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.
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.
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.
Empty Gallery榮幸呈現靈時小屋。靈時小屋位於畫廊入口門廳左側的獨立房間內。小屋將不定期呈現來自不同時空背景的單件作品,並提供人們深度思考的平台。穿越遙遠距離,在無限微觀的細節中爬梳——每次展覽都將有專人撰文,以動態的視角多層次地討論作品,從而照看我城獨特的歷史與社會情境。
靈時小屋之名戲仿自精神時光屋,在漫畫家鳥山明筆下,這是一個時空膠囊式的異次元自我修煉空間。項目藉此探索一種扎根在非西方哲學思想資源中的認識論思辨,也為懸崖峭壁般的全球化文化提出一個建設性地遊走其中的方法。
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。憑著共襄盛舉的精神,其名稱及概念無限期交付Empty Gallery使用。
靈時小屋的首展將呈現科隆藝術家Matthias Groebel的單件作品。Groebel在1989年至2006年間創作了一系列機器輔助的繪畫,將早期衛星電視的電子訊號轉化到神秘的矩形畫布上。進到電傳視覺這類輪廓未明的領域,他將自己對圖像的選擇讓渡給了直覺和偶然性——他將類比顯屏的截圖結合從字幕機調用的文字片段,創作出帶有如幻覺般表面密度質地的繪畫作品,它們有如具象謎團或是視覺公案。Groebel筆下這些既陌生又熟悉的廣播繪畫描繪出了直到近期才浮現在日常經驗中的社會空間、情感和地理空間方面的劇變。作品展現出了一個鈍化無生氣的景觀——此間的欲望錯位,恐懼蔓延。
Groebel的這件畫作猶如遠程傳輸至香港的訊號,有待進一步解碼與闡釋。《美國麗人#9》(2001)描繪一位不知名的男性人物在鏡頭前瞇著眼睛揮舞雙手,似是在抗議被拍攝,或者感到私隱被冒犯——同時,一行被挪用至此的繁體中文字幕,卻引領著觀眾說:來看吧。
Matthias Groebel, American Beauty #9 (2001). Courtesy of the artist, Ulrik and Empty Gallery. Photo: Michael Yu.