Kunsthalle Kowloon is pleased to announce "Writing off the Wall," an exhibition of recent art concerned with textual intervention to be staged during the period of the Hong Kong Art Fair in public and privates spaces throughout the neighborhood of North Wanchai. The project will open to the public on the afternoon of 26 May and will continue indefinitely until participating works are confiscated, stolen, or destroyed.
The last week of May has quickly become the marked period of the Hong Kong art world calendar: despite previous attempts at organizing a territory-wide art festival across different registers of spaces and galleries, it is ultimately ArtHK that has come to occupy the defining role in determining what the world thinks of cultural production in the city. With this in mind--and of course recognizing that anyone serious about maintaining a curatorial relationship to Hong Kong must do something in this key moment--we began to think of what our program might contribute to this synthetic and ephemeral week-long ecology of vision and pleasure. Seeking to produce the fact of intervention through the most minimal and non-hostile means possible, we consider the possibility of effecting an incident of media engineering that might be legible only within the discursive sphere. We hold no ill will against the commercial activities of the art fair but nonetheless believe that something should occur to insert or at least imply new meanings within this fast-codifying structure of exhibition and presentation. And so we come upon the notion of text: a flexible medium without any necessary presence prior to typography and not necessarily limited by the strictures of language, we are curious about the possibilities of this approach to intervention--a stealth proposition.
Considering the relatively unique audiences that appear during the period of the art fair, consisting not only of international visitors but also a certain category of Hong Kong residents who appear primarily at the fair, we began to examine the various publics and audiences that exist at different spaces and in different situations at various other times of the year. It appears that few in the Hong Kong art world are interested in questions of audience direction, as most purportedly community-based projects tend to define their programs by the coincidence of unconscionably bad art and hostility toward the contemporary art world. "Writing off the Wall" seeks to reconfigure the structural possibilities of relationships with our varied audiences by accounting for the violence of public positioning: rather than demarcating a particular space for the exhibition, artists have been invited to install their projects as they wish throughout the area of the art fair--indoors and out--in hopes that our highly specific public of fairgoers may stumble across or even be forcibly subjected to the work included. We attempts to produce a minor contradiction by making the exhibition as formally accessible as possible by placing much of it in public space, while on the other hand the content and conceptual import of the work may appear vague or absent for unsuspecting passersby not tuned to our chosen channels of communication (of which this mailing is one). The exhibition will be available--for a short time at least--but not obvious, a parody of the certain strand of community art that assumes it public to be "the street" writ large.
Confronting the mass of scholarship and critical reflection on the relationship between art and language produced particularly since the 1960s with the rise of conceptual art and its attraction to text, we find ourselves overwhelmed, enthused, and mildly disappointed in the lack of interest in the relationship between text as a medium that can only be instantiated with the assistance of some other material and language as a category simultaneously more encompassing but less relevant. This project seeks to again look closely at what materiality--and, of course, specific materials--have to do with art practice now, at a time and in a place where studio practice seems to be a sidelined genre in comparison with deterritorialized aspects of fabrication, participation, and intervention. Projects invited for inclusion in "Writing off the Wall" tend to deal with text as a tool, and language as a reservoir of potentiality sublimated by this more utilitarian device; material is typically a support, but also something that melds with and enters into a mutually dependent relationship with its textual superstructure.
We conceive of the exhibition as a platform for chain reactions that might themselves go on to catalyze new and interesting forms of visual or textual discourse. Rather than approaching a theme and commissioning or inviting projects related to our work, the curatorial process for this particular platform involved simply presenting the possibility of minimal intervention in the art fair environment, possibly using text, to a group of artists with demonstrated interests in such practices. Even this statement was written only after collecting proposals from these artists, making the project not so much a curator-driven exhibition as a piece of flexible material for the support of media-driven messages and sly hints at possibilities. "Writing off the Wall," as a radically collaborative response to the filtered and economical mission of the art fair proper, exists during this time as a possibility of another way of looking. We hope our audiences will learn to read the terrain they tread as if it were a map, seeking out the moments of content within the broader form that we adapt to our own purposes. By making an entire neighborhood the space of an exhibition we seek to call attention to the role of the legend, the key to deciphering our graphic world, without which everything appears to be something.
Artists contributing projects to this textual platform, oriented around this document, include Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung, MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young; their work ranges from posters and namecards to monumental sculptural moments and electronic devices. A map will be made available of installed work at www.kunsthallekowloon.org and, in printed form, from the Hong Kong Gallery Guide booth at ArtHK.
In addition to these installations in the environs of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a selection of critics and curators have been invited to deliver a program of site-specific talks on notions of public, audience, and community in the art fair context. Updated details of this schedule will likewise be available at www.kunsthallekowloon.org.
Distributed forum, 29 May 2011 (Sunday)
10:45: John Batten (Critic and co-convenor, Central and Western District Concern Group), “After Sunday Yumcha: Thirty-three 'must-knows' about leisure, money, art, and space in Hong Kong” (Open space between Immigration and Revenue Towers, at Norman Ko sculpture)
13:00: Tobias Berger (Curator, M+), "An Audience of Potential," (Location TBA)
14:30: Pauline J. Yao (Co-director, Osage Art and Ideas), “Audience and Client: Curating for the profit sector” (ArtHK, Osage Gallery Booth)
16:00: Jeff Leung (Project Manager, Hong Kong Arts Centre), “Art Out of the White Cube: Public art in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Arts Centre, lobby)
"Writing off the Wall"
Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung,
MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young
Curated by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham
Organized by Kunsthalle Kowloon (S.E.C.P.)
Opening 26 May 2011, 14:00 - 20:00
Forum 29 May 2011, 10:45 - 16:00
In and around the Hong Kong Art Fair
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
North Wanchai, Hong Kong
