Hong Kong-bound artist Sarah Morris, showing in Beijing, talks about films and the Olympics
American artist Sarah Morris muses on the restless spirit that inspired her films and paintings ahead of her show at White Cube in Hong Kong in May
Twenty years ago, the American artist Sarah Morris shot her first film, Midtown. There’s no narrative. She went out into the streets of that particular area of Manhattan for one day, and subdivided it into visual segments. Against the specific grid of the city, unintended patterns of colour (men in shirts) and texture (fountains) reoccur.
Ten years later, in 2008, she went to Beijing to make a film of that name during the Olympics. Beijing, too, is a city that was built on a specific grid. Again, other patterns (the Bird’s Nest stadium) and textures (ducks) emerge. Once more there’s no narrative, just insistent, electronic music by Morris’ then-husband, British artist and former Turner Prize nominee, Liam Gillick.
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To mark both anniversaries, the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing is having a Morris exhibition. It’s the first time her entire output of 14 films are viewable in one place. Such fixity of location is unusual because Morris, who has shot in Los Angeles, Rio, Paris and Abu Dhabi, is a wanderer. The title of the show reflects the urge: “Odysseus Factor”.
“I love what [conceptual artist] Lawrence Weiner once told me – that artists are like expensive pieces of luggage,” she says in her New York studio in Long Island City.
At 10,000 sq ft it’s the sort of space that can induce envy in a Hong Kong resident. Morris is also a painter of vivid geometric abstracts and the UCCA show includes what the press release refers to as some of her new “monumental” creations. On a February afternoon, she is working in her studio for a White Cube show that will open here in May. For Hong Kong, she concedes, “I want to have at least a few different elements of scale”.