Vunkwan Tam @ Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Vunkwan Tam: F

Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Through November 19, 2022

Empty Gallery presents F, Hong Kong-based artist Vunkwan Tam’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Tam’s practice operates akin to a sort of found poetry or cento, assembling groupings of readymade objects and linguistic fragments— often encountered online— into reduced spatial narratives. Site-sensitive and semi-improvised, these fugitive arrangements repurpose the deracinated stuff of semiocapitalism in order to perform an archaeology of communal affect— a type of emotional excavation of the present.

Appropriating its title from a popular form of chatroom response in which the titular letter is used as shorthand to express condolences for an accident, failure, or tragedy, F engages with the city’s contemporary moment as a form of cipher— traversing a spectrum of lived ambivalence and illuminating the potential artistic use-value of such minor affects as exhaustion, resignation and disillusionment. 

Upon entering F, the viewer first encounters the cryptically-named 78i78. Appearing like a discarded material remnant from a Morris or Le Va scatter piece, the work consists of a single, sodden scrap of fabric draped across the darkened gallery floor. Renewed each day with a mixture of synthetic doe urine— a substance used by hunters to attract horny male deer— and water, 78i78 performs a kind of simultaneous exhaustion and emotional saturation, a perpetually drenched sadboi minimalism. The presence of the synthetic urine as a potential attractant— depending upon one’s species— operates as a reference both to the insider signifiers of contemporary art discourse as well as the strategic function of performative mourning as a mode of social relation. 

Continuing into the main gallery, lest you-will-strike against-the-stone your-foot consists of an appropriated jigsaw puzzle of Bedtime Stories-era Madonna. Knees akimbo, she stares assertively into the emptiness of the gallery— an impossible (Western) image of aspirational beauty, liberty, and self-determination— her glossy surface fragmented by missing pieces, creased and soiled by enthusiastic handling. Meanwhile, in nearby XXX these thematics seem to be turned inside out. Consisting of a portable photographic reflector adorned with crucifix fragments which sketch the titular characters in a kind of dissipated scrawl, XXX seems to invoke the precarity and subjective convolutions of post-fordist labor— particularly the self-exploitative freelancing economy connected with the fashion and lifestyle industries— in its simultaneous evocation of both neoliberal exhaustion and quasi-religious fervor, it’s circular form suggesting an endless cycle of ouroboric consumption. 

The marginally adjusted readymades in F appear as mute relics of exhausted labor, used and emptied, they have been depleted of both productive energy— whether cognitive or bodily— and semiotic content yet they continue to circulate in a kind of twilight purgatory. L.O. (“liquid ownership”), arranges two items stolen from a mechanic’s shop— an engine-oil saturated t-shirt and a cut PVC pipe— into an ambivalent totem suggesting a semi-circle or the shape of the letter “u”. Whilst Untitled (IIIII, A Quiet Life) stages a pile of blackened straw hats as if they had fallen on the ground, conjuring associations of anonymity and resignation. Against the backdrop of a modern city which looks like Hong Kong but is in fact elsewhere (or perhaps anywhere), the crowd-sourced imagery of Untitled (You Control Climate Change) and Untitled (A Shadow Falls Upon My Leg) reinforce these themes, articulating the twin emotive poles of tenuous idealism and cynical malaise.  

F signifies a response to trauma, but one which ambiguously shifts registers between the distanced and the intimate, the ironic and the sincere, the local and the global— daring to inhabit the uncomfortable spaces between absolutes. Vunkwan Tam’s casual admixture of appropriated objects, images, and textual fragments— some found within the local cityscape, others sourced through international e-commerce platforms or encountered on online message boards, seem to diagram a haunted tautology of post-critical desiring affect. Inhabiting a shared space of disquieting familiarity, they reflect a moment of global circulation in which the destabilizing speed of networked media consumption coexists with manifold slower, more recalcitrant flows of people, goods, and infrastructures—evincing a sedimentary layering of the specific and the universal. In so doing, they may perhaps unknowingly capture a snapshot of an ephemeral moment which, however bleak, will itself disappear in the wake of impending history.

