Opinion | A new Hong Kong museum show isn’t afraid to offend, but it could do more
- There would have been little point in a Surrealist exhibition with all the sexual references removed. There is, thankfully, no fig leaf at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Yet, there are some stunning omissions
The curators have traced the fascinating developments of Surrealism since André Breton’s 1924 founding manifesto to convincingly demonstrate that after the first world war, there appeared an urgent and radical impulse to subvert existing cultural hierarchies, to unearth the root of desires and beliefs, and expose the lie of a rational, orderly world.
Hence the title of the exhibition. That diverse cohort of artists from nearly a century ago are celebrated for having the intellectual mettle to reconfigure and deface old myths, to make the familiar intensely disturbing.
A lot of the visual imagery here is sexual. These artists were active during the immediate decades after Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and proposed the idea of the Oedipus complex. Dalí’s William Tell (1930) is laden with castration anxiety: the Swiss folk hero is looking at his fleeing, fig-leaved son menacingly, scissors in hand and his manhood on proud display.
The classical myth of Minotaur became, for the Surrealists, a symbol of irrational urges driven by passion and emotion, and the monstrous bovine makes numerous appearances in the works included in that section of the exhibition, such as an abstract childlike doodle with sharp teeth and pronounced sexual organs in Miró’s The Bull Fight (1945).