ART CITIES:Hong Kong-The Real World

Working in a variety of media, from painting and drawing to video and installation the artists of the exhibition “The Real World”, each critically reevaluated the status of their materials and challenged the relationship between art and everyday life by incorporating nontraditional subjects, formats, and ideas into the composition and experience of their work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

On view across two floors of the David Zwirner Gallery’s in Hong Kong l, the works of the exhibition “The Real World”, exemplify the alternative approaches of the participating artists pursued in their respective practices as they emerged as major artistic influences within the New York and Los Angeles art worlds. On show is Diana Thater’s seminal 1998 image and video installation “The Caucus Race”. The work exemplifies the artist’s ability to integrate image and architecture so as to create immersive and engaging installations that activate the physical space in which they are presented. In this work, text and video are projected onto two walls with four video monitors placed on the floor. The work begins with a text from a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) that describes a chaotic animal race, which is projected one word at a time onto the gallery wall. After the text concludes, clips of animals play on the monitors arranged on the ground, ending with a large projection of a video looking down at a pool of water as a dolphin leaps upward toward the camera before diving back downward. Complementing Thater’s meditations on nature and humanity’s fragmented relationship to it is a selection of sculptures by Jason Rhoades, including “Chandelier 39” and “Chandelier 32” (2006), a unique work composed of neon lights and found materials. Rhoades emerged in the 1990s as one of the most formally and conceptually rigorous artists of his time. During his short but prolific career, he became known for highly original, large-scale sculptural installations, which incorporate various materials inspired by Los Angeles car culture and his upbringing in rural Northern California as well as by a mixture of historical and contemporary global and regional influences that he explored throughout his life. One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres employed simple, everyday materials in his work, including stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, and strands of beads. His evocative work, which purposefully references the languages of minimalism and conceptualism, resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Among the artist’s works that are presented is “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.)” (1991), one of his paper stacks. The large sheets of paper that make up the manifestation of this work each contain a metallic silver rectangle printed on their surface. Viewers may take individual sheets from the stack, which in turn can be replenished by the exhibitor. A selection of photographic jigsaw puzzles that Gonzalez-Torres produced as editions between 1987 and 1992 is also displayed. These works speak to Gonzalez-Torres’s interest in commercial and readily available production methods as well as questions about how to imbue emotionality, political content, and personal experience within unconventional formats that remain at a disconnect from the artist’s hand. As with his paper stacks, the puzzles exemplify Gonzalez-Torres’s sensitivity to the fragment and the whole, presence and absence. Also on view is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “untitled 1990 (pad thai)”, which marks the first presentation of the artist’s work at David Zwirner since the recent announcement that the gallery will be working with him in Asia. Tiravanija is best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around personal and shared communal traditions, such as cooking authentic Thai meals. At the forefront of the shift in avant-garde art practices in the 1990s away from traditional art objects and toward “relational aesthetics” that incorporate diverse cultural spaces, practices, and temporalities, Tiravanija has continually challenged and expanded the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the special and personal spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions.  On the gallery walls is a large-scale installation of work by Raymond Pettibon from the 1990s. Intermixing image and text, Pettibon’s drawings address a wide spectrum of American iconography pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture, among other sources. His work engages the visual rhetorics of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media as well as classic texts by writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman. Pettibon’s drawings from the 1990s, a formative period for the artist, speak to the growing disillusionment with capital markets, the collapse of American idealism, and lingering anxieties from the Cold War. Concluding the exhibition is a seminal, early painting by Lisa Yuskavage titled “Big Marie” (1993) that belongs to the artist’s “Babies” series, a major group of works begun in the early 1990s. The works in this series depict young, often nude women, who are constructs of the artist’s imagination, in the center of the composition, their erotized bodies seemingly materializing from brightly colored, monochrome mist—in this case tones of green. To achieve the immersion of figure and field, Yuskavage adapts the Renaissance technique of sfumato, in which different hues and gradations of a color are shaded gradually into one another, softening the outlines of forms.

Participating Artists: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Diana Thater, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Photo:  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Ross in L.A.), 1991, Print on paper, endless copies, Ideal size: 10 inches at ideal height x 29 x 23 inches (ideal paper size), Original size: 25.5 cm at ideal height x 78.4 x 62 cm (original paper size), Edition of 3, Certificate of Authenticity and Ownership, Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 18/5-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com