Art as acupuncture: Antony Gormley on statues Hong Kong rooftops will host

Antony Gormley is a sculptor who evangelises about the provocative power of his chosen art form. He has dotted diverse landscapes with statues that pose questions about relationships between people, time and places: from a barren, remote salt lake in Western Australia to a plot squeezed between Osaka office blocks and a grassy knoll above abandoned coal mines in northeast England, where his Angel of the North spreads its giant, steel wings.

In 2007, he started placing 31 statues, loosely cast from his own naked body, temporarily on top of buildings in major cities. They have been in London, Rotterdam, New York, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and each place responded to the statues differently.

“A project like this is a diagnostic tool. It’s like acupuncture. You poke a collective body like a city and depending on the nature of the body, you get a reaction,” he says via Skype from his London studio.

“In the Netherlands, the reaction was most ‘normal’, in so far as people were delighted in the temporary visitors,” says the prominent British artist. In Rio, the reception was less positive. He recalls seeing a sign saying “bad art” tied to one of the statues, and chewing gum hardening on others.

The project, called Event Horizon, will be unveiled in Hong Kong on November 19. It has already proved provocative during the two years it’s taken to bring the statues to the city. The statues were meant to have been displayed last year, but Hongkong Land pulled out as main sponsor after a J.P. Morgan employee jumped to his death from the roof of a Hongkong Land property in February 2014.

Hongkong Land did not comment directly, but news reports quoted unnamed sources saying that J.P. Morgan was of the view that having Gormley’s life-size statues placed on rooftops would be too much of a reminder of that particular tragedy.