EMPTY GALLERY

18th & 19th Floor, Grand Marine Center, 

3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan, Hong Kong

www.emptygallery.com

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2022-08-27 > 2022-11-19

Yutaka Matsuzawa @ Empty Gallery, Hong Kong - Vanishing in the Wilderness - Curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tomii

Yutaka Matsuzawa

Vanishing in the Wilderness

Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Through February 19, 2022

I don’t, in fact, write for the dead, but for the living—though of course

for those who know that the dead too exist.

Paul Celan, Microliths, They Are Little Stones, 1969

Empty Gallery presents Yutaka Matsuzawa: Vanishing in the Wilderness. Co-curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tomii, and realized with the generous assistance of the Matsuzawa family, this exhibition represents the first overview of this pivotal artist’s practice in Sinophone East Asia. Widely considered the leading pioneer of Japanese conceptual art, Matsuzawa’s practice synthesized a diverse array of Eastern and Western knowledge— including parapsychology, Pure Land Buddhism, quantum physics— in the pursuit of artistic strategies for expressing the immaterial sphere. Split like an atom between the gallery’s two levels —generative both separately and together—the 19th floor features canonical works from Matsuzawa’s post-revelation period, while the 18th floor presents earlier paintings and collages spanning the mid 1950s through the early 1960s— works which have rarely been shown outside of Japan.

This exhibition begins with a call for proposals from 1964. Calling for artists to exhibit their work with Matsuzawa in the highlands of central Japan, three aphoristic directions instructed would-be participants:

            Don’t Believe Matter

            Don’t Believe Mind

            Don’t Believe Senses

As instructions, they are formally conscious of the dominant Conceptual art being practiced globally at the time. However, as poetry, they conjure a speculative world that helps the individual temporarily return to a world of dissolution and disappearance.

Vanishing, disappearing, dropping out. In the 1950s and 60s, many artists were experimenting with these concepts. Burning and destroying works, or wholly removing themselves from the art world as they saw it, their activities nevertheless left traces through which we can reconstruct these techniques of disappearance. However, Matsuzawa, individually and in association with his colleagues, forged a path that was at once more internal and less demonstrative than those of his international peers. This path moved beyond the simple physical removal of the artist’s body or artwork to embrace the conscious disintegration of the perceiving individual. This removal is illustrated best by co-curator, Reiko Tomii, who notes that the concept of “being in the wilderness,” or zaiya, is similar to the Chinese xiaye (下野), literally meaning to “descend to the wilderness” and historically denoting a “departure from state power.” Matsuzawa firmly rooted his radical conceptual art practice in this wilderness, which he frames as a place where the presence of living beings and ancestors is deeply intertwined. 

In this exhibition at Empty Gallery, Matsuzawa’s Banner of Vanishing (1964) occupies a position of central importance. The message in the banner appears simple enough, proclaiming: Humans, Let’s Vanish, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Gate, Gate — Anti-Civilization Committee. It asks the visitor to accompany the artist in moving beyond a world based on matter, and in doing so, to pursue an alternative to material civilization. While the language of the banner can be read superficially as pessimistic or nihilistic, Matsuzawa’s intentions were in fact the opposite. Rather than focusing on the surface language that Matsuzawa employed, it is necessary to focus on a physical quality of the work that he considered immaterial in nature. Specifically, his use of pink. In Matsuzawa’s vision, pink came to symbolize the presence of the spiritual. Less a color and more a form, the occasional yet conscious deployment of pink in his oeuvre was part of a strategy to enable the viewer to access the immaterial world in its most invisible nature. 

            Notes on Pink:

            1. In the pink of oblivion there must be innumerable seasons, each both more and less factual than the one before it.

            2. A pink result was found as the oldest color on record, at over 1.1 billion years old. The oceans, which contained photosynthetic organisms that produced this colored chlorophyll, might even have once been colored pink. As one co-author of the report commented, it was “truly an alien world.”

Matsuzawa’s work might be imagined as a remnant of this alien, future-past world. Its memory tinted pink from the world it came from, and an image for what worlds may come. A meditative exercise by the artist titled, White Infinity 1 (1967), asks the participant to experience within one’s consciousness an infinite expansion of white paper in a two-dimensional fashion. The Banner of Vanishing might be seen as extending a similar concept––the emptiness that it aspires towards ultimately allowing even the gallery to vanish and disappear. Existing in total darkness, the threads of the work’s future unravelling found frozen in space with the world having since disappeared.

