Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation
Hong Kong Museum of Art
This exhibition, which showcases art created for and collected by luxury brand Louis Vuitton, is divided into four parts. Among them, the section entitled The Collection, A Choice, curated by Suzanne Page, the artistic director of Foundation Louis Vuitton Pour La Creation, is the biggest and most intellectually stimulating.
It begins with Class War, Militant, Gateway, a large and striking triptych created in 1984 by British artists Gilbert & George, although most visitors are drawn immediately to the last work, mainland artist Cao Fei's People's Limbo in RMB City, a video series musing on capitalism, Marxism and Taoism, which is also located at the gallery entrance.
Just as visually arresting is Andreas Gursky's large photo print series F1 Boxenstopp I-IV, in which movement and action are frozen in time, with the visual contradictions heightened by contrasting colours. But this quiet piece is disrupted by the blasting disco music from Robert Boyd's hard-hitting, socio-political four-channel video installation Xanadu playing next door.
The video works selected offer a diverse range of narratives, ranging from Pierre Huyghe's poetic A Journey That Wasn't, to Yang Fudong's epic Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, to shorter pieces such as the beautifully shot Les Oiseaux by Laurent Grasso and Zhou Tao's uplifting 1 2 3 4.