ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans has become known for a distinctive style of painting that demonstrates the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered a decidedly non-narrative approach to figurative painting, instead exploring how information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his works are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or a fading memory.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Luc Tuymans has become known for a distinctive style of painting that demonstrates the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. Emerging in the 1980s, Tuymans pioneered a decidedly non-narrative approach to figurative painting, instead exploring how information can be layered and embedded within certain scenes and signifiers. Based on preexisting imagery culled from a variety of sources, his works are rendered in a muted palette that is suggestive of a blurry recollection or a fading memory. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity, and they engage equally with questions of history and its representation as they do with quotidian subject matter. Tuymans’s canvases both undermine and reinvent traditional notions of monumentality through their insistence on the ambiguity of meaning. Luc Tuymans’ exhibition “Good Luck” exhibition brings together a wide range of global, historical, and contemporary references that reflect ongoing themes of interest for the artist. Among the works on view are a group of canvases painted from snapshot images of Delft tiles, which originated in the context of seventeenth-century Dutch imperialism. Initially made and distributed in response to increasing demand in Europe for prized Ming dynasty ceramics at a lower price during the golden age of Dutch trade, these tin-glazed objects mimic both the appearance and techniques of fine Chinese porcelain and often take banal scenes of everyday life adapted for a European context as their subject matter. Tuymans, who is half Dutch and lives and works in Antwerp, an original site of ceramic production before workshops were relocated to Delft, focuses on a solitary figure in each of these tiles to underscore the hybrid and evolving nature of this iconography, as the tiles continue to function as global consumer goods. Other paintings in the show address history, including “Cell” (2019), an enigmatic image of an anonymous prison cell door in use in Berlin in the 1930s that has two viewing holes, as if to conflate the gaze of the prison keeper with that of the imprisoned. The ever-accelerated connection between past, present, and future is explored in “Shenzhen” (2019), which depicts an aerial view of the Chinese city, painted by the artist from a documentary still captured from his laptop. Overlaid with play, rewind, and fast-forward symbols, the otherwise generic cityscape takes on an air of nostalgia for both the past and an unknown future. Also on view is “Outfit” (2019), which depicts a costume worn by the early Hollywood actor Tom Mix, who appeared as a cowboy in nearly three hundred American Westerns in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, the cowboy is presented as a disembodied prop in a museum, heightening a sense of artifice that suggests a parallel to the United States’ evolving, shifting role in the export of both culture and goods within the global marketplace. The exhibition also includes the monumentally scaled “Anonymous I” (2018), a painting based on a series of black-and-white images of forensically reconstructed faces. Depicting an individual who in reality may or may not exist, the artist has imbued the figure with an uncanny presence. Tuymans’s longstanding fascination with the idea of the face as an object sets up a tension between immediacy and withholding, and the real and the constructed. Featured in the exhibition is an animated work (2019), that reflects Tuymans’s ongoing interest in the relationship between moving and static images. Here, an owl is shown taking flight. The nocturnal bird can be seen to embody a dichotomy—at once a symbol of wisdom and the perfect predator, because it can approach its prey silently and with stealth.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 27/10-19/12/20, Days & Hours: Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com