The Collector | Hong Kong picks first female artist for solo show at Venice Biennale – it’s about time
Hong Kong-born, Los Angeles-based Shirley Tse’s choice marks a welcome series of firsts for the city
Getting Shirley Tse to represent Hong Kong at the 2019 Venice Biennale is to be applauded. She’s a woman. She’s older than those chosen in the past. She’s international. And, most importantly, she is an artist of such calibre that one cannot dismiss the choice as mere tokenism.
Since 2009, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, which is in charge of the Hong Kong Pavilion in Venice, has adopted the format of a site-specific solo exhibition instead of a group show. That gives one artist the opportunity to really shine at the world’s biggest and most important contemporary art exhibition. Samson Young Kar-fai’s “Songs for Disaster Relief”, for example, was seen by 130,000 people in the Italian city last year.
It is an opportunity that has never before been given to an artist who is not male. That’s not just the council’s fault, however. Since 2013, the pavilion has been co-presented by M+, the upcoming museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and M+ curators have been making the pick in consultation with the council.
Not only has the pavilion been devoid of diversity, critics lament, it is also a “black box” operation that blocks out the rest of the arts community. (Before 2013, the pavilion’s curators were chosen following an open invitation for proposals.)
Now the council and M+ seem to be listening.
For the 2017 edition, Ying Kwok was brought in as guest curator, which added an outside voice to the M+ production of Young’s exhibition. For 2019, another outsider, Christina Li, has been made guest curator, andshe got to pick the featured artist.
“I thought, ‘It’s got to be a woman,’” says Li, the former curator of non-profit art space Spring Workshop. “I wanted to look beyond artists of my generation [those born in the 1970s and 80s]. Those we have sent to Venice in recent years were all about the same age. I want to show the world that Hong Kong’s contemporary art scene is broad. When I looked at what Shirley’s done all these years, I thought she fit the bill perfectly.”
