Xenia Hausner portrays cage homes at her Hong Kong Arts Centre exhibition
Xenia Hausner goes to great heights in the name of art. For Cage People, one of the paintings in her latest exhibition "Look Left — Look Right", her first solo show in Hong Kong, the Austrian artist, attached to a safety belt, hovered three metres above her subjects for up to eight hours a day.
LOOK LEFT — LOOK RIGHT
Hong Kong Arts Centre
Xenia Hausner goes to great heights in the name of art. For Cage People, one of the paintings in her latest exhibition "Look Left — Look Right", her first solo show in Hong Kong, the Austrian artist, attached to a safety belt, hovered three metres above her subjects for up to eight hours a day.
"I would stay on the platform and paint for as long as the subjects below could stand being squeezed into the box. The colourful paint would drip down on them — it was an interesting experience for all involved," she says of the piece that references people in Hong Kong who live in cramped and filthy metal cage dwellings, some just 1.8 metres by 0.75 metres.
Hausner creates her brightly coloured, large-scale pieces with real models — mostly women.
"I recreated a cage in my Vienna studio, much like you would on a stage, but using a cardboard box and furnishing it with items found in the city. The girls — an art student and a music student — had to squeeze into it. The only difference is that my cage is occupied by a Western woman and a Chinese woman."