Art Basel Hong Kong

Past
May 19 – May 23, 2021
Hong Kong

For Art Basel Hong Kong, Pace will present works by 23 leading 20th and 21st-century artists, from innovators of postwar art—including Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg—to contemporary artists Sam Gilliam, Robert Nava, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joel Shapiro, Arlene Shechet, and Kiki Smith.

Pace's presentation also brings focus to leading artists from Korea and Japan, including Yoshitomo Nara, Kohei Nawa, and Lee Ufan, and China’s contemporary masters Li Songsong, Song Dong, Hong Hao, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhang Xiaogang, and Liu Jianhua, among others.

Art Fair Details

Art Basel Hong Kong
May 21 – 23, 2021

Online Preview

May 18, 2021

Above: Zhang Xiaogang, Mirror No. 1 (detail), 2018, oil on paper with paper and cotton rope collage, 108 cm × 90 cm (42-1/2" × 35-7/16") © Zhang Xiaogang

Location

Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center
1 Expo Dr, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
Booth 1D26

Connect

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery
(opens in a new window) @artbasel

Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol and members of The Factory: Paul Morrissey, director; Joe Dallesandro, actor; Candy Darling, actor; Eric Emerson, actor; Jay Johnson, actor; Tom Hompertz, actor; Gerard Malanga, poet; Viva, actress; Paul Morrissey; Taylor Mead, actor; Brigid Polk, actress; Joe Dallesandro; Andy Warhol, artist, New York, October 30, 1969, three gelatin silver prints mounted to linen, each image, 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches, each paper, 8 x 10 inches, mount, 8 x 30 inches, Edition 40 of 50

Richard Avedon

One of the most iconic photographs of the late 1960s, Richard Avedon’s group portrait of Andy Warhol and the members of his Factory bristles with energy from its linear composition to its queer challenge to the medium of photographic portraiture. For Avedon, the portrait photograph was capturing a personal essence by a photographer and a mode of performance for the sitter. On the nature of this practice, Avedon has said: “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.”

Avedon invited Warhol and his entourage to be photographed in his studio, rather than in Warhol’s, which had recently moved from its original “Silver Factory” to a location in the Decker Building overlooking Union Square. The result is an atmosphere of both sterility and ﬁerce autonomy: the photograph reads both as a picture of a group and a series of individual portraits. The sitters pose in various stages of undress, standing contrapposto and staring out at the viewer. Joe Dalessandro, an actor in movies such as Flesh, Trash, and Heat, appears as his own double: on the far left, he stands, naked, with director Paul Morrissey; on the far right, he stands, clothed, next to Warhol himself. Avedon’s portrait functions not only as a snapshot of an inﬂuential group but also as a microcosm of a sea change within art, culture, and identity-creation in America.

Alexander Calder

Mary Corse

Over the last ﬁve decades, Mary Corse has investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction. Her pioneering approach to painting explores the medium’s capacity to utilize and refract light through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works. For the artist, the essence of painting addresses underlying structures of visual experience and their presence within space and time. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a visual relationship between viewer and canvas.

Corse has pursued an interest in perception since the late 1960s when she began incorporating glass microspheres—an industrial material used to enhance pavement markings—into the surfaces of her paintings. This element, present in Untitled

(White Inner Band with White Sides, Beveled) (2021), reﬂects and refracts light depending on the viewer’s position relative to the optically rich surface.

Song Dong

Working with humble materials, Song Dong constructs installations using the detritus of old Beijing. Discarded furniture and parts of demolished courtyard homes are easily identiﬁable in Dong’s most recent work. These collaged remnants of people’s homes carry with them a complex history of a city and the lives of its people.

In taking a closer look, viewers become unintentional voyeur: imagining the artist’s subject’s distant homes, personal stories and perhaps identifying shared experiences, priming one to think of the future.

Sam Gilliam

Known for his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded the tenets of Abstract Expressionism , Sam Gilliam is considered one of the great innovators in post-war American painting. Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. Since completing his art education in the early 1960s, Gilliam has been creating richly colored abstract compositions using watercolors on Japanese washi paper. The techniques that Gilliam has explored in watercolor—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—have exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. As Gilliam’s practice matured, his watercolors began to play a powerful role in shaping his own approach to the canvas, developing a new sense of freedom and an embrace of abstraction.

