Billy Tang
Billy Tang is a the senior curator at Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai)
1. Opera for Animals at Para Site (Hong Kong)
I travelled from Shanghai after co-curating my first institutional exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum and arrived in Hong Kong straight into the busy art fair week.
It was a pretty intense experience having just opened an experimental butchery, plus a fully-functioning bar on the top floor of our museum, as well as a whole body of other new works by Tobias Rehberger for his solo exhibition that we worked on together. Going from this into Hong Kong, I was confronted with a typically dense encyclopaedic exhibition that filled the whole space of Para Site to the brim.
In the midst of this, I found solace in the work “Sirens” by Adam Nankervis. It was a row of tender photographs documenting a daily ritual of impromptu artworks made between Adam and his partner David Mendalla.
2. Wang Xu, Garden of Seasons at Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles)
Wang Xu can be friendly to the point of being too intense. When I first met him, he gifted me water jug that he handed to me at an opening. I believe this was the first ever present I have received from another man who is not my father.
Somehow through these anecdotes I hope to convey to you the kind of strange sincerity and seriousness of doing something good, that reflects back into his artwork and projects.
They are old-school in terms of always being rooted in the principles and lessons of sculpture - but they extend outwards into the myriad relationships forming together the ambient condition that envelopes or leaves an imprint on the work’s final shape.
3. Closing Ceremony Magazine Launch of the Issue ‘Americano’ at Bank (Shanghai)
Technically this was not an exhibition because there were no official artists involved in the making of the project and it lasted only one day. It was a magazine launch - but in a short space of time, they improvised a series of interventions using the work of photographers from around the world to create objects, backdrops, and interiors that somehow create a mis en scene of a hybrid airport to somewhere. Same Paper is led by the Shanghai-based imagemaker and photographer Xiaopeng Yuan, who operates between the commercial culture of image and his own independent projects and interventions that reflect and abstract the world views created by this industry. I met Xiaopeng through my partner Peng Ke - who I think together represent a very important generation of imagemakers and thinkers exploring the phenomenon of image culture and its material effect on the environment unfolding here. They are people who started making images as kids, experiencing the ways people from the countryside came the shiny new city and found gaps to create their own spaces and culture from within. It’s a style of photography I’m trying to studying and understand more about - but generally the philosophy is a type of baroque countryside modernism that has no added props or artificial intervention, because the way materials and characters coalesce together here are crazy and strange enough.