‘Very significant for women’: how American artist Barbara Krueger’s art changed the life of a Hong Kong gallerist
- Amanda Hon, managing director of Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong, encountered Krueger’s work for the first time at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art
- The exhibition made Hon question what she wanted to do and who she was – ‘it was definitely the beginning of a journey for me’
American artist Barbara Kruger is best known for her black-and-white collages featuring bold white-on-red captions that pose questions about subjects such as power, gender relations and consumerism.
In 2000, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of her work, which had travelled from its original home in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Amanda Hon, managing director of art gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
My high school took us on a trip to the Whitney. I was living upstate (in New York) at the time. They chartered a bus and drove us down. It was my first experience of contemporary art. I was in ninth grade.
We’d been to the Met (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) several times – it was the obvious introduction to art history, starting at the beginning. I remember really liking Egyptian art when I was young, and I’d always loved drawing classes and art history; I just really like looking at things. But I’d never been to the Whitney – my family didn’t do contemporary art.
Going to the Whitney, you don’t know what to expect, especially if you don’t understand contemporary art. I understand why people think it’s hard to grasp.
I went in there, and Barbara Kruger had done this huge installation that took up the whole room, which is something you don’t usually see. It was palatable, not so obtuse, yet also very significant for women.