Gilliam’s most recent watercolors expand on his practice, making color palpable, a physical, textural presence that seems to belong more to our world than to the surface of the painting. Color and support are inseparable: the paper becomes the color, rather than a vessel for it. Like his draped canvases, the creases and folds of the fabric evoke a sense of depth which is echoed in the composition of each watercolor painting. In Untitled (2020), vertical washes of color on each ﬂattened surface create the illusion of folds or pleats within rich and rhythmic planes of light and dark that bleed and overlap. Like much of Gilliam’s work, both chance and choice play an important role, echoing the artist’s love of jazz, with its improvisatory ethos and spontaneity.

Hong Hao

As one of the key ﬁgures in the development of Chinese contemporary art, Hong Hao has observed modern society through keen artistic intuition. His artistic explorations have been closely connected to the shifting value systems of present-day society and how to express these social changes throughout his work. The artist’s various practices reﬂect a powerful yearning to intervene in society, concealed beneath a cold, restrained aesthetic, which has grown over the past 30 years of Hao’s creative exploration to construct an integrated visual and conceptual practice.

In the Reﬂections series, a cycle of works on canvas begun in 2015, Hong Hao expands upon his unorthodox use of scanning. Translating scanned aggregations of quotidian objects to canvas, the artist strips down his material possessions into simple geometric shapes and forms. Reduced to outlines and emptied of their material content, these objects reveal themselves to be metaphors for consumption, which is at once an abstract concept and a tangible material one. In the formally sophisticated painting Reﬂection No. 34 (2021), these possessions are molded in gold foil on canvas, the lustrous material putting traditional ideas of opulence and wealth in conversation with contemporary ones. In the work’s golden surface, our habits of consumption are reﬂected back at us.

Liu Jianhua

Liu Jianhua’s practice has pushed the boundaries of porcelain as an artistic medium for decades. His Blank Paper series underscore an increasingly philosophical approach toward form and abstraction, which has characterized his practice over the last decade. Resulting in a full distillation of artistic form, thin sheets of white porcelain hang on the wall. Uncannily realistic in their mimicry of pristine sheets of paper, the works demand more than a perfunctory glance to see they are made of porcelain. However, in the process of discovering the sculptures’ true medium, assessments and assumptions are reevaluated and the viewer is able to reconsider the form of objects free from preconceptions of their function. Though the works allow for revelations, they offer the viewer no grand narratives, rather inviting them to make their own impressions.

Lee Ufan

Painted in 2015, the present work belongs to Lee Ufan’s ongoing Dialogue series, which began in 2006 deepened the artist’s longstanding investigation of painting as a conduit for meditative self-transcendence. Here, Lee loaded a broad brush with paint of different values, creating a color scale ranging from dark gray to white. The gradient of the paint allowed the brushstrokes to dissolve into the white canvas despite its dense, impasto nature. Lee thus creates an ambiguous painterly mark that is both material and abstract, three-dimensional yet optically ﬂat. Gray dominates Lee’s early Dialogue works, primarily because of the color’s versatility, subtlety, and ambivalence that, to Lee, “express[es] a vague, ephemeral, and uncertain world.”

Reinforced by chromatic calibrations, the gestural syntax of the present work encourages perceptual doubt and introspective pause. The repetition of minimal marks acts as a record of Lee’s embodied experience of creation as well as the temporal and spatial coordinates of his process. In a ritualistic approach reminiscent of Buddhist practices, Lee syncs the application of paint to his breath—a subtle dynamism intimated with remarkable economy by four brushstrokes, whose placement along the canvas’s four edges draw the eye around the work’s perimeter. The expanse at the heart of the painting is left deliberately unmarked, offering, Lee explains, an “open site, a vivid ﬁeld of contact and interrelationships brought about through minimal interventions.” For him, this space is infused with yohaku or “emptiness (resonant space),” which, unlike the Western notion of emptiness as total vacuity or nothingness, conceives of emptiness as a dynamic site hosting reverberations and tensions. The central, blank ﬁeld of this work, consequently, enables a dialogue—as promised by its title—to emerge between the canvas’s center and periphery, its painted and unpainted surface. Through this exchange, Lee observes, “it is possible to sense poetry, criticism, and the transcendent in the space.”

Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara rose to prominence in the late 1990s, becoming internationally renowned for his emotionally complex paintings of figures set against monochromatic backgrounds. His signature style is expressed in many other mediums, including sculpture, photography, ceramics and installation, but it is his drawings that form the foundation for his practice. Combining colored pencil with acrylic paint, his spontaneous drawings—whether diaristic doodles, expressive tracings of thought, or boldly sketched lines—portray figures in a range of emotions and capture the instinctive energy crucial to Nara’s expression of his ruminations, emotions, and dreams. Nara makes his drawings anywhere and at any time. As a result, they embody a freedom that is vital to him. He pins these works to his studio walls, places them in drawers, or piles them high on his desk. Often much later, he returns to them to tap into memories he then channels into new paintings and sculptures. The personal nature of Nara’s art distances it from the sleek, technophilic, and mass-produced aesthetics of Superflat, a Japanese style that emerged in the early 2000s.

