Contemplating a ‘coupling’
Beautiful and thoughtful: Sri Lankan artist Kos Cos with his new collection at Hotel Conrad, Hong Kong
I almost missed the Lionel Wendt nude at the 2017 Art Basel Hong Kong show in March. That’s understandable, after a week drunk on art – two mega art fairs in town; two art fairs in hotels; and add to that hundreds of parallel events at galleries, museums, auction houses and cultural institutions across the city. I binged, visiting all the fairs and as many other activities as possible until the mind sounded an alarm, slowed recall, and all impressions fused. That’s overload.
Yet when I heard there was a Lionel Wendt nude in the gallery around the corner at Art Basel, I came unstuck; a treasure at the tail-end of art week in a Sri Lankan presence at the world’s premier Asian art fair! I had started art week by taking in Sri Lankan artist Kos Cos’s new body of work at Hotel Conrad, and now I could end it on a high note contemplating a Wendt.
March is spring in Hong Kong; the coldest days of winter have passed and the weather is warming up, with a drizzle or two. And while there are art events round the year here, March has over the past five years, since the arrival of Art Basel Hong Kong, clearly become a dedicated art month. Art and culture institutions not only exhibit art but celebrate it with all manner of activities. Mandarin Hotel put on an Andy Warhol exhibition, while Pacific Place Mall in Admiralty added a stunning multimedia water installation called BIT.FALL by German artist Julius Popp to its lobby. Art fever peaks in Art Week, when the two mega fairs, Art Basel and Art Central, open, and art lovers and curators from around the world stream in to see and buy the works of thousands of international artists.
Contemporary art from China predominates. The gallery with the Wendt photo, Beijing-based Antenna Space, wasn’t representing Wendt per se, but rather Chinese conceptual artist Liu Ding who had paired the photo with another equally beautiful image of a 50’s-era Caucasian female nude in a composite work entitled Ideology and Experience 2008. The combination was complementary in beauty and other elements but aesthetics wasn’t the intention of this artist who is known for provocative installations. His entire Ideology and Experience series, comprises 17 appropriated black and white photographs with texts that make assertions about how perceptions and images are never neutral.
Does coupling two photos taken by others constitute a genuine new artwork? The concept of appropriation is accepted in art as long as it gives new meaning to the appropriated work. Indeed, a number of works at all the art fairs were appropriated. Viewers are urged to contemplate the social phenomena that Liu Ding had brought together in Ideology and Experience 2008.
Since my mind quickly connects the dots and tends to overthink, I had no problem giving it meaning: their vintage origins carry the value their times imbued in an ideal of beauty, now plunged into a contemporary world that questions ‘ideal’ forms. Possibly back then nudes may have been considered pornographic, whereas today’s porn-infused world may consider them ‘tame’. And how would such an interracial pairing – a white woman and a brown man – have gone down in Wendt’s time, if you think, for example, of the way Indian lovers of British women are portrayed in E.M. Forster’s The Passage to India and Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown? However, I wasn’t sure if my interpretations were Liu Ding’s intentions. The gallery assistant wasn’t able to help.
For the art lover at art week, there was plenty to beauty for beauty’s sake to admire, and plenty of cerebral works to chew on. I like mind benders. And even though many works were incomprehensible, there were some really good pieces. Favourites were: Among Pakistani gallery Ghandara Art Space’s many offerings, a stunning series by Australian Hazara artist Khadim Ali, drawing from miniature art traditions of Afghanistan, in particular a legendary figure called Rustum. And Bengali artist Astha Butail at Bangalore’s Galleryske with an assemblage of panels inspired by the Rig Veda entitled Turning towards pure white. The panels used geometry as a means of inquiry to understand the different composite elements and rhythm of the texts. I would never have guessed! Never-theless the whole assemblage was sublime and stunning. Then there was the massive mise-en-scene by Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso entitled Family Album, featuring cut outs of 30 members of his family as three different types of persona, differentiated by their clothes – traditional, everyday and formal wear – a Tibetan Buddhist tanka superimposed with popular images. The work alluded to how accelerated economic and social change is shaping Tibet. And there was Chinese artist Shen Shaoming’s Summit of lifelike acrylic and silica gel corpses of Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Kim Il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Summit is an imaginary G5 parody of the G8 grouping of industrialised countries. I couldn’t help but notice how peaceful they who had once created mayhem in their countries now seemed, and wonder where they were now – roasting in hell-fires? These are only a handful of the countless wonderful offerings of art week.
After art week, I contacted an online gallery exhibiting Experience and Ideology 2008, and was able to get an interpretation from Liu Ding himself: the series is special and he had been working on it since 2007. There were two editions of this work: one with Chinese captions, the one I saw at the fair, and the other online with the following English captions:
1. “This was a portrait of a female photographed in Paris, France, in 1950. The body of the woman in the pool was curved in an s shape, her head being slightly lowered. Light was projected onto the body from a 45-degree angle from the upper right corner.”
2. “This was a portrait of a man photographed by Lionel Wendt in Colombo, Ceylon, in 1938. The body of the man in front of a background was curved in a s-shape, his head slightly lowered. The main light was projected onto the body from a 45-degree angle from the right.”
According to Liu Ding, “The series is the subject of continuous discussion in our daily life where we form a general cognitive experience and a real world gap. This work discusses some of the coherence in the East-West cultural conflict as a medium for others in different places, different times and space, and different cultural backgrounds. Such universal aesthetics [shown in the images], thus the painting of the man and woman. The variety of colours in the works were something like ‘quatation marks or brackets’ we use in texts, and serves to emphasise the issues he was raising.”
I tried to get my head round that and wrote back asking: “Does he mean the photos represent unity through common aesthetic principles, and diversity through the various colours and textures.”
The reply: “Liu Ding’s reflection and discussion on ‘experience and ideology’ revolves around our lives, and how the universal common concept of aesthetics can be thought about differently, in the simplest matter of gender and unity/diversity. Just like the captions below each photo, they are similar, with the difference being the man and woman, the different locations, periods, and cultural background.”
The composition featuring Wendt’s work certainly got me thinking, although the artist’s explanation seemed less complicated than my own musings. In an interview with CoBo Social, Belgian art collector Alain Dervous, who was in Hong Kong for Art Basel, was asked, “What is art?” His answer was simple: “It’s a language that must speak to you, open your mind, touch your heart, and make you ask questions.” That’s art; it may or may not be beautiful, but it must challenge your suppositions. Ultimately, the piece is not just what the artist brings to it, but what you too bring to it.
Art week in March established Hong Kong as Asia’s top art hub; a spot coveted by neighbouring cities such as Singapore. This city’s evolution in this direction contrasts sharply to 25 years ago when the pickings were sparse, with only a handful of museums and galleries. Now there are over 30 museums and cultural centres, and a multitude of galleries, with more, including new cultural districts, in the pipeline. City planning and the natural course of urbanisation have pointed Hong Kong in this direction. It’s just what the doctor would order for a city that works too hard.
As for Kos Cos’s new collection at the Conrad, it was both beautiful and thoughtful. These fairs are also about making contacts and while I was there, a couple walked in and expressed interest in showing his works in their gallery in Hong Kong. The woman in particular seemed very enthusiastic. There is a lot to be said about Kos’s new works but that will be in another article in these pages.