, opens at Kunsthall Trondheim tomorrow (September 7, 2022). “In recent years, Winterling has explored the cultural, biological, and medicinal aspects of temperature. In their recent work, heat features as energy often indiscernible to the human eye, which nonetheless makes bodies quiver—from desire as much as fear—and which causes landscapes to surrender to drought or transform to ashes.”

A collaboration between Pivô Brazil and KADIST Art Foundation, de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands] is a new exhibition, publication and seminar series curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel. Two of Jes Fan’s Diagram works will be on view in the exhibition, which opens today (September 3, 2022) and will be on view until November 6, 2022.

With Frieze Seoul opening on September 2, Ocula magazine has highlighted eight galleries’ presentations. From Alexander Lau, Director of Empty Gallery:

“The selection of works we are bringing to Seoul includes a number of our core gallery artists, Cici Wu, Tishan Hsu, and Taro Masushio, who we are introducing to the Korean market for the first time, as well as Vunkwan Tam, a young artist from Hong Kong who has just joined the gallery.

These artists all deal with the intersection between technological modernity, imperialist legacies, and contemporary East Asian identity in important ways.”

Opening on September 2, 2022, Cloud Walkers is a group exhibition opening at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. Tishan Hsu will be one of the featured artists. The exhibition will be on view until January 8, 2023, and was curated by June Young Kwak.

Transactions With Eternity at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler was recently reviewed by Noushin Afzali for Ocula Magazine. The exhibition closes on August 20, 2022.

“On the other side of the gallery space is a sturdy pale-greenish frame; an interlocking resin-coated metal skeleton with three bloated glass pieces attached, given near-erotic shapes.

Standing at almost 1.43 metres tall, Rack II (2022) is the latest work by multidisciplinary artist Jes Fan, whose similar juxtapositions of soft, fluid forms with rigid structures, are also on view in the Venice Biennale‘s central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams (23 April–27 November 2022).”

“The Pollock-Krasner Foundation revealed that it would award grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to 106 artists and nonprofit organizations across the globe. The recipients represent sixteen countries and sixteen states.” Jes Fan has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2021–22 Artist Grant.

The full list of grantees and Lee Krasner Award Recipients can be viewed at the link below.

Jes Fan was profiled by Drew Zeiba for the August 2022 issue of Wallpaper* magazine. “Can art and biology come together to break down social constructs?

Transactions with Eternity opens on July 8, 2022 at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. The group exhibition includes the artists manuel arturo abreu, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Jes Fan, Yongxiang Li, Diane Severin Nguyen, Xiyadie.

“The odds are good, the goods are odd is a group exhibition that highlights a new generation of New York-based sculptors. Bringing together artworks across a range of mediums, the presentation showcases the divergent ethoses behind sculpture-making today. The featured artists favor the handmade, creating a spectrum of artworks that range from the polished and conceptual, to the raw and visceral.”

The exhibition is on view from 29 June through 5 August, 2022. Participating artists include Leilah Babirye, Kristi Cavataro, Jes Fan, Doreen Lynette Garner, Hugh Hayden, Elizabeth Jaeger, Hannah Levy, Eli Ping, Jessi Reaves, Devon Turnbull (OJAS), Kristin Walsh.

An online component of the exhibition can be viewed at the link below.

The artist list for the 58th Carnegie International has been announced, including Tishan Hsu. “Established in 1896, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art. Organized every three to four years by Carnegie Museum of Art, the International presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which is titled Is it morning for you yet?, runs from September 24, 2022 to April 2, 2023, and unfolds along two conceptual overlapping currents: historical works from the collections of international institutions, estates, and artists, alongside new commissions and recent works by contemporary artists.

Organized by Sohrab Mohebbi, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International and associate curator Ryan Inouye with curatorial assistant Talia Heiman, the exhibition traces the geopolitical imprint of the United States since 1945 to situate the “international” within a local context. The exhibition borrows its title from a Mayan Kaqchikel expression, where instead of saying “Good morning” it is customary to ask, “Is it morning for you yet?” Inspired by a conversation with artist Édgar Calel, who will present a new commission for the show, Is it morning for you yet? acknowledges that human beings’ internal clocks and experiences are different: when it’s morning for some, it might still be night for others.”

Opening Wednesday, June 22, 2022: “Nahmad Contemporary is pleased to present The Painter’s New Tools, an exhibition organized by Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick.

If you woke up today after twenty years asleep, you’d find the physical world hasn’t changed a great deal. You’d probably notice how everyone’s looking at their phones all the time, and how images are everywhere. How everyone’s making and remaking and communicating through images; and have, in a sense, turned into images on screens themselves. This is a moment of great transition. Your experience of the world is mediated by images, and increasingly takes place within the pictorial space of those images. It’s disorientating.

This has changed the way to think about painting: How can you make a distinct image in the face of this glut of images, this constant distraction, and is that even important? What are the painter’s new tools, and what can be done with them?”

Artists: Ei Arakawa, Darren Bader, Kerstin Brätsch, Alex Carver, Kate Cooper, Aria Dean, Harm van den Dorpel, Urs Fischer, Wade Guyton, Kate Mosher Hall, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Tishan Hsu, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jacqueline Humphries, Alex Israel, Jesse Kanda, Scott Lyall, Helen Marten, Ezra Miller, Julien Nguyen, Albert Oehlen, Laura Owens, Seth Price, Richard Prince, Rachel Rose, Sarah Sze, Tojiba CPU Corp, Jessica Wilson, Jordan Wolfson, and Anicka Yi.

Jes Fan’s Mother is a Woman (Cream) (2019) will be on view at Retrograde, a group exhibition opening at Galerie Du Monde tonight (16 June 2022, Thursday, 5-8pm) , curated by Cusson Cheng. The exhibition period is 16 June – 13 August 2022.

“Galerie du Monde is delighted to present the group exhibition Retrograde curated by Cusson Cheng. Different from other LGBTQ-themed exhibitions that emphasize the pride and visibility of sexual minorities, Retrograde raises questions on the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. The exhibition contests the dominant heteronormative logic of desire, the homogeneous models of gay modern identities, and proposes alternative ways of thinking that allow one to radically reimagine queer histories, subjectivities, and futures.”

Participating Artists: Ivana Bašić, Jes Fan, Dew Kim, Green Mok, Naraphat Sakarthornsap, Tseng Chien-Ying, Floryan Varennes, Luis Xertu, Xu Guanyu, Rachel Youn, Stella Zhang

更多…

Opening June 2 2022 through 15 January 2023: “The exhibition Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s at Museum Brandhorst brings to life a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon in art, and more particularly in sculpture: the reciprocal interpenetration of body and technology. With more than 100 works and several large-scale installations by around 60 artists—primarily from Europe, the United States, and Japan—the exhibition focuses on the major technological changes since World War II and their influence on our ideas of the body.”