Robert Nava

Driven by his desire to “make new myths” responsive to our times, Nava has developed an uncompromisingly personal visual language that has established him as one of the most innovative painters working today. Drawing inspiration from disparate sources, such as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, and cartoons, Nava creates magical worlds and fantastical figures that invite viewers to tap into their childlike imaginations.

Building on the groundbreaking approach of artists like Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nava combines spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil with everyday materials to create thought-out composites of hybrid monsters that he first reworks obsessively in his sketchbooks before transferring them to large canvases. Often developed to the vitalizing beat of techno and house music, his paintings conjure a realm awash in magic and possibility, where beings appear on the verge of transmogrification.

Kenneth Noland

A key ﬁgure in the development of postwar art, Kenneth Noland is regarded as one of the foremost American abstract painters. A founding member of the Washington Color School, Noland’s career can be largely deﬁned by his tireless exploration of color and form. The artist attended Black Mountain College, in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, intermittently from 1946 to 1950. While there he was exposed to some of the most inﬂuential artists of the time, ranging from Josef Albers to John Cage, and developed an early interest in the expressive potential of color and chance. His mature style would come to render color a resonant force and built a visual language that included chevrons, diamonds, circles, and horizontal bands. Often adhering to a compositional format, Noland would work methodically within a series to explore color, material, and method.

Knife Ship 1:12 by Oldenburg/van Bruggen — Oldenburg/van Bruggen, *Knife Ship 1:12*, 2008, aluminum and mahogany wood, 8-1/2" x 40" x 9-1/2" (21.6 cm x 101.6 cm x 24.1 cm), closed without oars, 27-3/4" x 82-3/4" x 37" (70.5 cm x 210.2 cm x 94 cm), fully extended with oars (blades at 180 degrees; corkscrew at 90 degrees), 32-3/4" x 40" x 37" (83.2 cm x 101.6 cm x 94 cm), partially extended with oars (blades and corkscrew at 90 degrees), Edition 4 of 6

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

At the beginning of his career in the 1950s and 60s, Claes Oldenburg experimented with the interaction between sculpture and performance, working closely with fellow artists to create spectacles that mirrored his exuberant and irreverent pop art objects. The staged performances, known as Happenings, most notably the Store Days series of 1962, cemented Oldenburg’s reputation as an inventive and innovative artist. The 1970s saw Oldenburg focus on large-scale public art, work that was further energized by his meeting and collaboration with Dutch curator and academic Coosje van Bruggen in 1976.

In 1985, Oldenburg and van Bruggen would work with curator Germano Celant and architect Frank Gehry on their ﬁrst collaborative performance, Il corso del coltello, performed over the course of 3 days outside the Venetian Arsenale. Combining sculpture, costume, and performance, the work was extensively documented in both photo and video formats. The centerpiece of the work was a large Knife Ship, an oversized reproduction of a Swiss Army Knife transformed into a ﬂoating vessel.

Knife Ship and Knife Ship 1:12 were fabricated shortly before van Bruggen’s death in 2009 and represent one of the most radical moments in Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s oeuvre. The ship makes ironic reference to an everyday object, but also mirrors within its form the architecture and cultural heritage of the city of Venice. A corkscrew rises high, evoking the tower of the Campanile di San Marco; the oars hang amusingly off the knife’s sides recall the form of the bucintoro, the ceremonial ship of the Doges of Venice; the exposed blades of the knife mirror the prows of the city’s gondolas. With Knife Ship 1:12, Oldenburg and van Bruggen celebrate and commemorate one of the most iconic and artistically complex works of their career.

