Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice
Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Respected Los Angeles–based Hong Kong artist and educator Shirley Tse to exhibit in the Hong Kong Collateral Event at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The Hong Kong exhibition is co-presented and co-promoted by M+, at the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC).
Negotiated Differences (detail), 2019. 3D-printed forms in wood, carved wood, metal, and plastic
Courtesy of Shirley Tse. Photo credit: Joshua White. Commissioned by M+, 2019
(8 April 2019, Hong Kong) M+, at the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) are proud to announce the exhibition Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice as Hong Kong’s Collateral Event at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. As the fourth collaboration between M+ and HKADC, this exhibition is a milestone for Hong Kong contemporary art on one of the world’s most prestigious international platforms.
The exhibition is curated by Christina Li, an internationally active curator based in Hong Kong and Amsterdam, as Guest Curator, with Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, acting as Consulting Curator. This is the second time M+ has appointed and engaged a guest curator from the rapidly growing community of contemporary art practitioners. In the previous edition of the Biennale Arte in 2017, Ying Kwok was the guest curator for the solo presentation of the work of Samson Young.
Over the past two decades, the Los Angeles–based Hong Kong artist Shirley Tse has addressed the various meanings and possible interpretations of materials and things. Her sculptural practice has evolved from considering plastics as the prime signifier of globalisation through circulation, standardisation, and industrialisation to examining plastic as an adjective, and the resonance of plasticity, movement, and multiplicity in contemporary society.
The exhibition in Venice presents a new body of site-responsive work by Tse that contemplates a model for how we relate to each other, in ways that counter the logic that has produced our tumultuous times. In line with the overarching theme of this edition of the Biennale—titled May You Live in Interesting Times and curated by Ralph Rugoff—Tse uses the medium of sculpture to translate her thought process into physical form with two large-scale works: Negotiated Differences and Playcourt. Her work explores both horizontality and verticality, highlighting the unique spatial qualities of the exhibition site on the Campo della Tana, which includes an interior and an open courtyard. Negotiated Differences is a sprawling, rhizome-like installation of 3D-printed joints and hand-turned wooden forms that stretches across all the rooms of the space. Balusters, handrails, bowling pins, and abstract objects are connected by wooden, metal, and plastic elements, bringing together craft, mechanical, and digital technologies into an integrated whole.
Occupying the courtyard, Playcourt comprises sculptural amalgams of equipment and anthropomorphic forms that draw the eye skyward. The installation transforms the enclosure into an improvised badminton court, partly inspired by the artist’s memory of growing up in Hong Kong, and emphasises the negotiation between people and space that is a fundamental component of play. This negotiation is at the heart of Stakeholders; foregrounding the ideas of affect, empathy, and ethics, the exhibition proposes a space to reflect on how we can come to terms with the unforeseen actions that define our relationships with one another.
Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+, stresses the significance of Hong Kong’s presence in Venice this year: ‘This marks the fourth collaboration between M+ and HKADC, in which we present the best of Hong Kong contemporary art and curatorship to a wide international audience in Venice. I am particularly pleased with the selection of a female artist for the Hong Kong presentation. For M+, this edition of the Biennale is especially significant, as we prepare for the opening of our permanent home—the M+ building—in 2020. We look forward to more and more collaborations with HKADC in Venice and trust that our permanent base will allow us to continue to promote and nourish the development of Hong Kong art in new, inspiring ways.’
Wilfred Wong, Chairman of HKADC, says: ‘Our participation in the Biennale has been one of the flagship projects of HKADC since 2001. Over the years, we have been presenting many outstanding Hong Kong visual artists and their works to the world through this international arts platform.
Riding on the previous success of Hong Kong’s presence in the Biennale, we continue to strengthen our ties with M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, this year to proudly present the exceptional works of Shirley Tse to our global audience. We are confident that the exhibition will enlighten our arts experience and bring new insights into the development of Hong Kong arts.’
Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, Consulting Curator of the exhibition, emphasises the resonance of Shirley Tse’s Venice work: ‘Stakeholders is an exploration of issues of the individual and the collective that continue to be highly relevant today. Through the journey of spatial negotiations that she is thoughtfully setting up, Shirley Tse invites audiences to reflect on how individuals in society can maintain their identities and values.’
Christina Li, Guest Curator of the exhibition, places this project in the context of Shirley Tse’s practice: ‘I am excited to be working with Shirley Tse on Hong Kong’s presence in Venice. With Stakeholders, Tse’s career-long exploration of the concept of plasticity evolves further, and the exhibition is a momentous opportunity to showcase her sculptural practice to global audiences while also re-establishing her prominent position in Hong Kong contemporary art.’
Shirley Tse adds: ‘I am grateful for the generous support I have received from M+ and HKADC to develop this new body of work and to be able to represent Hong Kong in Venice. These new installations are the culmination of two decades of work, and my hope is that viewers will come away with new perspectives with which to think about their own agency and to look at the complexity of all forms of relations in our contemporary world.’
