Three Hong Kong art exhibitions not to miss this summer
Photography, white porcelain sculptures and quilts with a message by international artists Taryn Simon, Rachel Kneebone and Fereydoun Ave are featured in their first solo shows at Gagosian, White Cube and Rossi & Rossi galleries
Hong Kong’s commercial galleries have gone into hyperactivity, with one opening after another to catch visitors before the summer exodus begins. Don’t know where to start? Here are three must-see shows by major international artists who have never had solo exhibitions in this city before.
Taryn Simon: Portraits and Surrogates
Gagosian Gallery
American Taryn Simon catalogues situations where the individual gets caught up in the power of the state, war, religion, capitalism and other overarching systems they have little control over, which means anyone, anywhere, can be her subject.
Indeed, the mini retrospective at the Gagosian Gallery covers a bewildering range: from the most mundane – a record of confiscated items at Kennedy International Airport – to the shocking – a project about albinos in Tanzania killed for their body parts because witch doctors insist they bring luck.
The latter is part of the series called A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII. Simon spent four years from 2008-2011 travelling around the world researching and recording families who have lost members to cruel superstition, to civil war, or in the case of feral rabbits in Australia, to biological warfare designed to wipe them out. Each panel has a photographic family tree with gaps representing the dead and the missing. The unsmiling faces of the three generations she photographed are as blank as the uniform, beige background. Textual explanations on the other side provide the context.