From Empty Shoe Box to a full Hong Kong gallery - Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s journey

In 1993, a young Mexican artist – not a term he particularly likes but we’ll get back to that – named Gabriel Orozco showed a work at the Venice Biennale titled Empty Shoe Box. The clue’s in the title. It really was a shoebox with nothing in it.

One of the (many) contradictions of the contemporary art world is that it likes to embrace those who appear to be rejecting it. The shoeless box was seen as an antidote to the glossy, gussied-up, galleried art of the 1980s; its very emptiness indicated its worthiness. Within a few months, Orozco’s work was being shown in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Usually, young artists at MoMA are given a designated space but Orozco refused to be confined within the usual white cube and positioned his work in unlikely corners. What people often remember about the show is the work Home Run. It consisted of oranges arranged in cups and vases. The crucial point was that they weren’t in the museum: they were in the windows of homes and offices that could be seen across the street.

And the artist? Well, he was a nomad, rattling around the world, gathering impressions – rather like the ball of plasticine, weighing exactly what he did, which he rolled through the streets of New York, picking up the city’s lint, and onto one of MoMA’s landings. He called that work Yielding Stone.

The following year, he held his first show in a commercial gallery, Marian Goodman, in New York. The highlight was Yogurt Caps which, yes, were four (Danone) yogurt lids, each attached to a gallery wall. You could say it was a cultured revolution.

Orozco was in Hong Kong last week for the opening of his first solo show in the city. The fact that it’s in a gallery called White Cube gives some sense of the distance travelled. Art world trimmings were properly in place: the gathered press, the expert flown intercontinentally to speak about the oeuvre, the stark chilliness of wall, the deadened air.