On Thursday June 9th, 5 to 7PM CEST: Between the Enchantment of Technology and Technophobia

“When asked about her birth, Carrington once said she was the product of her mother’s encounter with a machine, in the same bizarre union of human, animal, and the mechanical that marks much of her painting and writing. This event will discuss the convergences between individuals and technologies, asking what’s at stake in today’s theories of transhumanism and technological optimism that oppose the dread of a complete takeover by machines via automaton and artificial intelligence.

Keynote by Yuk Hui, philosopher and author, Associate Professor, Philosophy of Technology and Media, SCM, City University of Hong Kong.
Conversation between Yuk Hui; Tishan Hsu, and Jacqueline Humphries, participating artists at the 59^th International Art Exhibition; moderated by Matthew Biro, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan.”

May 6 – August 14, 2022: “Breaking Water is a group exhibition bringing together works in installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance that offer a range of approaches to the subject of water, liquidity, and feminism at the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati, Ohio. The exhibition will debut four new commissions by Paul Maheke, Josèfa Ntjam, Claudia Peña Salinas, and a collaborative work by Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant, after which the exhibition is titled, alongside new and existing work by an international group of artists whose work explores themes of fluidity, connectivity, and resistance, and addresses timely concerns including water rights, climate change, and the effects of natural disasters. The exhibition will be accompanied by a parallel film screening program and catalogue that extend the exhibition’s central themes.”

Tuesday May 3rd & Wednesday May 4th, 5:00 – 9:00 PM

Sound artists Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork and Laetitia Sonami set up in residency at Human Resources for their fourth collaboration. For Fingers caught in a field of moss they scale down natural growth events to rhythms of sonic saturation and rarefication.  The synthetic textures created in real time by the artists evoke an organic unfolding of layered scales of time. The ten-channel audio installation incorporates loudspeakers, subwoofers, directional speakers and anechoic sculptures to manipulate the natural resonance of Human Resources architectural acoustics, turning the gallery into an instrument. Both artists would like to acknowledge the pervading influence of Maryane Amacher’s groundbreaking work in their own unique practice.

Cici Wu is amongst the artists exhibiting at a new exhibition at Loong Mah titled Entre Centre Et Absence. She is exhibiting one of her recent new works on paper, titled Accepts Forgetting, As Well As Remembering 01 (2022).

James T. Hong’s Apologies (2016) is presented on e-flux Video & Film as the April 2022 edition of Staff Picks.

“Originally designed as a video installation, Apologies is a compilation of modern political apologies and a timeline of political progress as unrepentant recidivism and contrite repetition. It is a continuing work-in-progress, and this version ends with 2016. Dozens of apologies are collected every year, and they will be added as time permits.

The passage of time does not heal all wounds; it cannot settle all accounts or resolve all disputes. But the identities of the perceived perpetrators can change, and a national apology’s task is to document, to put on record, a symbolic act as a prelude to possible reconciliation and forgiveness. To achieve these ends, one’s sincerity is paramount, especially when reading from a script.”

Watch Hong’s film at the link below.

The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts is an annual event for members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to honor contemporary artists who they believe are making some of today’s most important and timely work. The exhibition opens on March 12 through May 22, 2022.

The Invitational is an exhibition without a theme or a single author, and yet, certain tendencies emerge in this year’s installment. In many cases, the finished works destabilize, even disregard, old disciplinary questions rooted in hierarchy—is it a painting or a sculpture; art or craft? Instead, they opt for plenitude, for and, and, and. Objects in the exhibition extend the art historical archive to include artifacts of incarceration, migration, and climate emergency. They heighten our attention to color and scale. Artists employ a range of techniques: marbling, weaving, glazing, animation, found-object manipulation, collage, dark-room processing, and more, often in “wrong” or unconventional ways. We witness art’s capacity for surprise, and the enduring pleasure of material experimentation.

Artists included in the exhibition:
Candida Alvarez, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Andrea Belag, Ellen Berkenblit, Kerstin Brätsch, Cynthia Daignault, Carl D’Alvia, Thomas Eggerer, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Keltie Ferris, Judy Fox, Joanne Greenbaum, Rachel Harrison, Anna Sew Hoy, Tishan Hsu, Jacqueline Humphries, Suzanne Jackson, Tomashi Jackson, Elisabeth Kley, Pam Lins, Rodney McMillian, Laura Newman, Janice Nowinski, Eileen Quinlan, Matt Saunders, Arlene Shechet, Arthur Simms, Michael Smith, Shinique Smith, Martine Syms, Kennedy Yanko

Josie Thaddeus-Johns’s new feature “Not All Microbes”, Jes Fan’s Systems II is amongst the works cited in the author’s exploration of cellular microbes in contemporary art.

“Covid, initially linked in the press to its origins in Wuhan, China, also sparked a dangerous wave of racism, evident in growing numbers of anti-Asian incidents since March 2020. But even before the pandemic, artists were considering how systems of classification such as race are socially constructed through fear about contamination and difference. Jes Fan makes this literal in his work Systems II (2018), a wood and resin sculpture inspired by the networks of fibers that fungi and plant roots create.”

Xper.Xr is one of the participating artists in “Sounds as Silence: The Academic Value of Life”, Project #4 in the first Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial research exhibition series. The exhibition will be on view until March 20, 2022 and was curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu.

Fostering a new Film Culture through Virtual Presentations: Watch and Chill, a Case Study
Thursday, March 17 | 7:00PM HKT

“With the persisting pandemic and advancing digitisation of cultural activities, artists and curators will discuss how they present and adapt existing works for virtual audiences and produce future projects. How do virtual presentations offer new possibilities for collaboration, inclusivity, and internationalism to foster a new film culture that is true to our time?

In this online conversation, as part of M+ International, moving image artists Shireen Seno, Cici Wu, and Kim Heecheon, and curators Jihoi Lee and Silke Schmickl will share experiences about Watch and Chill, a travelling exhibition co-presented by MMCA in Seoul, MCAD in Manila, MAIIAM in Chiang Mai, and M+ in Hong Kong. Conceived in a hybrid format consisting of an online streaming platform and physical presentations across the four cities, this project emerged from a collective desire to create a platform for the exchange of moving image works.”

Jes Fan and Tishan Hsu have been invited to the 59^th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani. The exhibition dates are April 23 – November 27, 2022.

“The Biennale title, “The Milk of Dreams”, refers to a series of drawings that were later turned into a children’s book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Alemani has said the show will focus on three distinct areas of inquiry: “the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.””

Melanie Pocock, the curator of James T. Hong’s solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery, has written an essay: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, The Philosophical Films of James T. Hong, now live on the Ikon Gallery website.