On the 18th floor Matsuzawa’s earlier works are arranged as processional bodies, where proverbs and parables may arrive to the visitor. Abstract in form and often incorporating elements of collage, they are worked over in oil, pastel, self-mixed pigments, and ink. Notably more colorful and expressive than the post-1964 works which Matsuzawa became most well-known for, they were completed at a time in art history when, under increasing ideological pressure, Abstract Expressionism was beginning to fossilize into Minimalist painting. Lee Krasner, recognized as one of the leading critics and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism, stated: 

            the attempt at purity of a [Abstract art] work is alarming. It terrifies me in a sense. It’s rigid, as against being alive. 

These experimental works did not aim towards any sense of formal purity, they instead partook of a form of art that asked artists only to “splash about from the wine of one’s heart.” This phrase, adopted from the early ink paintings of Sesshū, asks artists to not aim towards refinement, but instead to live and create—drunkenly and openly—in the dazzle of the heart’s openness. With the whole of art history under review, they did not adhere to any particular genre or movement. Instead Matsuzawa sought to construct a new system of belief. Though they diverge aesthetically from the conceptual attitudes of his later works, they reflect the same metaphysical engagement with the myriad worlds lying beyond our material plane. Matsuzawa’s practice does not hinge upon art as emotional conveyance, but rather upon the belief that art may foment new trajectories and parameters for sensing what worlds exist elsewhere. 

Matsuzawa would often speak of a shift happening within his artworks—like a momentary ripple in the fabric of sober consensus reality. Like the exhibition, which moves back in time to Matsuzawa’s beginnings, this text also looks back. 

Slipping backwards, through the membrane of closed eyes, as pink moments drift silently in the dark, a fetal caress echoing from a prior mother and a spirit which whispers on air: let’s go. 

Text by Alan Longino

YUTAKA MATSUZAWA (1922-2006) is considered a pioneer of Japanese conceptual art. Born in Shimo Suwa in central Japan, he studied architecture during the war and upon witnessing the after effects of the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, he proclaimed upon his graduation from school that he wished “to create an architecture of invisibility.” After giving up his architectural practice, he wrote poetry, made paintings, and worked as both an artist and teacher in his hometown. In the formulation of his practice, Matsuzawa began to develop a unique understanding of conceptual art that both elevated and transcended the typical notions of conceptual art in the Western, Euro-centric art worlds.

ALAN LONGINO is a Ph.D. student in art history at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on artists of East Asia as well as the Southern U.S. An on-going project of his considers the presence of telepathy within information as a source of image production. His writing has appeared in Heichi and the Haunt Journal of Art, from UC Irvine.

REIKO TOMII is an independent art historian and curator, who investigates post-1945 Japanese art which constitutes a vital part in world art history of modernisms. Her early works include her contribution to Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum of Art, 1999), Century City (Tate Modern, 2001), and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (Getty Research Institute, 2007). She is co-director of PoNJA-GenKon, a listserv group of specialists interested in contemporary Japanese art. With PoNJA-GenKon, she has organized a number of symposiums and panels in collaboration with Yale University, Getty Research Institute, and other major academic institutions. Her recent publication is Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016) received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award. In 2019, based on the book, she curated Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, which included a major section on Matsuzawa Yutaka, at Japan Society Gallery in New York. In 2020, she received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government for cultural transmission and international exchange through postwar Japanese art history.

EMPTY GALLERY

18th & 19th Floor, Grand Marine Center

3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan, Hong Kong

emptygallery.com

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Henry Shum @ Empty Gallery, Hong Kong - Vortices

Henry Shum: Vortices

Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

September 26 - November 21, 2020

Empty Gallery presents Vortices, their first solo exhibition with Hong Kong-based painter Henry Shum. Drawing its title from an anachronistic term for ‘vortex’ once employed by William Blake and Descartes to describe the spiral-like structure of the cosmos, Vortices assembles a thematically interconnected group of recent oil paintings along with a single wall mural. Henry Shum locates his source materials within the tides of mediated imagery which daily engulf our consciousness, transmuting these eclectic images into paintings which seem to pulse with an oneiric energy. Rendered in undulating lines and diaphanous washes, these haunting compositions (whose fugitive motifs are mirrored and inverted across the show) depict otherworldly scenes which are at once distant and familiar – tenebrous spaces of late-capitalist dream.

