British artist Rachel Kneebone’s warped Exiles are currently showing at the White Cube HK, and from an outsider’s perspective, they stick out like a sore thumb.
Having been here for just under a month now, I’ve more or less settled in to the bustle of life in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, this territory of 21-year-old travel writing has a tendency to sound like I’ve just arrived back at the family timeshare, having spent the day tweeting about my enlightenment and busking for travel money in chinos. So, to keep it brief:
It’s hot (very hot)
The buildings are big
You won’t go five minutes without seeing a street market or shopping mall.
All of these things are great; I am perplexed by how an umbrella’s primary purpose is to shade oneself from the sun, and I love how 20 restaurants all get packed into one 20 story building. It also makes the setting for White Cube’s foray into Hong Kong all the more anachronistic within its surroundings.
Opened in 2012, the gallery hosts a combination of local and international artists, and is currently showing Rachel Kneebone’s Ovid in Exile. This exhibition holds a number of sculptural works, all employing Kneebone’s signature fragmented approach to porcelain. Each work stands on its own plinth, and upon first glance you might be forgiven for mistaking them for abstraction. Their colour and texture are reminiscent of some ambiguous calceiform buildup, like a 1000 pieces of pre-chewed gum. On closer inspection, however, you begin to see the detail. Out of the refuse emerge expertly sculpted limbs; lone feet and hands.
I had actually first seen works from this series in the V&A, where they sit next to a couple of Rodins, but in this setting they take on a new light. Avocado-toast-eatery per capita here is far lower than in London, and space is a coveted commodity. I may be wrong, but walking in to the gallery’s whitewashed interior, I got the sense that it wasn’t just pristinely clean because that's so in vogue, but because no one had actually walked in before I had.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the works enough and although their porcelain renderings gave more of a sense of dainty decision-making than raw puissance, there was certainly a sense of meditative reflection to the works that underlined what the gallery described as ‘sublime echoes of life’s cycle’. Part of me wished that there was more kinetic energy to the pieces, which were less Biennale Mark Bradford and more like Vesuvius victim – but this is probably just my disposition, which sometimes leans away from too much of the ‘clinical ruminations’ that crop up in the art world. Gabriel Kuri at Sadie Coles comes to mind…
But despite my feelings for the work itself, it was interesting to see it in context of Hong Kong. Everything about the swathes of negative space and concealed light sources contrasted with the ram-packed neon dynamic outside. With people living in ‘coffin apartments’ due to lack of space, being in the gallery felt a bit like grandstanding, and I couldn’t help but wonder to what end someone living in Sheung Wan or Kowloon could relate. Whilst this feeling of contextual exclusivity has its place in UK and other Western institutions, something about it felt more jarring here.
There is a broader comment to be made on this note, about the language often used by the arts media to describe galleries in the Asia Pacific. Less is commented on the work and more on burgeoning markets or investment opportunities. For sure, marketed art should come as no surprise to anybody interested in the currency of the arts world, but my experience in White Cube HK brought this idea to the forefront of my mind. Conclusions can be drawn; is this experience as normal as the rows of commercialized haute couture outlets that line Hong Kong’s streets? Or is there something more to be said about the loss of authenticity in the commercial gallery enterprise?
'Ovid in Exile' in on display at White Cube Hong Kong until 19 August 2017.
Christian Jackson