“The first voice that the viewer hears in De Anima (2021) is the artist’s, Taiwanese-American filmmaker James T. Hong. Reverberating bass and buzzing synth set the tone for a disquieting disclosure: that “it has been twenty years since [Hong] has changed the prescription on his glasses”. Blurry scenes of a subway in Taipei evoke the vision – it’s as if we are seeing the world through his eyes. Hong’s gaze fuses with that of the camera, and we are drawn into a state of empathy with the artist. Yet there is also an irony to this opening statement. Why would Hong, a filmmaker for whom clarity of vision would seem a vital tool, neglect his optical health for twenty years? The logical question further clouds our perspective. Should we trust the artist? Especially one who can barely see?”

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s first solo exhibition at François Ghebaly, Solutions to Common Noise Problems, will open at its New York location on January 29, 2022. The exhibition will feature a continuation of her Sound Blanket series featuring hand-felted wool sculptures.

Cici Wu was recently interviewed in the January-February 2022 issue of ArtAsiaPacific (The Almanac) by H.G. Masters.

“I’m more aware that the contemporary art world may not be the only world to share my work. In terms of production, I want to work more slowly. I still have a lot of feelings and thoughts that need to be processed first. I realized the goal for me in making art is primarily to become free—and to constantly think about what freedom means, for myself.”

A Través at James Cohan Gallery is on view from January 14 through February 19, 2022, at 52 Walker Street.

Participating artists include Simon Evans ™, Ellen Gallagher, Yun-Fei Ji, Jes Fan, Teresa Margolles, Wardell Milan, Jesse Mockrin, Wangechi Mutu, Brandon Ndife, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Kathleen Ryan, Shinichi Sawada, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Bill Viola, and Jesse Wine.

Collectively and individually, we pass through thresholds, periods of transitions, and states of indeterminacy in life. In the middle stage between birth and death, there is a “cloud of unknowing,” the Romantic idea of a psychic space with no boundaries; at once freeing and equally anxiety-provoking. If ever there was a time when ambiguity and disorientation are shared sensations, it is now. This exhibition is a meditation on this transitory state. Through performance, sculpture, painting, photography, and film, the artists presented offer glimpses into these subconscious states as they play out in figuration.

Screening and Talk: Philosophy in the films of James T. Hong
Saturday 22 January 2022 / 4.30pm — 6.00pm

4.30pm – Watch James T. Hong’s films The Duck of Nature/The Duck of God and De Anima
5-6pm – Talk by Dr Steven Gambardella

This event takes place at Ikon Gallery and will also be live streamed via YouTube. To watch online please subscribe to Ikon Gallery’s YouTube channel. Booking essential (limited capacity).

James T. Hong screening and live music
Thursday 3 February 2022 / 6.30pm — 8.30pm

Live music by Cristiana Ilie, Chromatouch, Steckdose, RBMK and Taibach

With an in-person audience of up to 30 people, and unlimited numbers for online streaming (which is free to access).

Ysabelle Cheung reviews Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork | Olistostrome in the January 2022 issue of Artforum. “Twenty-four hypersensitive condenser and contact microphones, twelve strategically placed speakers, one Mac mini, six needle-felted wool sculptures, a carpet of weathered pebbles, and two fuzzy outsize sound blankets. At Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s recent solo exhibition “Olistostrome,” the stage was set. The only missing element? Its protagonist: the viewer.”

Jes Fan’s Diagram XI and Diagram XII from 2020 are now part of the Kadist Art Foundation collection, San Francisco. “The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves.”

Founder of Sunpride Foundation and pioneering collector Patrick Sun was recently profiled in Artsy Magazine regarding his collection of LGBTQIA+ artists.

“I have participated in Para Site’s benefit auctions through Artsy and successfully acquired a few works. Among them is Brooklyn-based artist Jes Fan Jes Fan’s 2020 video installation Dr. Pimple Popper. Jes is a wonderful artist. Their work often deals with the notion of the body and questions the concept of otherness by exploring materials with biological and social connotations. I went to see Jes’s solo exhibition at Empty Gallery in 2018 and acquired a large-scale work from the exhibition, and have been following the artist’s development ever since. When I saw Jes’s work appearing in Para Site’s auction catalogue, I immediately decided to go for it.”

What happens when technology extends life beyond its biological limits? How can we complicate traditional and normative ideas of identity? And what happens when artists interrogate bodies—their own, those of others, and those they imagine—to envision new forms of living?

Join The New Museum on December 16, 1PM EST for a panel discussion in conjunction with their 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” featuring participating artists Kate Cooper, Jes Fan, and Jeneen Frei Njootli, and moderated by Jeanette Bisschops, Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum.

Jahresgaben 2021 will be on view from December 9 – 23, 2021 at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn.

“The group exhibition Sex Ecologies explores gender, sex, and sexuality in the context of ecology. The exhibition is founded in the belief that environmental and social justice go hand in hand. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the exhibition critiques understandings of nature, gender, sexuality, and race that attempt to objectify and naturalize them. For example, “laws against nature” used to criminalize queer sexuality, and in many places still do. These norms are justified through evolutionary narratives exclusively permitting heterosexual reproduction. Everything that does not fit this norm is considered unhealthy, polluted, or “degenerate.” These norms have proven detrimental to humans and to the thing we call nature alike.”

Artists: Margrethe Pettersen, Alberta Whittle, Anna Tje,Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Ibrahim Fazlic, Jes Fan, Jessie Kleemann, Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born, Pedro Neves Marques

Cassie Packard has written about Hsu’s first solo exhibition with Miguel Abreu Gallery, skin-screen-grass, for the ArtSeen section of The Brooklyn Rail.

Tishan Hsu has been exploring the messy entanglement of bodies and technology for over three decades. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video, his work is characterized by a slippery lexicon of biological and technological motifs—lingering on the touch in touchscreen and the face in interface—that probes the more visceral, affective, and lived aspects of our relationships to machines. A strong complement to Liquid Circuit, the artist’s first American institutional show staged at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and SculptureCenter in New York, Hsu’s first solo show at Miguel Abreu Gallery features 13 pieces made between 2019 and 2021, a pandemic period when, for many, physical isolation brought new manic intensity to our enmeshment with our devices.

James T. Hong’s first solo exhibition in Europe, at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, UK) opens tonight on December 3rd. The exhibition will be on view through February 13, 2022.

“This exhibition presents two films by Hong which feature animals. The Duck of Nature/The Duck of God (2010) was originally made as an educational video for Dutch schoolchildren, and imagines the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza as a mechanical duck, who is snubbed by other birds on the canals of Amsterdam. The scenario reflects Spinoza’s own experience, who was excommunicated by the Jewish community for his humanist beliefs.

The second film, De Anima (2021), is a two-channel video installation. The first channel, filmed in Taiwan, presents three points of view: the artist’s, that of the “enemy” virus (Covid-19), and a dog’s. The second channel, shot in India at the historical location where the Buddha gained enlightenment, reinterprets the first channel and represents the artist’s search for insight during the pandemic. In both elements, animals provide this insight with witty observations about human behaviour.”

Vivian Chui in Ocula: “Rather than forcing artists into rooms organised by subthemes, works correspond to one another in a free-flowing exchange that runs through the show.

