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Ashlyn Chak

Louise Bourgeois is having a moment in Asia thanks to a major touring museum exhibition named after one of her embroideries: “I Have Been to Hell and Back. And Let Me Tell You, It Was Wonderful”.
The much-talked-about survey started at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in September 2024, travelled to Taipei’s Fubon Art Museum, where it is now, and will move on to Seoul in autumn.
Hong Kong may not be part of the tour but it, too, has a new exhibition that sheds light on the late French artist’s inner world.
Called “Soft Landscape”, the collection of 19 pieces at Hauser & Wirth’s gallery space in Central is a deep dive into how her fascination with the human body inspired her artmaking and psychoanalytic writing.


Eight of the works have never been shown in Asia before, from the small sculpture Spider (2000) to the three-metre-long (10-foot) bronze Mamelles (fountain) (1991), which spews water from the nipples of its row of female breasts.
The 52cm-tall (20-inch) steel and marble Spider is very different from Bourgeois’ gargantuan Maman series of towering arachnids, heavy with eggs, that have become the artist’s best-known symbol. More realistic, Spider’s arachnid stands guard over a large marble egg – inspired by an ostrich egg that someone gave Bourgeois – conveying the hefty burden of motherhood.
Bourgeois often described the spider as an ode to her mother, a tapestry restorer who died when Bourgeois was 21. But it is also a symbol of herself, a mother of three children.
While her spiders often portray motherhood as an isolated, onerous experience requiring great strength, Mamelles (fountain) – mamelles mean “teats” in French – symbolises a benign and giving maternal presence.
“Bourgeois also made other pieces where the mother spilled the milk on the floor, meaning a bad mother,” says Philip Larratt-Smith, curator of the foundation that manages Bourgeois’ estate and of the Hong Kong exhibition. “She was always looking at herself and evaluating whether she was a good mother or not.”

Motherhood was part of how her own body helped her tap into her unconscious, says Larratt-Smith, who worked as the artist’s literary archivist in the final eight years of her life.
“The exhibition title really means the body: the landscape as a metaphor for the body, and the body as a metaphorical landscape. In the classic philosophical divide of body versus mind, Bourgeois was decidedly on the side of the body.
“She felt that the body was predominant and that, through her body and illnesses or reactions to people, she had access to her unconscious. It gave her insight into the underlying mechanisms that motivated her artwork and the way that she lived.”


Even when Bourgeois painted landscapes – there are a number of examples in the Hong Kong show – they were often related to the body.
“It’s a particular iconographic trick of hers, to fuse these two things. A lot of her landscapes have hollows, cavities and recesses. So do her depictions of the human body. There is always this doubling of landscape and body in Bourgeois’ work as a whole,” Larratt-Smith says.
“Soft Landscape” takes over the entire ground floor of Hauser & Wirth’s space in Central, including the usually private viewing room in the rear of the gallery, where Mamelles (fountain) is situated.
“It functions almost like a kind of grotto. You’re meant to hear the water a little before stepping into the space and seeing what it is. I think this is a nice, mysterious effect that Bourgeois would have liked,” Larratt-Smith says.
“Life is organised around what is hollow,” Bourgeois once said, according to Larratt-Smith - a comment informed by her gender and her observations of the body, the womb, the unconscious and the subconscious.


You can sense the feeling of isolation, and also the need for space, in Bourgeois’ untitled wood reliefs, painted as landscapes inhabited by biomorphic forms.
The Lair series, meanwhile, features sculptural environments that were first created in the early 1960s as she returned to her artistic practice after years engulfed in depression and psychoanalysis. Resembling cocoons, these shelters are psychological spaces, according to Bourgeois.
“The lair is a protected place you can enter to take refuge,” she wrote. “And it has a back door through which you can escape. Otherwise it’s not a lair. A lair is not a trap.”
Portraying this aloneness and spatiality helps the Hong Kong show stand out from the larger exhibition touring Asia at the moment, which chronicles Bourgeois’ life in terms of her relationships with other people.


Bourgeois is clearly influenced by the people in her life, turning her personal relationships, experiences and deep-seated sensitivities into subject matter for her art, Larratt-Smith says. Her work, however, is also immensely private and intrinsically entwined with her constant meditation on identity, childhood and womanhood.
“Louise Bourgeois – Soft Landscape”, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, G/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central, Central. Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 7pm. Until May 10.


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Spider sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ inner world revealed in Hong Kong exhibition

Spider (2000) is one of Louise Bourgeois’ works on show at Hauser & Wirth’s “Louise Bourgeois: Soft Landscape” exhibition, in Central, Hong Kong. Photo: Christopher Burke

Untitled (2004), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke

Lips (verso: Sphincter) (1993), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Bourgeois in her Brooklyn studio in 1993. Photo: Philipp Hugues Bonan, courtesy of The Easton Foundation

Landscape (2002), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Untitled (1993), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Lair (1986), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke 

Le père et les 3 fils (#3) (2006) – meaning “the father and the three sons” – by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Timothy Doyon

Spider (2000), by Louise Bourgeois. Photo: Christopher Burke

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Detail from Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar.  Photo:  courtesy of Musée national Picasso-Paris

Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi’s 2011 portrait of Pablo Picasso and Robert Doisneau’s 1952 photograph of the Spanish-French artist at the entrance to an exhibition of work by him alongside modern and contemporary Asian art at Hong Kong’s M+ museum. Photo: Lok Cheng

Figures by the Sea (1931) by Pablo Picasso, on display in Hong Kong. Photo: courtesy of Musée national Picasso-Paris

Joy of Life (1969) by Luis Chan, one of the Asian modern and contemporary artists represented in the M+ exhibition. Photo: courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) by Pablo Picasso. Photo: courtesy of Musée national Picasso-Paris

Woman with a Bird (1949) by Wifredo Lam. Photo: courtesy of Sotheby’s

Massacre in Korea (1951) by Pablo Picasso. Photo: courtesy of Musée national Picasso-Paris

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Puruntatameri prepares ochre at the workshop of Jilamara Arts. Photo: Kylie Knott  

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Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is a deep dive into how the late artist’s fascination with the human body inspired her art


Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is a deep dive into how the late artist’s fascination with the human body inspired her art.


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Spider sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ inner world revealed in Hong Kong exhibition

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is a deep dive into how the late artist’s fascination with the human body inspired her art

Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is a deep dive into how the late artist’s fascination with the human body inspired her art