Influenced by the work of French avant-gardiste René Daumal, a show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong attempts to reimagine death and decay as regenerative states
In his poetry collection Le Contre-Ciel (The Counter-Heaven, 1936), French avant-gardiste René Daumal describes the emancipatory potential of negation, reimagining decay and death as regenerative states that might overcome ego-driven delusion. Invoking such ideas, curator Olivia Shao’s impressive exhibition fills the tenebrous interiors of Empty Gallery with works by 25 artists from around the world, alongside a selection of Chinese antiques.
Like the eponymous book, Le Contre-Ciel is animated by elemental forces and the interplay of light and dark. Encapsulating these central motifs, Liz Deschenes’s 1928 – 1898 (2019) is a silver-gelatin photogram produced by exposing photosensitive paper to the night sky. Grey smudges that may be mistaken for fingerprints on the inky substrate are in fact indexical traces of the moon and stars, mapping their relative positions and the contingent conditions from which the work arose.
Another form of cartography can be found in Mel Chin’s oil-on-steel Polycentric Multi-Polar Paradigm (2005), in which three multicoloured jellyfishlike blobs float within concentric translucent domes. The work presents an abstracted view of power: the three blobs stand for Saudi Arabia, China and the United States, with population denoted in pink, military budget in green and ideological influence in white.
Many of the works engage with notions of contested authority. Screened in a separate room, Francis Alÿs’s Cuentos patrióticos (1997) references an act of protest in 1968, when civil servants forced to gather in Mexico City’s main square to show support for President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s unpopular administration chose to bleat like sheep instead. In the looped black-and-white video – soundtracked by a tolling bell that resonates throughout the gallery – the artist circumambulates a flagpole in the square followed by a growing flock of sheep. Moving in single file, they eventually form a closed circle to the point where the sheep appear to lead the man – a switch that nods to the fluidity of power. In a corner of the main gallery, Antek Walczak’s lambent Culture LV11 (2017) is a copper sheet silkscreened with barely visible images of $100 bills. The surface of the piece was treated with heat and corrosive liquids to give it the appearance of a relic, hinting at the artificial yet dominant systems of value that undergird fiat money and art objects alike. Elsewhere, authority figures are fragmented or spectral, as in Yu Ji’s Flesh in Stone – Ghost #2 (2018), a wall-mounted sculpture of a hand reaching towards emptiness, and Trisha Donnelly’s I Am Taking Your Morning (2003), a chilling recording of a female voice claiming possession of ‘everything you see’ when the sun rises.
Invisible order gives way to visible chaos in Mr. O’s Book of the Dead (1973), a video produced by experimental filmmaker Chiaki Nagano and choreographer Kazuo Ohno. In the video, Ohno and a troupe of dancers enact a series of ritualistic, bizarre and ecstatic gestures across abandoned temples and desolate hillsides. This grotesque performance from the founder of butoh – the ‘dance of darkness’ in Japanese – is an inspired inclusion that chimes with Daumal’s morbid poetry.
Although the original text is driven by the desire for revelation, Shao’s Le Contre-Ciel frequently turns to the obscure. Displayed on a plinth are three carved cong dating to the Neolithic period. No one knows the exact purpose of these ancient Chinese tomb objects, granting them a sense of totemic mystery. The penchant for the esoteric continues in the smaller downstairs space, where Bruce Conner’s Untitled (1970) presents a degraded image encased inside a dirty glass bottle. Installed on the floor is Tom Thayer’s Rock Symphony (2024), a trio of stones attached to mechanised rods that tap out a code of clinks and thunks on metal discs. On the wall behind this piece, Wucius Wong’s beautiful ink-painting River Journey #2 (1986) renders a surging channel as negative space, with finely traced mountains receding into the misty background. Making use of the classical ‘leave-white’ technique, Wong balances form and void to express an elemental mystique.
A moment of clarity comes in the form of Tang Kwok-hin’s video Riddles of Light pt.ii (2015), depicting a disembodied hand manoeuvring a teacup so that it catches the light. In Tang’s image of a moon in a teacup, one sees the minute- ness of human endeavour within an infinitely expanding and unknowable universe.
Le Contre-Ciel at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, 24 March – 25 May
