Anyone for (table) tennis?
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The art world takes up residence in Hong Kong for Art Basel
A mass ping-pong match on a giant doughnut-shaped table and the chance to become a citizen of an imaginary country were among the more offbeat interactive works at Hong Kong’s Art Basel.
The “Ping Pong Go-round” was a hit at the VIP preview of the fair, which showcases the rapid growth of the Asian art market.
The artist, Lee Wen from Singapore, challenged all-comers at his unorthodox table.
“It’s like a conference table with no borders,” Lee said. “Looking at the world now with globalism and as well as between men and women, the game is quite fair.”
A work by Chinese artist Sun Xun offered buyers the opportunity to spend up to US$13,000 (Bt422,000) on “citizenship” of his imaginary country, the Republic of Jing Bang – entitling them to one of an unknown number of aluminium suitcases complete with a passport, ID card and a national flag.
“It’s an ideology. He’s just creating a utopian country, so in this country you can tell lies, nobody knows what is truth and what is false,” said Edmund Chan of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute gallery.
With its knack for attracting a global mix of wealthy buyers, artists, gallery owners, VIPs and celebrities, Art Basel, which wrapped yesterday, was the catalyst for a champagne-soaked itinerary of art fairs, exhibitions and happenings around the city as its gallery scene went into overdrive.
The fair involved more than 240 galleries from 39 countries and territories showcasing paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and videos.
Well-known artists, including Japan’s Takashi Murakami and Britain’s Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin had a strong showing at the fair.
“Nowhere else on Earth will you find such a rich mix of high-quality work from the leading galleries and artists from both East and West,” Art Basel director Marc Spiegler said.
The show also curates selections from the Asia-Pacific region and works by emerging stars.
German artist Carsten Nicolai was commissioned by Art Basel to turn the 118-storey International Commerce Centre on the Kowloon peninsula into a glowing installation called “(alpha) Pulse”, one of many events to have been scheduled around the fair’s opening.
The event also highlighted the city’s own artists, directing its VIPs to more than 150 art events around the city.
“It’s vital for the Hong Kong local art scene,” said Bonhams’ Asia chairman Colin Sheaf, adding that the city’s thirst for contemporary art is growing.
Art Basel last year replaced Art HK, Hong Kong’s former art fair that was set up in 2008 before being taken over by the high-profile Swiss Art Basel franchise.
From licks to clicks
David Watkins,
Agence France-Presse
Formance artist challenges attention spans Whether licking
Louis Vuitton handbags or burying himself neck-high in a forest as people trample on his head, the works of performance artist Ryan McNamara demand attention in a world whose powers of concentration are apparently in decline.
“Attention span is something that I’ve been thinking of a lot,” said the New Yorker ahead of his first performance in Asia. It was part of Hong Kong’s Art Basel fair. “There’s all this noise about how attention spans are being shot by the Internet, but it’s not a completely negative shift,” said McNamara, whose more recent work has explored how our online lives are changing our reality.
He won the prestigious Performa 13 Malcolm McLaren award last year at New York’s performance art biennial with “Meem: A Story Ballet about the Internet”, which explored “our sense of what we do when we copy, steal, appropriate, create, repeat, plagiarise, mine or tweet”.
“The things we’re doing now, the way we communicate – they were dreams of mine from when I was ten years old about what the future would be like.
“And then when they happened, they actually seemed so mundane, they integrated into our lives so quickly that we didn’t have that moment of amazement. I’m exploring it in my work because I never had that moment of pause.”
Many things tend to happen at once in McNamara’s works, which are influenced by the MTV he grew up watching and involve music, dance, theatre, video and a heavy dose of showmanship.
A commission by luxury goods maker LVMH in 2010 saw him licking the brand’s famous handbags at Louis Vuitton’s New York boutique. Another solo show forced every viewer to become part of the piece.
Or there was McNamara’s “II” in which he and a collaborator were buried up to their necks in a forest floor and sang songs to passers by.
“This guy came along and kicked the other guy’s head. He backed up to see what he had kicked and stepped on my head. This was 15 minutes into the three hours that we were going to do it,” McNamara recalls.
He has been commissioned by Hong Kong philanthropists Stephen and Yana Peel to perform his latest piece, “Score” – described by McNamara as “20 performers, 20 performances in 20 minutes.”
The new performance will incorporate the various meanings of the word “Score” – including its use in music and also its connotations of a contest or game – in exploring how the art of paying attention is changing.
“I’m not a tech artist – everything I make is pretty much something you could have made 50 years ago. It’s important to take technology out of its context to examine it, because it has to work with the human body,” he says.
“But yes, I’m looking to create a complete shift in the room. If so I’ll be very happy.”