Jes Fan’s glass sculptures Networks (for Rupture) and Networks (for Expansion) (both 2021), containing a strain of black mould known for its asexual reproduction, are placed besides Iris Touliatou’s Untitled (Still Not Over You) (2021), an abstract installation of flickering, near obsolete fluorescent light tubes collected from defunct offices in Greece.

Although addressing unrelated themes—respectively, sexual identity and the temporality of human infrastructures—the pairing appears materially harmonious, united visually by the shared use of tubular materials.

One of the show’s greatest strengths is the notable subtlety of works on display: a refreshing respite at a time when so many artists have embraced brash, overt political agendas within their practices.”

Premiering at the CAC in Spring 2022, Breaking Water features contributions from Carolina Caycedo, Jes Fan, Paul Maheke, Carmen Winant and more, alongside a parallel film program. In May 2022, the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati will premiere BREAKING WATER, a group exhibition bringing together works in installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance that offer a range of approaches to the subject of water, liquidity, and feminism. The exhibition will debut four new commissions by PAUL MAHEKE, JOSÈFA NTJAM, CLAUDIA PEÑA SALINAS, and a collaborative work by CALISTA LYON and CARMEN WINANT alongside new and existing work by an international group of artists whose work explores themes of fluidity, connectivity, and resistance, and addresses timely concerns including water rights, climate change, and the effects of natural disasters. Co-curated by CAC Senior Curator Amara Antilla and independent curator and writer Clelia Coussonnet, Breaking Water will be on view at the CAC from May 6 through August 15, 2022. The exhibition will be accompanied by a parallel film screening program that extends the exhibition’s central themes.

“CHART is honored to present 8 Americans, an exhibition of eight multi-generational Asian American artists, whose work, across various mediums, comments on notions of shared identity and histories. While the number 8 has a significance in Asian culture as a sign of auspiciousnes, the impetus for choosing that specific number for the exhibition became more urgent following the tragic shooting in Atlanta earlier this year. The 8 here is meant to honor the eight victims of that tragedy in March.” The exhibition will be on view through January 22, 2022.

Curator: Clara Ha
Artists: Hyegyeong Choi, Tishan Hsu, Byron Kim, Antonia Kuo, Timothy Lai, Jennie Jieun Lee, Kang Seung Lee, Jean Shin

Opening today at Centre Pompidou-Metz in Paris: Toi et moi, on ne vit pas sur la même planète, a curated selection of works from the 2020 Taipei Biennial. Eighteen of James T. Hong’s storyboard series, “The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend”, are included in the exhibition.

The biennial, with the theme “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet” was co-curated by French philosopher Bruno Latour and Paris-based independent curator Martin Guinard.

James T. Hong’s on-going series of storyboards centre on a speculative science-fiction film in which forces from China, the USA, and other nations engage in military conflict on the island of Taiwan. Hong’s choice of watercolor as a medium evokes histories tying together plein-air romanticism and the rise of militarism; the cult of sentiment and the cult of the dictator. Painted in collaboration with Yin-Ju Chen, these works often evoke a disarming sense of calm amidst depictions of total warfare.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork was recently featured in The Here and There Collective’s Instagram Live series. The Here and There Collective, founded by Steven Abrahram & Lisa Young, are an organization committed to connecting and uplifting contemporary artists, curators, and collectors from the AAPI/Asian diaspora.

View the Instagram Live below, with a walkthrough of Kiyomi Gork’s exhibition Olistostrome at Empty Gallery, with the artist’s commentary and context around the works.

“Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial, brings together works across mediums by forty artists internationally, including Jes Fan. It recognizes artists reimagining traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established institutional paradigms. Their works exalt states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures, porous and unstable surfaces, and the fluid and adaptable potential of both technological and organic media. The Triennial will be on view from 27 October, 2021 to 23 January, 2022.

Curators: Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at The New Museum, and Jamillah James.

Tishan Hsu’s first solo exhibition with Miguel Abreu Gallery, skin-screen-grass, opens October 21st, on view until December 23. The exhibition is held at the gallery’s 88 Eldridge Street location.

“Over the last three years, with increasing focus and intensity, Tishan Hsu’s art has taken a turn towards exploring the vast possibilities of image production today, and how to introduce this all pervasive force into his work. With the steady development of ever more sophisticated image processing software, and quasi limitless access to photographic sources and electronic imagery afforded by new high resolution databases, Hsu’s palette has expanded exponentially to include a set of tools particularly well suited to engage with the concerns underlying his work since the beginning: How does the screen world affect cognition and our relation to our bodies? How can art channel omnipresent technological effects and reveal their immanent affective content? In other words, what kind of artistic forms might truthfully render this increasingly potent and palpable state of biomorphic affairs?”

“After a long summer of being closed for maintenance, Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum reopens with a new exhibition, The Principle of Hope. It is an exhibition that contemplates, envisions, summons and claims the “future.” By presenting the practices of Chinese and international artists and cultural practitioners, we demonstrate the future as a space full of potential, beckoning for the subjective individual, to confront the present with the courage and enthusiasm of a future-oriented outlook.”

Participating artists: Francis Alÿs, Aram Bartholl & Nadja Buttendorf, Erick Beltrán, Chen Chen Yu, Chen Juanying, Karel Čapek, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana, Datong Dazhang, Péter Dobai, Fang Tianyu, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Norma Jeane, Pauline Julier & Nicolas Chapoulier, Pope. L, Lei Lei, Li Jiaqi, Feng Kehui, Mak Ying Tung 2, Pedro Neves Marques, Meng Jinghui, Nabuqi, Phil Patiris, Gabriel Tejedor, Xingfu Peifang, Wang Xiyan, Xper.Xr, The Yes Men, Liam Young, Goang-Ming Yuan, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Zhong Ming

Artistic directors: Carol Yinghua Lu, Luo Xiaoming

Curatorial team: Huang Wenlong, Liang Chouwa, Yin Shuai, Jerome Zhang, Scarly Zhou, Zhu Siyu

Empty Gallery is pleased to open a dual-presentation of sculptor Jes Fan and painter Henry Shum at the Focus section of Frieze London, booth H10, from October 13 through October 17.

Fan’s ongoing Diagrams sculpture series features partial body-molded pieces of aqua resin covered in patches of color alluding to medical depictions of the epidermis, overlaid with hand-blown glass globules. These works continue Fan’s inquiry into what forms belie the body part that determines the majority of differences in human skin colors, and suggests that living beings are not bound entirely by the form of the skin.

Shum presents new oil paintings created in his home/studio in Tai Po. Building on his exploration of allegory, symbolism and spirituality in his recent exhibition Vortices, Shum extends his unique approach of wielding oil paint in an ink-like fashion, rendering elements from spiritual and mythological imagery in translucent, dripping layers. Shum’s material experimentation and dynamic approach to a familiar medium results in surreal, large-scale compositions at once dream-like and restrained.

