Fair value for viewers
In the first of a series on how artists are increasingly looking to put the audiences at the center of their vocation, visits the immersive and participatory projects in HK’s ongoing art fairs.
by calling out their recommendations. “Much like how we as citizens watch world leaders make decisions, the onlookers stand by with bated breath as they watch the tower progress, clapping as blocks are stacked and gasping as the tower shakes,” Lo adds, summing up the effect she is hoping to have on her audiences.
Cultural entrepreneur Magnus Renfrew, who launched the parent edition of ABHK and now runs the art consultancy ARTHQ/Group, says performance-based and participatory activities often provide a welcome break from the “booth-to-booth experience” in art fairs. “Sometimes the architecture of art fairs could be a little bit on the repetitive side. One could be breaking these up with installations, but also breaking these up temporally with performances,” which, he says, have the ability “to grab people’s attention”.
One such captivating show is Caroline Garcia’s performance piece,
at Art Central. Dressed in an ethnic Filipino costume, complete with elaborate head gear, Garcia — an Australian of Filipino origin — dances in sync with her own digital dancing image in a video inside a vitrine with blinds that are manipulated to allow different degrees of visibility. She seems to scrutinize the faces of the audience crowding around the enclosure with a glacial look emanating from her extraordinarily large, pitiless eyes, turning the discomfiture she might be experiencing herself — from dancing inside a box in a strange costume, under the consumerist gazes from strangers like a caged animal —right back on to the audience.
“My intention is to give visibility to the marginalized community groups that are often disregarded and unacknowledged when it comes to the general idea of a ‘Filipino’,” says Garcia. The gaps in her 40-minute performance piece are a key to understanding her activism. “Since the performance consists of a lot of still and quiet moments, the audience can be quite aggressive, in the sense that they want something to happen,” says Garcia. “It’s their desire to see me perform my culture and to consume it,” — an urge she says she deals with by “inciting those feelings and confronting an audience’s gaze of objectification and the tendency to exoticize”.
Virtual tourism
An art fair set-up can provide a great venue for such activism-propelled art projects, allowing artists to directly solicit viewer support and encourage them to endorse a worthy cause. In a video presented at ABHK by HTC Vive (also accessible through the app store VIVEPORT), the performance artist Marina Abramovic shares a recent VR experience which gave her a feel of navigating the odds in a severely global warming-affected future.
“VR is known for its ability to generate empathy, more so than any other existing medium, given its all-immersive nature,” says Victoria Chang, director of HTC Vive, explaining the effectiveness of this new technological medium to strike at people’s nerve cells and goad them into action. “Marina Abramovic very accurately captures the nature of this new medium when creating Rising, a work that is empathetic and enables the viewer to have a direct interaction with her avatar.”
Multimedia artist Wong Kit-yi takes the business of engaging with her audience so seriously that she wants her artworks “to literally get inside viewers’ bodies”. Buyers of her works were given a choice of outright purchase or going for a “99year lease”, referencing the detritus of a British colonial policy that Wong says “gave new authority and legitimacy to an old Chinese tradition that only male members of the clan could own the family property” in her native New Territories.
At the a.m. space gallery booth in ABHK, medical professionals in lab coats were seen taking cheek swabs from Wong’s patrons. The certificate of the ownership of Wong’s art would be encrypted in the DNA samples thus collected. These could be preserved or sequenced several decades later to ascertain ownership of the piece, said Wong. There was no telling, however, if setting up an elaborate theater with a DNA sampling station and provisions for Karaoke-singing in the same space, was meant to underscore the pointlessness, ultimately, of trying to own a work of art.
Entering a landscape painting
The growing volume of interactive and immersive content in art fairs may not be an unmixed blessing, though. As Renfrew says, “People have a lot of visual overload to deal with at art fairs. As a result sometimes the more quiet, reflective sort of works get overlooked in the visual noise.”
Still, there seems to be room for the relatively understated immersive experience within the framework of an art fair. Wu Chi-tsung’s Wire V and Still Life installations at the ongoing ABHK make for very fine examples of what a minimal use of traditional knowhow can achieve in the time of post-digital era sensory overloads.
Wu, whose works are a tribute to the traditional Chinese literati school of landscape paintings, shan shui, has used a wire mesh to make onscreen analog projections in a dark room, highlighting sections of the landscape thus created by turns and playing up the details in unlimited combinations.
Wu says the idea was to give the audiences a feel of having entered a traditional Chinese ink landscape, in order “to show how image media can transform our viewing and imagination, reinterpreting the idea of traditional landscapes”.
In his Still Life video installation, a chrysanthemum, painted in traditional Chinese watercolor style, slowly emerges on to the screen — the duration of the film corresponding to the drawing of the image in real time. The series, says Wu, is intended to “start a dialogue and reconnect” people on the run with the finer elements of nature. The deliberate slowing down of the pace at which the image of the flower gets more distinct on the screen, he says, is an attempt to re-package the aesthetic of the idealized world of shan shui paintings “through a contemporary medium and artistic language”.
Then are the so-called materialistic, perennially-on-their-toes, Hong Kong audiences ready to slow down to sample the likes of Wu’s offerings, moment by elongated moment?
ABHK director Adeline Ooi agrees that it’s indeed easy to miss the timebased pieces in an art fair because of their ephemeral nature. Then, she adds, “the Hong Kong audience is really special. There is curiosity, and to be curious to begin with is already a good thing. We live in such hectic times, it’s easy to walk past something and just switch off. That always drives us to do more and better for the viewing public.”