Art Basel Hong Kong

Team Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2016 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. This marks our inaugural appearance at the fair. We will present works by Cory Arcangel, Ryan McGinley, Sam McKinniss, Tabor Robak and Samson Young. We will be located in booth 3C26. 

By Cory Arcangel, we will present a new diptych from his Photoshop Gradient series. The initial impulse for this body of work came from the artist’s desire to create and show “blank” photographs, and thus isolate and interrogate the crucial role of context and presentation in the contemporary era. Their titles consist of explicit instructions for the creation of the particular image: which default gradient to select and where, exactly, to click. This apparently egalitarian transparency butts up against their intentionally rarified status as unique art objects. The resultant tension challenges the nature of the art market while remaining an active participant therein.

By Ryan McGinley, we will show a salon of smaller-scale road trip works from the past three years, including his recent bodies of photos taken during the fall and winter in upstate New York. Here, their ensemble presentation explicates conceptual lenses through which the artist operates; his constructive, non-documentary mode of making photographs induces the erasure of dichotomous separations between the realms of the public and the private, and explores the temporal sensitivity of the natural environment. 

Intimately scaled paintings by Sam McKinniss mine a variety of images – from the French Baroque and Rococo, to his own cell phone snapshots, to film stills and promotional pictures of celebrities. The artist’s fascination with the overlap of sexuality and violence, lust and death, in contemporary representational media and popular culture permeates these works. Re-creations of Henri Fantin-Latour’s rose paintings, for example, emphasize the ephemerality and rapid decay of flowers, as well as their historic role in sexual transaction. A painting of Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, licking her black latex-clad hand, carries both the threat of violence and a direct erotic enticement.

A brand new work by Tabor Robak entitled Tidepool is a self-generating digital artwork that displays vibrantly colored, aqueous brushstrokes pouring contiguously over three HD flat screen televisions. Robak has custom-built and -programmed a computer, which makes random decisions within predetermined parameters to determine the palette and motion patterns of the “brushstrokes.” This work is therefore durationally infinite; the likelihood of any moment repeating itself is a statistical impossibility. Painting, the material as well as the physical act of its application, provide the unlikely subject matter for this artwork. By visually aping and recontextualizing the more traditional medium, Robak explores the powerful potential of computers as not only tools, but active agents in art-making – in a sense, he has taught a machine to paint. 

The Hong Kong-based sound artist Samson Young presents video documentation of his performance titled Muted Situations. This piece actualizes a series of proposals for sonic situations to be heard anew, achieved through a re-prioritization of different sound layers. Certain layers – in most cases the sonic “foreground” of such situations – are consciously muted or suppressed, and as a result the less-commonly-noticed layers are revealed. For example, he might conduct a string quartet to perform a Bach composition, but silence the sound produced by the traditional musical instruments, emphasizing the “incidental” sounds produced by the performance. Building admirably on the legacies of John Cage, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, his instructions for the situations range from specific directives, to more open approaches that require negotiation with the participants.

Art Basel Hong Kong takes place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, located at 1 Harbour Road in the Wan Chai district. VIP openings take place Tuesday, 22 March, from 3 to 8pm, and Wednesday, 23 March, from 1 to 9pm. The fair will be open to the public on Thursday, 24 March, from 1 to 9pm, Friday, 25 March, from 1 to 8pm, and Saturday, 26 March, from 11am to 6pm.