Featured Events in Hong Kong in March 2024 (June Updated)

A new publication ‘Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews’, edited by James Hoff, will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers on 25 June 2024. Ligon’s solo exhibition ‘Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place’ will be held at Fitzwilliam Museum (the University of Cambridge’s principal museum) from 20 September 2024 – 2 March 2025. Alongside his paintings, sculptures and prints, the artist will curate a series of site-specific interventions throughout the museum aimed at peeling back layers of its exhibition history. About the exhibition ‘Stranger #98’ (2023) is from Ligon’s Stranger paintings, his longest running series, which first began in 1997 and renders excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, ‘Stranger in the Village.’ In the text, Baldwin recounts his experience of visiting the small mountain village of Leukerbad, Switzerland, where he encountered villagers who had never met a Black man before him. He connects the experiences to global structures of racism, colonialism and white supremacy and analyses how they manifest in both the United States and Europe. In the Stranger series, Ligon stencils text onto the canvas with oil stick, creating a relief made of sentences. As the stencil is moved across the canvas, oil stick residue and smudges from previous words mark the canvas, obscuring some of the text. The text is further abstracted by the addition of coal dust—a black, gravel like waste product of coal mining—to the surface of the painting. Through the work’s varying degrees of legibility, Ligon evokes both hypervisibility and invisibility in the Black experience and explores language’s inability to fully articulate issues surrounding race, citizenship and subjecthood. As Ligon remarks, ‘The essay is not only about race relations but about what it means to be a stranger anywhere.’ [1] The new Static series sees Ligon building on this technique but to more abstract ends. Like his Stranger paintings, Ligon stencils excerpts from Baldwin’s text; however, here he uses white oil stick on a white gesso ground, subsequently rubbing black oil stick on the raised forms. In applying pigment to the overlapping layers of letters, the artist creates different degrees of abstraction and emphases their illegibility. The resulting compositions come to form a visual representation of static: the absence of a coherent transmission signal on a radio or television and the resulting noise. This series questions whether language--in our ‘post-truth’ world—can function as a way to describe the cultural moment we find ourselves in. Similarly in his untitled works on paper, Ligon pushes the limits of abstraction by employing the traditional rubbing technique of frottage. Using a single Stranger paintings as a textured surface on which Kozo paper is placed, the artist rubs carbon and graphite to translate the blurred text from canvas to paper. The spontaneous forms that emerge build upon the idea of ‘improvisational abstraction,’ which is central to the artist’s practice, exploring the tension between accident and intention, conscious and subconscious. All three series offer a reflection on, in Ligon’s words, ‘the things that can be said and the things that cannot be said, or the things that are difficult to say, or that remain opaque despite this will to be clear and explain...’[2] About the artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985). In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, Glenn Ligon: America, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important solo exhibitions include Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); Glenn Ligon: Call and Response, Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); and Glenn Ligon – Some Changes, The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (traveled internationally) (2005). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2017); and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool (2015). Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta XI (2002). [1] Glenn Ligon quoted in Jason Moran, ‘Glenn Ligon’, Interview Magazine, June 8, 2009, unpaginated. [2] ‘Glenn Ligon: In the Studio,’ Brooklyn, New York, 2021 © Glenn Ligon / Hauser & Wirth.

Warhol was one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century, and his work’s staying power has been augmented by its enormous diversity. Over the course of four decades, he continually reinvented his practice, moving from his intimate drawings of the 1950s to iconic silkscreened Pop paintings of celebrities, consumer goods, and disasters in the 1960s; portraits of the social elite in the 1970s; and photographs, television shows, and collaborative projects in the 1980s. This heterogeneity has seen Warhol’s legacy inform and inspire numerous contemporary artists. Warhol’s paintings (1963), Mao (1973), and (1979), and his film of Donyale Luna (1965–66), redefined portraiture in relation to contemporary style, power, and celebrity. In addition, (1964) and (1981) brought commercial design and financial icons into the realm of fine art, while his (1964) and series (1978–79) introduced new modes of abstraction. The new styles of representation that Warhol developed and his challenging of gender norms both resonate with the thematic centrality of identity, glamour, and performance to photographs by Nan Goldin, which here include (1972). Jean-Michel Basquiat’s double portrait of himself with Warhol, (1982), was made shortly after Basquiat first met his idol, while (1984–85) is one of more than 160 paintings on which the pair collaborated—it also saw Warhol return to painting by hand. As often as Warhol experimented with new art-making strategies, he also reimagined his public persona through techniques of doubling, masking, and recording. In his (1986), he alters his appearance by donning silver wig and sunglasses, also obscuring his features in shadow. Foregrounding an uneasy affinity with this approach, Douglas Gordon’s (2008) comprises a commercial reproduction of a self-portrait of a bewigged Warhol that is partially burned, split, and mounted to a mirrored background. (2023) by Urs Fischer employs post-Warholian strategies of appropriation and transformation of commercial imagery, while in (2024), Nathaniel Mary Quinn interprets Polaroids and paintings of Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from Warhol’s series, along with a Campbell’s soup can. Zeng Fanzhi’s double portrait of himself and Warhol in (2000) imagines the two artists—their features hidden behind identical masks—standing in a field of flowers, as two jets fly overhead. A new painting by Takashi Murakami resonates with Warhol’s by abstracting from nature to create an instantly recognizable form, while (2012) by Alex Israel recalls the Pop artist’s embrace of artificiality. (2023) by Derrick Adams embraces popular culture, Untitled (2010) by Richard Prince employs a humor conversant with Warhol’s, and Sterling Ruby’s (2014) is inspired in part by Warhol’s paintings. Through these works, brings to light unexpected juxtapositions with artists whose work “thinks” through, with, and beyond Warhol’s oeuvre, demonstrating its enduring relevance.

Supper Club is a unique week-long event set to debut in Hong Kong at the Fringe Club from March 25 to March 26, 2024. It offers a fresh concept by combining an art fair, a social space, and an interactive platform for engaging with contemporary art. The event promises to redefine the traditional art fair model by creating a relaxed atmosphere for art appreciation and socializing. Visitors can explore the carefully curated selection of 22 international galleries, each showcasing their works in different areas of the Fringe Club. The concept was conceived by Willem Molesworth, Ysabelle Cheung of PHD Group, and Alex Chan of THE SHOPHOUSE, aiming to provide a new perspective on art consumption. Extended evening hours allow guests to wander through the event's interconnected spaces at their leisure. For more details and ticket prices ranging from HK$105.99 to HK$158.99, interested individuals can reach out via email at info@supperclubhongkong.com.