Collar and Bow 1:16 by Oldenburg/van Bruggen — Oldenburg/van Bruggen, *Collar and Bow 1:16*, 2005, aluminum painted with acrylic and polyurethane enamel, 50" x 50" x 40" (127 cm x 127 cm x 101.6 cm)

Irving Penn

Issey Miyake Fashion: Seaweed Dress by Irving Penn — Irving Penn, *Miyake Seaweed Dress*, New York, 1987, dye transfer print, 22" × 19-1/4" (55.9 cm × 48.9 cm), image and paper, Edition of 21

Bird Bones (Sweden) by Irving Penn — Irving Penn, *Bird Bones (Sweden)*, New York, 1980, platinum palladium print mounted to aluminum, 19-1/2" × 11-3/8" (49.5 cm × 28.9 cm), image, 24" × 16" (61 cm × 40.6 cm), paper and mount, Edition 23 of 32

Robert Rauschenberg

Apogamy is an asexual form of creation. For Robert Rauschenberg, his Apogamy Pod series was image-creation without narrative. In this series, Rauschenberg sought to create a body of work directly descended from his earlier silkscreened masterpieces—such as Retroactive I (1963) now housed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, but devoid of images that could be deﬁned through any cogent narrative. The result is a surface in which an abstract landscape is formed through both inkjet pigment transfers and the polylaminate base surface, delineated by marks of graphite. The Apogamy Pod series are perhaps the most spatially-aware works of Rauschenberg’s since his infamous Combines of the 1960s, ﬁnding landscape and architectural forms within the ﬂatness of surface.

Paolo Roversi

Originally shot for the March 1994 cover of Vogue Paris, these images of supermodel Kate Moss showcase Paolo Roversi’s photographic prowess at its most distilled. Made with the artist’s trademark Deardorff 8 x 10 camera and Polaroid ﬁlm, the photos ﬁnd Moss in a typically Roversian landscape of blurred, vibrant color. Her poses evoke the classical fashion photography greats, such as Irving Penn or Roversi’s mentor Lawrence Sackmann, but these images’ spatiality is entirely contemporary. Utilizing the mysteriousness of his constructed spaces, Roversi evokes raw emotional expression using the sparest of elements, such as the blue haze and shaky focus of these images.

Roversi’s photographic oeuvre, constantly bridging the gap between commercial and fashion photography, has proved one of the most iconic bodies of work in recent memory, almost singlehandedly creating a new way of image-making for a new era of photographers, among them Jeff Bark, Petra Collins, and Tim Walker.

Joel Shapiro

Through his incandescent career, Joel Shapiro has said his interest in sculpture lies in “moments when it simultaneously conﬁgures and disﬁgures.” His works confront the viewer with their visually malleable anatomy and use of scale, eliciting questions of the relationship between the human and the inanimate, the living and the sculptural. In untitled (2000), Shapiro furthers his play with conﬁguration and disﬁguration through his use of metals. Though made of white bronze, this work features the unmistakable texture of wood grain, resulting from the initial wood model, which was molded and cast, preserving the texture of the surface.

Arlene Shechet

In her newest series, Together: Paciﬁc Time, Arlene Shechet demonstrates her deep exploration of the power of color during a time of extraordinary upheaval. Using a naming system that alludes to the medieval Book of Hours, the titles of these works reﬂect the marking of time during their creation.

In the same way that a Book of Hours delineated the seasons of harvest, spirituality, and celebration through richly decorated manuscript pages, Shechet–who views color as a “lifeforce”—ﬁnds in these sculptural pieces innovative ways to express the abstractness and subjectivity of emotional experience through time and form. Though titled to reﬂect the passage of time, these sculptures also harness the present moment through their seductively vibrant and chromatically rich nature.

Kiki Smith

Since the 1980s, Kiki Smith has been engaged in a multidisciplinary practice relating to themes of spirituality, morality, mysticism, and the natural world. Smith uses a broad variety of materials, including sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles to continuously expand and evolve her body of work. Drawn to the cogency of repetition in narratives and symbolic representations, much of Smith’s work is inspired by the visual culture of the past, spanning scientiﬁc anatomical renderings from the eighteenth century to the abject imagery of relics, memento mori, folklore, mythology, Byzantine iconography, and medieval altarpieces.

Summer (2008) is an example of Smith’s use of handmade Nepalese paper. The formal delicacy of this work is enhanced by the artist’s overt passion for the inherently tactile qualities of paper—a material that she has explored extensively in sculpture. Smith likes to work with translucent, skinlike sheets of handmade paper, folding them, pasting them together, and otherwise manipulating them in inventive and unexpected ways.