Recurring throughout the paintings on view, the titular vortice can serve as a kind of conceptual interstice through which we can begin to think Henry Shum’s artistic practice. Often mythologized as a site of peril and instability — a kind of zone of negative chance — the figure of the whirlpool has deep roots in the Western psyche, appearing everywhere from Homer to Pound. Defined most simply as a meeting of opposing currents; a spontaneous configuration of swirling fluids around an absent center, it is an elemental structure that has much in common with the self. A spiralling tide which deliriously circulates all manner of cultural debris within its churning orbits, it is destructive and generative in equal measure. For Henry Shum, to paint is first to accept this essential loss of agency, to relinquish a certain intentionality and tenuously circumnavigate this centrifuge of potential images which furnishes the degree zero of a composition.

The works in Vortices harbor deep traces of this aleatoric process, not only on the level of composition or content, but also in their more painterly formal characteristics. One of Henry Shum’s most recent paintings, Annunciation (2020), depicts an enormous tree framed within a pseudo-classical archway, its curving trunk and branches bisecting the composition. Clusters of robed figures emerge from the base and sides of this tree, the folds of their drapery rendered in expressively swirling brushstrokes which seem to echo the gnarled form of the wood itself. These contours pulse with a sense of implied movement, an extra-representational vibration which is mirrored elsewhere in works such as Spirit of An Eye (2020) and New Sun (2020). Reaching beyond the mere fusion of subject and landscape depicted in so much romantic painting, this sense of movement seems rather to hint at the defiant agency of pigment and oils; those liquid intelligences which are so often at odds with the intended mastery of the painter’s hand. Henry Shum frequently uses dilute washes to delineate large areas of his canvases. In paintings such as Revolution of Night (2020), they steep, drip, and pool on the surface of the work (always conversant with the canvas as material) creating subtly irregular forms which feel liminal and vaporous — abstract dispersions of color which only accidentally happen to resolve into the contour of a cloud or the texture of tree-bark. It is as if these painted marks could detach themselves and circumnavigate the space of the canvas, or regain their former liquidity and flow off their material supports entirely. Material can never be completely reduced to image, movement never completely resolved into fixity and stillness. A stretched canvas is merely a threshold, a dark reservoir in which the vitalized fluids of representation lie temporarily suspended.

This sense of internal movement, of emergent multiplicities latent within a single work is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Henry Shum’s practice. If there is often something in one of his paintings which feels unresolved, a symbol or gesture which seems tenuous or peripatetic in relation to the whole, we can perhaps understand this as a sort of constitutional openness — one which implies a different relation to selfhood and artistic agency. This openness takes Henry Shum beyond the hermetic vistas of much contemporary neo-symbolist and neo-romantic painting currently in ascendance. In contrast, his works depict not the reactionary space of personal desire, but rather a formless eddy of pan-subjective merging in which memory and image, history and simulation, and finally, individuality and collectivity collapse into one another. Nowhere is this vision of things clearer than in the titular Vortices (2020), which depicts an anonymous group of silhouettes, gathered together underneath the looming form of a floating balloon. Reusing compositional motifs from earlier paintings, these forms are rendered in outline only; porous and transparent bodies vacated save for the substance of twin whirlpools, whose swirling currents merge into cloudy night sky. In Henry Shum’s aesthetic cosmos, brick facades, frescoes, and classical arches simultaneously recall both the faux-euro ornamentation of Hong Kong housing estates and the Renaissance grandeur of Titian, mysterious robed figures are at once Buddhist arhats and Christian saints, the star-filled evening sky alludes not only to art history but to the self-conscious filtering and aestheticizing of experience; its reduction to image. The figures in Shum’s compositions offer a clue to this condition: with their downcast eyes and languid postures, they suggest nothing so much as the somnambulist. However, this is no longer the exalted state favored by the artists of earlier eras as a means of “transcending the everyday”, but rather the waking sleep of our ceaselessly mediated present.

HENRY SHUM (B. 1998, Hong Kong) received his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts London in 2020. Selected group exhibitions include presentations at Candid Arts Trust Gallery (2020), Fitzrovia Gallery (2019), and Bones and Pearl Gallery (2018), in London. Henry Shum currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

EMPTY GALLERY

18th & 19th Floor, Grand Marine Center

3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan, Hong Kong

www.emptygallery.com

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