The works of Shum and Fan involve the iterative layering of materials to dissolve unquestioned binaries, whether it be the collapsing of interior and exterior spaces in Shum’s paintings or the questioning of race and gender in Fan’s pieces. 

In conjunction with our Frieze London booth (H10) presenting Henry Shum and Jes Fan, Jes Fan will be in conversation with artist Rindon Johnson, moderated by professor and translator Ari Larissa Heinrich, at Frieze Talks curated by Jeppe Ugelvig. Professor Heinrich is currently working on Decolonial Melanin: Jes Fan’s Contagious Xenophoria (A Glossary).
This online discussion will take place on Saturday 16 October, 13:00 British Standard Time / 8:00am Eastern Standard Time/ 8:00pm Hong Kong Time.

This event is accessible to Frieze members and guests of the fair. Click the link below for more information.

Setting the Stage: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork by Lumi Tan appears in the Tidbits section of Mousse Magazine #77, out now.

“For artists who center sound within their practice, sharing sonic space and attention within institutional environments is a familiar struggle: how to create a focused audience without merely encasing them in soundproof walls or imposing isolating headphones upon them. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has attuned her sound work to be fully integrated within group exhibitions, art fairs, and outdoor settings. Pointedly, they consider themself a listener, not a composer—in a sense, aligned with the individual visitor and the collective audience rather than with the maker.”

Tishan Hsu’s new wall installation and accompanying QR-linked video piece, “Grass-Screen-Skin: Bolzano” is now on view at  Museion, Bolzano, Italy, as part of TECHNO. The exhibition is on view until 16 March, 2022.

Articulated through three themes— Freedom, Compression and Exhaustion — the exhibition TECHNO puts the techno experience center stage, adopting it as a lens through which to capture a contemporary human condition and social order. Museion invites an international group of artists, thinkers and producers to explore how cultural phenomena related to techno have become interlaced with the ways we experience our identities today.

Artists: Riccardo Benassi, Paul Chan, Nicolò Degiorgis, Karin Ferrari, Massimo Grimaldi, CC Hennix, Tishan Hsu, Mire Lee, Ghislaine Leung, Isabel Lewis, Piero Martinello in Zusammenarbeit mit/in collaborazione con/in collaboration with Franco Ruaro, Sandra Mujinga, Nkisi aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Emeka Ogboh, Yuri Pattison, Daniel Pflumm, James Richards und/e/and Steve Reinke, James Richards, Jacolby Satterwhite, Leander Schwazer, Sung Tieu, Jan Vorisek among many others.

TECHNO is curated by Bart van der Heide, Director of Museion, in collaboration with an international research team including Francesco Tenaglia, art critic and curator, Florian Fischer, stage director and author and Frida Carazzato, curatorial assistant at Museion.

In Issue 125 Sep/Oct of ArtAsiaPacific, Editor at large HG Masters profiled Xper.Xr after his exhibition Tailwhip at Empty Gallery. “Though the show featured an abundance of archival materials—cases of magazine clippings, album covers, old correspondence, articles and zines that Chris published, musical scores, and various noise-making props including a megaphone and angle grinder—it can still be difficult to comprehend that Xper.Xr’s multipronged creative life really happened, and with such intensity.”

CAMP FIRES is a polymorphous project that centers around the exhibition of some twenty video works by international artists, dancers, singers, performers, and activists exploring the body as a performative interface to resist the normative gaze over dissident bodies—that which is queer in the broadest sense of the word. The project defends the idea that identity is not a definitive state but a continuous negotiation between the ontological self and the rest of the world, a form of constantly becoming rather than being. The exhibition opens on 2 September and runs until 23 October at Last Tango.

Artists: Fatima Al Qadiri & Khalid Al Gharaballi, James Bantone, Básica TV, Lukas Beyeler, Emilio Bianchic, Lex Brown, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Tianzhuo Chen, Jes Fan, House of Ladosha, Ivy Monteiro, Javier Ocampo, Tyler Matthew Oyer, Signe Pierce & Alli Coates, Bhenji Ra & Justin Shoulder, Florencia Rodríguez Giles, Jacolby Satterwhite, SOPHIE and more

Curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla
Hosted and co-produced by Last Tango
Co-hosted by Tanzhaus Zürich and Shedhalle

The 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, One Escape at a Time, is slated to open from September 8 to November 21, 2021 at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and other locations across the city.

One Escape at a Time will present works and projects—many of them new productions—by 41 Korean and international participants: Bani Abidi, Monira Al Qadiri, Amature Amplifier, Richard Bell, Johanna Billing, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Chang Yun-Han, Chihoi, Minerva Cuevas, Brice Dellsperger, DIS, Hao Jingban, Hapjungjigu, Sharon Hayes, Jinhwon Hong, Hsu Che-Yu, Geumhyung Jeong, Eisa Jocson, Kang Sang-woo, Kim Min, Sarah Lai, Oliver Laric, Li Liao, Life of a Craphead (Amy Lam and Jon McCurley), Lim Giong, Liu Chuang, Mackerel Safranski, Tala Madani, Henrike Naumann, ONEROOM, Yuri Pattison, Paul Pfeiffer, Hansol Ryu, Pilvi Takala, TASTEHOUSE × WORKS, Wang Haiyang, Ming Wong, Cici Wu, Chikako Yamashiro, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, and Tobias Zielony.

One Escape at a Time builds on ideas of escapism in relation to currents in today’s popular media—especially the US sitcom One Day at a Time (2017–). First produced and made available for streaming worldwide by Netflix, One Day at a Time is a contemporary update of the 1970s sitcom of the same name. It charts the life of a three-generation Cuban American family sharing the same roof in Los Angeles. Despite its seemingly conventional format, the sitcom flips the norms of media representation and disguises its central concerns with laughter while tackling some of the most urgent and human questions today: racism, gender, class, sexuality, identity, migration, gentrification, and violence, among others.

For Spike Art Magazine, contributing editor Jaime Chu and art researcher Michelle Wong teamed up to explore Tailwhip, Empty Gallery’s exhibition of pioneering Hong Kong noise musician, Xper.Xr. “NOISE IN THE DARK: A CONVERSATION ON XPER.XR: Active in Hong Kong’s underground for three decades, Xper.Xr defies description. Fanzines, experimental sounds, and hammers all come together under one roof for the multifaceted (and more than occasionally dangerous) artist’s first retrospective.”

The Art + Technology Lab at LACMA has announced its 2021 grant recipients.

Emphasizing iteration and risk-taking over the completion of a finished work, the Lab continues to support artist projects that engage emerging technology. Selection criteria includes artistic merit, opportunities for public engagement, and the suggested forms of data, methods, and/or models that might be of interest to other artists. LACMA issued the 2021 Request for Proposals in December of 2020 and received over 900 submissions.

