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.
Amid his exhibition at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, the Japanese bricolage photographer presents art as helping us sit with the discomfort of the unknown.
In the last essay he published before passing away on 23 October 2024, Gary Indiana wrote about photographs: “We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity.”
Born in Japan and now living in New York, artist Taro Masushio’s exhibition “Pass” at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong is replete with photographic evidence, but contains little of facts and does not reward undue curiosity. Masushio’s reprinting of his father’s amateur travel photography on the cardboard of care packages shipped across the world from father to son conjures a haptic, material intimacy mediated by impersonal logistics networks. A series of sparing, high-contrast still-life photographs catalogues enigmatic objects sourced intuitively from his father’s belongings and the artist’s own collection – a book of Rimbaud’s poetry, a pair of male Ainu figurines, testosterone supplements, photo paper, a darkroom safe light. The effect is disruption of the impulse towards certainty in meaning-making, the recognizable objects utterly drained of their indexicality, despite their unambiguous familial, autobiographical, and sexual connotations.
“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.
Empty Gallery榮幸呈獻《靈時小屋》。小屋位於畫廊入口大廳左側的獨立房間內, 不定期展示來自不同時空和背景的創作,讓觀者對單件作品進行深度思考。該計畫有別於我們的恆常展覽,旨在從常規項目的邏輯、思維及壓力中開闢新的空間。展覽穿越遙遠距離,在無限微觀細節中爬梳,並每次委託文字工作者撰寫論文,以動態的視角從多層面討論作品,從而照看我城獨特的歷史與社會環境。
《靈時小屋》的名稱靈感來自精神時光屋:在漫畫家鳥山明筆下,精神時光屋是一個時空膠囊式的異次元自我修煉空間。項目藉此探索一種植根於非西方哲學的思辨性認識論,用於在懸崖峭壁般的全球化文化中漫步。
《靈時小屋》原為2018年至2021年間於皇后博物館開展的合作項目。博物館憑著共襄盛舉的精神,將其名稱及概念無限期交付Empty Gallery使用。
在第二個展覽中,小屋將聯手三藩市灣區最具影響力的藝術家和電影製作人之一Jordan Belson,展示他的一系列繪畫作品。Belson作為Harry Smith、Oskar Fischinger和John Cage的同代人,致力探索宇宙結構,並視擴展人類意識為終生任務,而他的創作亦源於這些抱負。Belson受到神秘主義和科學的深刻影響,發展出一套獨特的視覺語言,包括振動模式、幾何圖案和放射狀線條,表達他對超越主義運動的願景。
Belson的《孔雀之書》(Peacock Book)繪畫創作於1950年代初期,當時他正處於創作醞釀期,開始逐漸形成他後來最為知名的抽象電影風格。他運用墨水和粉彩,在中國紙上以書法般的筆觸完成作品,充滿活力和幻像般的動感——紙上彷彿上演著整部Belson電影,畫面似乎來自天外並轉瞬即逝,通通被濃縮進某個時刻的視覺密度之中。
***
Jordan Belson(1926-2011)是二十世紀前衛電影的重要人物。他年輕時學習繪畫,1946年獲得加州大學伯克利分校的藝術學位。他最初以畫家身分取得成功,在1940年代末於三藩市現代藝術博物館和紐約古根海姆博物館(當時稱為非具象繪畫博物館)展出作品。然而,1950年之後,他定居在三藩市的北灘區,主要專注於電影製作。儘管他在餘生仍繼續創作繪畫和素描,但他再也沒有公開展出過這部分作品。