Performance art by Tino Sehgal at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong a challenge to your senses – these are events to be experienced, not just seen

Artist Tino Sehgal is bringing two of his best-known pieces to the ‘trust & confusion’ exhibition at Tai Kwun – where the audience can become part of the work

Performers and interpreters engage with the public through singing, dancing and conversations in This Variation and These Associations

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Artist Tino Sehgal’s two works, This Variation and These Associations, are coming to Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun for six weeks. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 11:23am, 22 Oct 2021Updated: 3:35pm, 22 Oct 2021

If you have already been to the “trust & confusion” exhibition at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage and Arts in Central, then you have probably already seen the artworks there that are neither objects nor performances in the usual sense.

For example, Mette Edwardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010 – ongoing), is experienced by having an entire book recited to you from memory by a trained guide at the exhibition.

Scarlet Yu and Xavier Le Roy’s Still in Hong Kong (2021) is a collection of 22 performers who approach visitors and offer to share with them their own personal stories, or special actions and postures.

This is more than just audience participation – it is art that intentionally confuses roles, that is a reaction to this age of online social networking and brings strangers together in ways that are outside our ordinary experiences.

Artist Tino Sehgal is an artist of German and Indian descent. Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

Now, five months after “trust & confusion” opened, one of the leading lights of the genre, Tino Sehgal, is enacting two of his best-known works in Tai Kwun for six weeks.