Gandhara-art Hong Kong in collaboration with Lisson Gallery London is delighted to present ‘Translation/Transliterations’, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of Rashid Rana, South Asia’s most eminent contemporary artist. The exhibition will be held from 21 October to 18 November 2011 at the Pao Galleries (5/F), Hong Kong Arts Centre. Presenting over 20 exceptional pieces, the show will give the Hong Kong public an excellent opportunity to get up close to Rana’s stunning creations across various media.
Critically acclaimed and with an impressive exhibition record, Rana is the most iconic and influential figure among the new generation of Pakistani artists. In fact, he is widely considered as one of the most prominent and original contemporary artists working in South Asia today. In May of this year, Rana’s monumental photomontage sculpture was featured at ART HK 11. In 2010, the artist held a retrospective at France’s prestigious national museum for Asian art, the MuseĢe Guimet in Paris. His oeuvre has been shown in numerous notable biennials, museums, and leading galleries including the Lisson Gallery, London (2011), Asia Society Museum, New York (2009), National Museum of Taiwan (2009), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), Saatchi Gallery, London (2010) and the Singapore Art Museum (2011). Many of his works have commanded impressive prices at major auctions. One of the standouts, Red Carpet, set a world auction record for any Pakistani work of art in 2008.
Rana reconstructs traditional images that are specific to his culture, often employing familiar cultural motifs such as Persian rug patterns and burqa in his artworks. He engages with the present using a 21st-century visual language that forms a kind of pixelated aesthetic, while acknowledging the past at the same time. This visual lineage from his culture makes him a Pakistani artist with a global horizon, and distinguishes him from his fellow conceptual artists.
The Exhibition
This exhibition, presenting a selection of Rana’s works from 2004 to the present, comprises four distinct narratives. Highlights include Rana’s photo sculptures, large scale photo mosaics, and new works. His art investigates the theme of perception, explores the idea of duality and engages with the two-dimensionality of the image, through multiple visual sources composed to create a single whole. The interconnection of two types or scales of pictorial material invites the viewer to interact with the work and discover its multiple meanings, operating in critical tension to the world it inhabits.
Adopting a new medium or a new working method every few years, Rana is truly a cross-disciplinary artist. He has traversed different media from acrylic on canvas to performance videos. Currently, the artist creates artworks with large digital photomontages and sculptural cubes made of smaller images. These main images often resemble familiar cultural emblems such as patterns of a Persian carpet. However, in his works, Rana explores how the entirety does not always equal the sum of its parts.
