ReviewAn artist channels the tides of history: William Kentridge at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

Virgil’s Aeniad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, imperialism in Africa, and the Cultural Revolution in China are among the inspirations for William Kentridge’s evocative and poetic multimedia exhibition in Hong Kong. Remembrance of history has been central to the work of the Johannesburg artist, theatre director and animated-film maker. Yet the 66-year-old son of Jewish lawyers who defended anti-apartheid activists in South Africa has often used his work to warn that official history can be unreliable. His formative years spent under a racist, totalitarian regime have instilled in him a deep mistrust of ideology and authority, and a rejection of simplistic world views. The first work we see in the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth gallery is Ladder Horse (2021), a crude-looking wooden equestrian outline. The horse is a recurring motif in his work and represents the empty posturing and pride before a fall that often accompany claims to heroism. Next to it is a triptych six metres (20ft) across called Weigh All Tears (2020). The artist, who collects and use phrases like found objects, says he came across the saying “weigh all tears” during the coronavirus pandemic, when the weight of our collective sorrow has been so keenly felt. The images in the triptych suggest a sorrow accumulated through human experiences that go back decades, if not centuries. Painted fragments of maps of Europe and Africa, yellow with age, point to the legacies of colonisation. Superimposed on the canvas are black paper silhouettes of figures in a variety of animated poses. These, the artist has explained, are based on illustrations of Italian workers just after the second world war. Some are protesting, some toil silently, and one man, on the right, may well be moving to a new part of the country in search for a better life. On the opposite wall, steel heads of model Chinese revolutionaries refer to a very different kind of hope. The style will be recognisable to many in China as borrowed from the Maoist yangbanxi (model operas) that promoted “correct” ways to behave during the reign of terror that was the Cultural Revolution. On a black, steel laser cut-out of a woman’s face, Kentridge has added the phrase “There Is No Epiphany”, a rejection of the possibility of utopia that led to so many tragedies in modern history. ‘Something we have never seen before. And already know’: the NUNO paradox The weight of the Cultural Revolution is evoked again in a set of large tapestries that also look like paper silhouettes stuck on torn up maps. Like the triptych, they allude to multiple, incongruous times and places in history rather than offering a straightforward narrative. The maps are based on real road maps of Hebei province in China, published just after the Communist revolution of 1949, that Kentridge bought 20 years ago. They include tables written in Chinese listing distances between newly set-up communes, the words and numbers clearly legible on the hand-woven tapestries by a long-time collaborator, Marguerite Stephens and her weaving studio outside Johannesburg. In one of the tapestries, called Colleoni (2020), the black silhouette of Bartolomeo Colleoni, a mercenary and Captain General of Venice in the 1400s, can be seen on top of a Chinese map. In another playful shuffling of stories and fates, he is depicted as a figure on horseback in the same style as the Qianlong Emperor in China was painted by the Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione. A collection of bronze sculptures of varying sizes stand in different configurations around the two floors of the gallery. There are recurring motifs as if they are hieroglyphs that can be interpreted and read. Indeed, these may well form an invented language by an artist who has often expressed a scepticism about the power of words to represent the world. Their seemingly random subjects – an oak leaf, people in strange garments, a film camera – gain context once you’ve seen a film called Sibyl (2020) by Kentridge, included in the exhibition, that is based on his 2019 chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. The Sibyl was a seer mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid and referred to later by Dante at the end of his epic poem. She had the power to predict the future, but as soon as she wrote down her answers on oak leaves a wind would scatter them and the messages became scrambled. In the film, these partial answers, some hinting at profound warnings, some just total nonsense, are projected onto an encyclopaedia as it is being flipped through, accompanied by animated charcoal drawings and cyanotype prints of dancers and symbols that appeared in the original opera. Some of the words and phrases are laments that could be heard around the world today, such as: “Wait again for better people/ Wait again for better gods.” Others are more ambiguous and playful. The word “Resist” flashed urgently across the screen twice, only to be followed by “the third cup of coffee”. Outside the screening room, the bronze characters and objects from the film look as if they are waiting in the wings, ready to play their part. But all the world is not a stage in Kentridge’s imagining. This is an exhibition about the tides of history, but also about defying fate, expectations and orders. “William Kentridge: Weigh All Tears”, Hauser & Wirth, H Queen’s, 15-16/F, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Central, until May 29. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, the gallery is closed to the public. Artworks can be viewed online, and there will be a limited online screening of Sibyl in April on the gallery’s website.