Eight years after his last Hong Kong show, French contemporary artist Laurent Grasso returns to the city with 'Future Archaeology', a new exhibition at the Edouard Malingue Gallery that upends notions of time and knowledge with paintings, sculpture, video, neon and a giant room installed atop Central Ferry Pier 4.
Grasso's career has soared since his last visit here in 2004, with three dozen solo shows around the world and a Marcel Duchamp Prize. After a few days in Hong Kong to set up 'Future Archaeology', he returned to Paris to prepare for another exhibition in the French capital and to work on yet another for the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art next year.
'It is not time to play the naive or romantic artist,' says Grasso. 'It's time to create work that is as complex as reality.'
In this case, the 40-year-old Paris-based artist has brought together two seemingly opposite notions: the future and the past. 'My main objective here is to give this sensation of time travelling towards the future and towards the past,' he says. 'You have the sense that, in the future, each object is an archaeological object.'
This is seen most explicitly in Studies Into the Past, a series of landscape paintings in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Each depicts a group of travellers gazing up at solar eclipses and mysteriously floating rocks. The works are tinted to obscure their actual age. Grasso likes the idea that these scenes of paranormal and extraordinary activity could one day be mistaken for artefacts from the past.
'If in 500 years somebody found the painting, he would never be able to know what was going on,' he says.
'I work with this confusion. I like this border between something that seems like it could be impossible, but is finally possible in the end. I'm not doing pure fiction. I'm not interested in science fiction because it's not possible. But I think somebody like Nikola Tesla is interesting. He invented wireless electricity, which seemed like a wild dream, but is now possible.'