Telling by Kiki Smith — Kiki Smith, *Telling*, 2011, cast aluminum, 32" x 17" x 14" (81.3 cm x 43.2 cm x 35.6 cm), AP 1, Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Li Songsong

Li Songsong’s paintings point to China’s many transformations but eschew narrative to emphasize the way images operate as nebulous fragments of a history that is open to interpretation. Li is interested in how images can trigger memories and emotions—a psychological impact magniﬁed by his technique. The use of impasto and the dense materiality of his brushstrokes elicit a potent haptic response, while his palette of cool shades of gray, green, and beige create an estrangement from his chosen subject matter. Li deconstructs and reassembles images through his signature use of compact blocks of color, pushing his art towards abstraction.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is synonymous with the rise of Pop art, and among the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. Graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in commercial art in 1949, he moved to New York City where he found success as an illustrator. Beginning in the early 1960s, Warhol began creating and exhibiting art with imagery derived from popular culture, also invoking the methods of mass production through his repetition of motifs and use of screen printing on canvas. Warhol’s studio, which was known as the Factory, became a center for the counterculture in New York as well as a site for his art and film production. A media-savvy and sometimes inscrutable figure, Warhol himself became a celebrity and an icon of American culture.

Throughout his career, Warhol screen-printed commissioned portraits from photographs, but also appropriated images of celebrities, turning them into silkscreen prints reflecting his fascination with fame while dealing with deeper issues of identity, legacy, and death. During the early 1960s, while living and working in New York, Warhol first began his celebrity portraits. Although he expanded his subject matter throughout the years, his obsession with fame and celebrity endured as he continued to produce celebrity portraits in the later part of his career, including Judy Garland, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Dolly Parton, and Liza Minnelli.

Qiu Xiaofei

The work of Qiu Xiaofei is elegantly structured around techniques and concepts of duality and doubling. His paintings bridge the gap between conscious description and subconscious imagination, the realms of the ﬁgurative and the abstract, the stable and the unstable. His choice of acrylic paint—quicker drying than oils—forces him to work quickly, which contributes to the looseness of his gestures and the negotiations between forms, suspending the paintings in an air of unresolved feeling. His process and speed are a means to translate his unconscious—which he construes as a repository for various cultural, social and political factors that have shaped him—onto the canvas, arriving at a purer form of self-expression untainted by rational thinking. The Zero Gravity series marks a watershed moment in the artist’s practice, in which he deftly combines his early ﬁgurative work with bold abstract landscapes. In present work, two spheres ﬂoat in front of bold stripes of color, objects both suspended and in danger of falling off the canvas, a tension further exacerbated by the presence of two crater-like shapes on the peripheries of the canvas. For Qiu, these forms evoke the rigors of his technical training and suggest an aesthetic entrenched in artiﬁcial rationalism. The artist noted, “For me my paintings are products of my childhood and what I experienced in the Chinese society, social progress that I’ve witnessed, and the knowledge that I’ve absorbed shape the way I paint. These two elements are kind of like the double pendulums in my painting system.”

Zhang Xiaogang

Yin Xiuzhen

Closely associated with Chinese history and tradition, porcelain has been the focus of Yin Xiuzhen’s practice in recent years, and its materiality has served as the impetus for signiﬁcant variability in her sculptural work during this time. Through a nontraditional method of porcelain ﬁring in her Wall Instrument series, Yin realizes subtle yet abundant variation in color and texture on the works’ surfaces while also allowing the spontaneity of this ﬁring process to serve as a form of stimulation and dialogue. Ultimately, through this process, the original, smooth porcelain plates take on natural undulations, wrinkles, and cracks through Yin’s interventions. The artist also embeds fragments of worn clothes within these pieces, so parts of the clothing appear in the demarcations in the porcelain surfaces. In encompassing the experiences of those who previously wore these clothes, the works mimic a skin-like surface, creating psychological cues and evoking sensory perception from the viewers while acting as poignant carriers of memories.

Yin Xiuzhen will be the subject of a major solo exhibition, Along the Way, at Pace Gallery's flagship gallery in New York from May 21 – June 26, 2021.

Zhang Huan

Since 2005, Zhang Huan has created Ash Paintings made from incense residues collected from temples around China. Delicately creating images that seem to arise from a smokey fog, Zhang evokes the proffered wishes and prayers of Chinese people and how worship and prayer intersect, emulate, and disrupt the culture of a one-party state. Here, Zhang depicts the peak of Mount Kailash—considered to many Buddhists one of the holiest sites in the world—which is situated in the middle of the Tibetan Himalayas. Photographically accurate but hazy in execution, the image of the mountain appears conjured rather than created. A holy site in a politically contentious region, Mount Kailash represents perhaps the most explicit metaphor for the tenuous relationship between the state and religion in modern China. Zhang’s preoccupation with Mount Kailash has extended into his sculptural and performative work, often inviting a controversial response. Mount Kailash No. 8 (2021) is a moving microcosm of Zhang’s philosophy of art and his virtuosic use of nontraditional creation methods.

To inquire about any of the artists or works featured in this presentation, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Past, Art Basel Hong Kong, May 18, 2021