Among the four winning projects: Jaqueline Kiyomi Gork and Rhett LaRue will develop a multiplayer game space that uses sound as its main modality for navigation and interaction. Giving consideration to empathy and intimacy, they will disrupt the traditional structure of gaming experiences, developing an experience based on collaboration and listening. Gork and LaRue’s project is called Inhabit360.

We are pleased to announce that two recent sculptures by Jes Fan, Diagram IX (2021) and Diagram X (2021), have joined the Collection of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Empty Gallery would like to thank the team at MHCAM who made this possible. A work from Fan’s ongoing Diagram series exploring the epidermis, Diagram X (2021) features two undulating forms of aqua resin fused in three points, above which a glass globule is situated in a custom-molded form. The organic geometry and fluctuating joinery of this piece evoke the permeable, semi-transparent layers of skin covering human bodies. In his deliberate openings and closings of skin-like waves, Fan questions where a body begins and ends.

The group exhibition Zeros and Ones investigates the ways artists operate within their surrounding institutional structures. Taking the algorithmic paradigm in scripting, scoring, instruction, or command, the works selected systematically complicate these procedures through lived experience. Tools and tasks are mobilized without measurable outcome while always returning to the material conditions of their labor. Through subtle redistributions, infrastructure and the body are both intimately as well as violently situated towards each other.  The practices of artists such as Lutz Bacher, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Hanne Darboven, Jana Euler, Jef Geys, Tishan Hsu, Ilmari Kalkkinen, Silvia Kolbowski, Pope L., Louise Lawler, Carolyn Lazard, Lee Lozano, Henrik Olesen, Sarah Rapson, Margaret Raspé, readymades belong to everyone®, Ketty La Rocca, Sturtevant, Otto Wagner, and Martin Wong, prompt us to question the metrics and hierarchies that are being reproduced in the field of art and beyond. The exhibition will be on view until 19 September, 2021.

Curators: Kathrin Bentele, Anna Gritz, Ghislaine Leung

Opening on Friday, June 25 in New York: Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness) is a prelude on the dissolution of light. For her second solo exhibition at 47 Canal, Cici Wu begins an embarkation on the imagining and reconstruction of a proto-cinema. The works installed in this exhibition––paper lantern sculptures, drawings, and projection––embody trajectories made between an undetermined past and an unforeseeable future. The exhibition duration is June 25 through July 30, 2021.

ALIEN NATION, a group exhibition curated by Kenta Murakami opens at von ammon co (Washington DC) on Sunday, June 20th and runs until August 1, 2021. The exhibition’s artists include: Gretchen Bender, Colette, Catharine Czudej, Tishan Hsu, Helmut Lang, Peter Nagy, Kayode Ojo, Pope.L, Puppies Puppies (jade kuriki olivo),Julia Scher, SoiL Thornton and WangShui.

In collaboration with the film and video platform Normal Screen (Tokyo) led by Sho Akita, Taro Masushio will have a virtual-showcase of his recent Empty Gallery exhibition Rumor Has It online. This online presentation will include film programming (June 14—21) as well as on June 18th (10PM Japan Standard Time) a conversation between Masushio and graphic designer-publisher Yo Katami of loneliness books. The program will be conducted in Japanese.

Now on view at Miguel Abreu Gallery’s 88 Eldridge Street and 36 Orchard Street locations until July 24, 2021:

In a world increasingly described and experienced as regulated by immaterial forces – the digital revolution – there exists a discrete counter force, one fueled by what can be referred to as a renewed materiality. A tripartite condition of opportunity for artists has been in place for some time, but now might be the moment for an exhibition to focus on how 1. new materials, 2. advanced software, and 3. innovative fabrication techniques constitute a rare point in history in which, taken together, the availability of radical new tools offers the ‘Poet-Engineers’ working today a compelling invitation to explore unknown content and invent new forms.

Participating artists: Yuji Agematsu, American Artist, Nairy Baghramian, Dexter Sinister, Trisha Donnelly, Isa Genzken, Tishan Hsu, Pierre Huyghe, Flint Jamison, Jonathan Lasker, Sam Lewitt, Scott Lyall, Helen Marten, K.R.M. Mooney, Jean-Luc Moulène, Florian Pumhösl, R. H. Quaytman, Wacław Szpakowski, Cheyney Thompson.

We are thrilled to share that Tishan Hsu’s Outer Banks of Memory has joined the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. We would like to express our gratitude to everyone involved who made this possible. It is significant that Hsu, a Chinese-American artist, is taking a place in the art historical canon during this pivotal moment when Asian-Americans are re-asserting their presence in American culture.

“Outer Banks of Memory (1984) is one of the prescient works [Tishan Hsu] created to address screen-based interaction and was just acquired by the Whitney. The large-scale painting-sculpture hybrid depicts illusionistic, organic folds and wrinkles in addition to orifices that resemble technological input/outputs. It brings together the artifice of the screen and its self-reflexivity with the contortions of the human body—the body that responds to and integrates with the technology it has created.”

Now on view until June 27, 2021: Jes Fan presents three new works at The Lewis’s Building titled Network (For Staying Low to the Ground) (2021), Network (For Survival) (2021) and Network (For Dispersal) (2021), as part of his series Networks (2020-ongoing). The sprawling new work takes the form of an entangled network of borosilicate tubing, punctuated with biomorphic forms. The sculpture also acts as an incubator for black mould, which reflects on Fan’s sustained interest in racialised fear of contamination, as well as his engagement with interspecies kinship – as allegorized by the fungal mycelium. It describes a way of learning to care for what is not human.

Supported by Empty Gallery, Canada Council for the Arts, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London, and The High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom.

Para Site and Rockbund Art Museum are thrilled to continue their fruitful collaboration with the new exhibition, Curtain,
opening on 14 May 2021 at Para Site’s home and on 15 May 2021 at the institution’s temporary venue in Hong Kong’s
Sheung Wan. Curtain is a continuation of the unique dialogue and partnership between the two institutions, which began in 2019 with An Opera for Animals that premiered at Para Site, with a jointly curated edition travelling to Rockbund Art
Museum subsequently.

Artists: Chantal Akerman, Xyza Cruz Bacani, Leigh Bowery, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cao Guimarães, Ho Sin Tung, Hu Yinping, Hu Yun, Derek Jarman, Shuang Li, Minouk Lim, Gustav Metzger, Ocean & Wavz, Jacolby Satterwhite, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Tan Jing, Robel Temesgen, Jason Wee, Cici Wu, Wu Jiaru, Stella Zhang, Jasphy Zheng, and Zhou Tao

Curators: Cosmin Costinas, Larys Frogier, Celia Ho, Anqi Li, Billy Tang, and Xu Tiantian
Collaborators: Biljana Ciric and Mathieu Copeland

James T. Hong was awarded the Grand Prize in the Taiwan Competition of the 2021 Taiwan International Documentary Festival for Opening Closing Forgetting (2018). This film is a visual record of long-lasting open wounds and the disappearance of collective memory. Hong examines the current plight of a group of elderly Chinese peasants, who, as civilians, have been made victims of the Imperial Japanese Army’s lethal human experimentation in Northeast China, suffering from festering wounds for over 70 years. Hong also visits some surviving soldiers of Unit 731——Japan’s notorious regiment devoted to biological warfare during World War II.