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Notes to editors
About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.
About the West Kowloon Cultural District
The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.
About the Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) is a statutory body set up by the Government to support the broad development of the arts in Hong Kong. Its major roles include grant allocation, policy and planning, advocacy, promotion and development, and programme planning. The mission of HKADC is to plan, promote, and support the broad development of the arts including literary arts, performing arts, visual arts as well as film and media arts in Hong Kong. Aiming to foster a thriving arts environment and enhancing the quality of life of the public, HKADC is also committed to facilitating community-wide participation in the arts and arts education, encouraging arts criticism, raising the standard of arts administration, and strengthening the work on policy research.
Annex
Exhibition details
Curated by Christina Li, Guest Curator; with Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, as Consulting Curator; assisted by Olivia Chow, Assistant Curator, Special Project; and Maggie Yim, Curatorial Assistant
Coordinator in Venice: PDG Arte Communications
Graphic design: Geoff Han and Julie Peeters
Location: Campo della Tana, Castello 2126, 30122, Venice, Italy (in front of Arsenale entrance)
Dates and times: 11 May–24 November 2019, 10am–6pm. Closed on Mondays (except 13 May, 2 September, 18 November).
Exhibition website: www.vbexhibitions.hk
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring essays on Shirley Tse’s new work as well as on her practice overall, with contributions by Evelyn Char, Chris Kraus, Miwon Kwon, and Christina Li.
Organisers’ websites
HKADC: http://www.hkadc.org.hk
Social media
Please join the conversation on Twitter (@mplusmuseum), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/mplusmuseum), and Instagram (@mplusmuseum) with the hashtags #ShirleyTse #Stakeholders #HongKongInVenice #MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes #BiennaleArte2019
About Shirley Tse
Los Angeles–based Hong Kong artist Shirley Tse (born 1968) works in the media of sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She at once deconstructs the world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs models in which differences might come together. To visualise heterogeneity, Tse conflates different scales, fuses the organic with the industrial, moves between the literal and the metaphorical, merges narratives, and collapses the subject and object relationship.
Tse received a Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004/2017); Osage, Hong Kong (2010/2011); K11, Hong Kong (2009); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2009); the Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk (2006); the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); Para Site, Hong Kong (2000/2005); the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2003); the Art Gallery of Ontario (2002); the Bienal Ceará América, Fortaleza (2002); the Biennale of Sydney (2002); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (2002); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002); MoMA PS1 (2002); the New Museum (2002); Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini (2002); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001); TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam (2001); and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2000). Her work is featured in many articles, catalogues, and other publications including Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life (2015) and Sculpture Today (2007).
Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and has been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001, where she is the Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art.
About Christina Li
Christina Li is a curator working between Hong Kong and Amsterdam. She graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in Fine Arts (Art History) and Comparative Literature, and completed De Appel Curatorial Programme in 2009. She was the Curator-at-Large at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she served as the Director between 2015 and 2017. At Spring, she curated, among other projects, A Collective Present (2017), Wu Tsang: Duilian (2016), Wong Wai Yin: Without Trying (2016), Days push off into nights (2015), and Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor (2015). Her most recent exhibition, Dismantling the Scaffold (2018), was the inaugural exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. With Heman Chong, she launched Stationary, a collection of short stories, and co-edited the latest volume with writer and artist Malak Helmy.
Li previously worked as a curator at Para Site in Hong Kong from 2005 to 2008, and was the Assistant Curator of Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities and Dreams, Hong Kong’s participation in the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, in 2009. Her other projects include The Goethe-Institut’s Pyongyang Reading Room: Between Object and Shadow (Goethe-Institut Amsterdam, 2013); A Map of Misreading (TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam, 2012); Spacecraft Icarus 13: Cinematic Narratives from Elsewhere (BAK, Utrecht, 2011); Prologue – Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility (SKOR and various locations, Amsterdam, 2010); Not Yesterday, Not Tomorrow (Cable Factory, Helsinki, 2009); and Weak Signals, Wild Cards (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2009). As a writer, she has contributed to publications including Artforum, Art Review Asia, LEAP, Parkett, Spike, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art.
About Doryun Chong
Doryun Chong is Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator of M+, a new museum of visual culture, which will open its Herzog & de Meuron–designed building in 2020, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. Appointed as the inaugural Chief Curator in 2013, Chong oversees all curatorial activities and programmes, including acquisitions, exhibitions, learning and public programmes, and digital initiatives encompassing the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Some of the exhibitions he has curated or co-curated at M+ include Mobile M+: Live Art (2015); Tsang Kin-Wah: The Infinite Nothing, Hong Kong in Venice (2015); Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour (2018); and Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint (2018). Prior to joining M+, Chong worked in various curatorial capacities at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003–2009) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009–2013).