Yosemite in all its intimacy: feminist photographer Catherine Opie’s first solo Hong Kong show features western landscapes

Sharp close-ups of features of the California national park, accompanied by unfocused, blurry shots from the same spots, are inspired by the same radical impulse as artist’s earlier representations of oppression of sexual minorities

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Images Catherine Opie shot in California’s Yosemite National Park, and which she describes as “highly vaginal to a certain extent”, on show at Lehmann Maupin gallery in Hong Kong as part of the American artist’s first solo exhibition in the city. Photo: courtesy of Lehman Maupin

Published: 1:45pm, 22 May 2018Updated: 1:45pm, 24 May 2018

Hong Kong’s art market suffers from a lack of diversity. Lehmann Maupin is the one exception, and bringing Catherine Opie to Hong Kong is consistent with the international art gallery’s commendable efforts to include gender parity and sexual diversity in its programming.

But be warned. The works chosen for the American photographer’s first solo show in the city are natural landscapes that are thoroughly safe and unobjectionable (unless one takes issue with what Opie describes as the “vaginal” cropping of images of a particular waterfall).

‘Tree’ (2015). Photo: Catherine Opie/courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

You may feel slightly short-changed if you were expecting some direct reference to the defiance and audacity of her unforgettable portraits (and self-portraits) of the American queer community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (There is one recent portrait hanging inside the gallery’s office.)

It is not because domestic bliss has made her mellow, says one of America’s most successful lesbian artists. Laid-back and amiable, there is little hint today of the angry radical who in 1993 photographed her own bare back, the blood still seeping out after two female stick figures holding hands in front of a house had been cut into her skin.

‘Self-Portrait/Cutting’ (1993). Photo: Catherine Opie/Copyright: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York