In the competition judge Dimitris Kerkinos’ words: “[Opening Closing Forgetting is] a powerful, courageous and well-researched film which brings to light an unknown historical trauma that seventy years later hasn’t healed yet. A topic with universal resonance, a visual record of the horror of biological experimentation and warfare on humans, that comments, at the same time, on the disappearance of memory and the denial of assuming responsibility.”

The Liverpool Biennial plans to launch its Second Chapter on 19th May, 2021. “Liverpool Biennial 2021 opens the second ‘inside’ chapter of exhibitions across the city on 19 May, bringing together the complete presentation of the 11^th edition, The Stomach and the Port. In line with Government guidance, this final chapter will open the doors to the city, welcoming visitors from across the country to safely enjoy the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary art.”

Jes Fan presents three new works at The Lewis’s Building titled Network (For Staying Low to the Ground) (2021), Network (For Survival) (2021) and Network (For Dispersal) (2021), as part of his series Networks (2020-ongoing). The sprawling new work takes the form of an entangled network of borosilicate tubing, punctuated with biomorphic forms. The sculpture also acts as an incubator for black mould, which reflects on Fan’s sustained interest in racialised fear of contamination, as well as his engagement with interspecies kinship – as allegorized by the fungal mycelium. It describes a way of learning to care for what is not human.

Supported by Empty Gallery, Canada Council for the Arts, Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, London, and The High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom.

Pavel S. Pyś explores Jes Fan’s work in the Futurity issue (#36) of CURA magazine:

“In 1986, performance artist Stelarc wrote: “skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality […] technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.” While Stelarc posited on the cybernetic—hybridizing the bodily with the robotic—his assessment shares common ground with the work of New York-based artist Jes Fan, whose works often begin with a contemplation of skin. Drawing on laboratory processes of distillation, ex- traction, and injection, Fan turns our attention to the skin as a coded boundary that conceals a vast unseen molecular world inextricably linked to our assumptions of identity, race, and gender.

The fifth iteration of the Hammer’s acclaimed biennial opens on April 17, bridging east and west with complementary presentations at the Hammer and The Huntington. Free, advance reservations are required. Capacity is limited. Reservations are made available on a first come, first served basis every other Tuesday. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s installation the input of this machine is the power an output contains (2020) will be on view at The Hammer Museum. Register for admission at the link below.

On the occasion of Hello America at Karma International, curator Gianni Jetzer will talk to artist Tishan Hsu on Karma International’s Instagram Live on April 6, 12PM EST. View a recording of the discussion at the link below. The exhibition is on view until May 8, 2021.

We are pleased to share that two new works by Henry Shum, Sol and Memory Fallacy, are on view in Fifteen Painters at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s 22 Cortlandt Alley location from April 2 – May 8. Occupying both floors of the gallery, the exhibition brings together fifteen artists born after 1980, who each take distinct and diverse approaches to the medium of painting. From those that use painting for its immediacy to those who utilize it for project-based investigations, the exhibition does not aim to identify a specific theme or trend. Instead, it demonstrates the continued mutability of painting as a practice, and its malleable nature that extends beyond its physical application. The exhibition features works by Han Bing, Gabriella Boyd, Guglielmo Castelli, Bendt Eyckermans, Daisuke Fukunaga, Lewis Hammond, Behrang Karimi, Dominique Knowles, Dana Lok, Megan Marrin, Leslie Martinez, Matt Morris, Sophie Reinhold, Henry Shum, Kate Spencer Stewart.

The 13th Gwangju Biennale opens today (April 1), and will run through May 9, 2021.

Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning sets out to examine the spectrum of the extended mind through artistic and theoretical means. Directed by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, the 13th Gwangju Biennale (1 April–9 May, 2021) will feature a dynamic program encompassing an exhibition, a performance program, an online publishing platform and publications, and a series of public forums bringing together artists, theoretical scientists, and systems thinkers. The Biennale argues for the primacy of plurality, positing that points of origin and influence ought to be accessed not only through the dominant technological systems and machinic vocabularies traceable to the West but also relate to heterodox ancestries.

Tishan Hsu is one of the 70+ artists featured in the exhibition. Outside the installation in Gwangju, visitors can also support the exhibition with their robust online programming.

Opening today Karma International in Zurich— Hello America, a group exhibition featuring Jennifer Bolande, Jessica Diamond, Tishan Hsu. Curated by Gianni Jetzer, it will be on view through 8 May 2021.

Thinking Through the “Malleable Body”: Tuesday, March 23, 6:30–8:00 PM EDT

Who are we? What are we? Are we always the same? Why? How not? Humans can change how we appear in the world, both physically and virtually. We are malleable. Tishan Tsu and Jes Fan, artists included in The Body Electric, discuss their approaches to the challenge of our “malleable body” in their creative practice and work. Organized by the Miami Dade College of Art and Design. Click below to watch the recording of the event.

Jes Fan will be presenting at the University of California Los Angeles as part of their Visiting Artist Lecture Series on March 19, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time. Please click the link below to register for the online event.

On March 6, 2021 Empty Gallery is pleased to present an online dialogue between professor Taro Nettleton (Temple University Japan) and artist Taro Masushio. Masushio and Nettleton will explore the constructed nature of photography, Japanese aesthetics, the relation of seeing and knowing, and the politics of vision.

View the recording here.

For the inaugural South South OVR, Empty Gallery presents a solo presentation of the early films of Yokahama-based artist Rei Hayama. Hayama’s films expand our field of vision to include alternative ways of living and seeing, especially in relation to non-human species. This online presentation explores the thematic and formal concerns underpinning her practice over the past decade: humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the instability and mutability of vision, and the influence of early and structuralist-materialist cinema. Spanning 2009 through 2015, these are the visions of a filmmaker solidifying her commitment to “a humble cinema’” that articulates a non-human gaze to uncover the strangeness of being human.

Jes Fan will be speaking about their work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison next week as part of their Visiting Artist Colloquium. Wednesday, February 24 at 5 – 6:15pm CST. The event is free and open to the public. It can be accessed online at Blackboard: bit.ly/uw-art-talk

A Conversation with Jes Fan, Jota Mombaça, Iki Yos Piña Narváez, and Tuesday Smillie is now live on the Guggenheim blog

For this four-part series, X Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator, invited four artists—Jes Fan, Jota Mombaça, Iki Yos Piña Narváez, and Tuesday Smillie—to participate in a discussion about decoloniality, transfeminism, and what is at stake when discourses about transgender personhood center on white, Western, or cisgender feminist and queer perspectives

In print and online with the February 2021 issue of The Brooklyn Rail: Tishan Hsu speaks with art historian and critic Martha Scwhendener about his painting and sculpture practice, the relationship of the screen to the body, and Vilém Flusser’s prescient theories of photography. This conversation was held on the occasion of Hsu’s survey exhibition at SculptureCenter, Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit (September 25, 2020 – January 25, 2021), which was curated by Sohrab Mohebbi. It was originally recorded as a New Social Environment and has been edited for clarity, concision, and readerly pleasure.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork was recently in conversation with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, The Hammer Museum’s assistant curator of performance, about her installation at the Made in L.A. Biennial. Click here to view the talk from January 14th. Additionally, she also spoke on Episode 21 of the Contemporary Art Review LA Carla podcast with Aria Dean and Harmony Holiday, the recording of which can be found here.

Nick Yu writes in Ocula: At the entrance to Rumor Has It, Taro Masushio’s current exhibition at Hong Kong’s black-box Empty Gallery, a giant, meekly illuminated pumice stone is supported by a steel structure—a sparse signifier of a subterranean cave. The atmosphere is mysterious, mythological, almost transgressive; not so much a Dionysian cruising club or a lascivious sauna than a mise-en-scène constructed with restraint.

Single rows of framed black-and-white silver gelatin photographs line black walls: still-life captures that include a camera stand, flowers, soap, and erotic hand-drawn sketches.

Long in gestation, Taibach’s first recordings were recently released as an LP on Empty Editions, a record label that I run together with my colleagues from Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. Composed of two Asian Americans who wish to remain anonymous, Taibach’s deliberate engagement with the ideological minefield which is US-Taiwan-China relations feels necessary during a moment defined by rising ethno-nationalism and the flattening of complex political narratives. With a nom de guerre that references both the infamous Slovenian proto-industrial group Laibach and their mythologized homeland of Taiwan, Taibach restages the classic thematics and aesthetic strategies of industrial music for a contemporary moment in which shifting balances of power between East and West herald new hegemonies and exhume old grievances. I spoke with the members of Taibach over email, iMessage, and WhatsApp about music, politics, and Asian American identity.

Andrew Russeth on Taro Masushio’s newly opened Rumor Has It: One recent morning in Hong Kong, while in the last hours of his quarantine, the New York–based artist Taro Masushio recounted a visit he made to a vast, little-seen archive of homoerotic photographs by Jun’ichi En’ya, who had worked as a photo-technician in Osaka, Japan. “I had just never seen anything like it,” Masushio said on a video call, as he recalled flipping through hundreds and hundreds of En’ya’s analog prints. “It was this very surreal and visceral experience.”

Xper.Xr is a legendary, if poorly documented figure in Hong Kong’s experimental music scene. He first became active in the late ’80s “after a steep learning curve and gobbling up every piece of musical rebellion [he] could get [his] hands onto,” and put out his debut cassette Murmur in 1989. For the majority of his recording career he lived abroad—mostly in the UK and France—but he returned to Hong Kong in 2013 to open the short-lived underground venue CIA, his “payback to the HK arts and music scene.” CIA put on gigs that would be hard to imagine happening elsewhere in the region, like an Aktion for Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, and a rare Asia booking for Slovenian industrial band Laibach.

(Dis)Embodying the biomolecular sex: The lapse of identity in Jes Fan’s hormone works (2017-2018) by Sophie X. Guo now on the Courtauld Gender and Sexuality Group blog:

To borrow the terms of the American feminist Donna J. Haraway, the twenty-first-century body is a technoliving system, the result of an irreversible implosion of modern binaries (female/male, animal/ human, nature/culture).

— Paul. B. Preciado, 2013^[1]

The contemporary condition of the body as a ‘technoliving system’ is meticulously mapped onto Jes Fan’s precarious sculptures, through which the artist wishes to challenge binary conceptions of gender, race, and identity. In their 2018 sculptural series titled Systems, Fan isolates testosterone, estrogen and melanin from the human body and lets them float freely in their hand-blown glass globules. Rendered in biomorphic shapes recalling human organs and drops of body fluids, the limpid glass objects slothfully hang on a piping system which the artist called ‘lattice’, as if in the process of leaking, or seeping out (Fig. 1). Not dissimilar to lattice normally used as a support for climbing plants, the vine-like pipeline used in Fan’s works is, for them, a ‘living shelf’— or at least, a semi-living one, for the sex hormones and melanin contained in the glass vessels are perpetually in flux.

Online event with SculptureCenter: Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 11am–12:30pm. Tishan Hsu’s work appears prescient and influential for younger artists working today, which we can now understand (at least partially) as a product of his idiosyncratic and forward-reaching relationship to the aesthetics, media, and theory of the 1980s.

Referencing the work of scholar Elaine Scarry, Tishan Hsu has remarked that while the critical theory of the 1980s interrogated the subject and saw its autonomy emptied out, pain remained the nagging anchor that kept it from dissipating into thin air. In other words, it was pain that kept the genie in the bottle of embodiment. In Hsu’s work, the body in pain, administered through the institutions of modern life (the office, the hospital, the prison, the factory), manifests itself as fragmented, sundered, and wounded.

Stephanie Bailey writes in Ocula, “Showing in partnership with Fine Art Asia at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre between 27 and 30 November 2020, Hong Kong Spotlight is Art Basel‘s first physical presentation in 2020. Ocula Magazine highlights six artists on view among the curated booths of 22 participating galleries. Empty Gallery‘s black box was the perfect setting to showcase the impressive hand of Hong Kong-born painter Henry Shum, who graduated with a BA in fine art from Chelsea College of Arts only in 2020.”

OPHELIA LAI writes in ArtAsiaPacific, “The vortex-as-portal is a recurring motif that conjures the irresistible yet terrifying pull of the unknown. For poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827), it takes on a spiritual dimension as a symbol of transfigurative passage. These mysterious connotations suffuse painter Henry Shum’s “Vortices,” a fever dream of perilous journeys and mystical awakenings in Empty Gallery’s darkened sancta.”

James T. Hong’s work The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend is in the 12th Taipei Biennial, on view at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum from now until March 12, 2021. Curated by Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard with Eva Lin, it is titled “You and I don’t live on the same planet” and explores how “people around the world no longer agree on what it means to live ‘on’ Earth.”

Hong’s work is a series of concept art storyboards for a speculative science fiction film set in the near future. The film presents a military conflict in Taiwan which involves forces from China, the USA, Japan, Taiwan, and other nations.

Diaries: Era of Good Feelings is an online exhibition curated by Mark Pieterson with an essay by Rizvana Bradley, featuring Antoine Catala, Julien Creuzet, Tishan Hsu, Heesoo Kwon, Christopher Meerdo and Philipp Timischl. On view now until December 20, 2020, this special online presentation brings together various works by six artists that extend the affective possibilities for empathy, care, and connection through the haptic. Also featured is a newly commissioned essay “The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic” by Rizvana Bradley.

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!