Pace Hong Kong’s group exhibition ‘Chewing Gum V’ is a visual melting pot. Artworks by nine modern and contemporary artists, from across different decades, geographies and mediums are curated together, creating unexpected dialogues. This is Pace’s fifth iteration of the quirkily titled exhibition series which started back in 2015, exploring how globalised contexts have the potential to dissolve or breakdown cultural differences. Active audience participation is encouraged, with viewers given the autonomy to find connections between the artworks as they navigate through the space.
A collection of monochromatic works at the beginning of the exhibition reveals skill and eccentricity. Liu Jianhua’s Blank Paper is comprised of two plain white sheets hanging side by side with corners curled ever so slightly and faint undulations. The sheets look exactly like paper but they are, almost imperceptibly, expertly crafted from porcelain. These replica pieces of blank paper invite external input – a tabula rasa for viewers to impart their own ideas and imaginations, setting the approach for the rest of the exhibition.
Elsewhere, two sculptures are positioned across the room from one another. Collar and Bow 1:16, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s formation of black-tie accessories is humorously enlarged to create a dynamic linear construction. It sits opposite Kiki Smith’s Rabbits – another playful piece, but with a certain sense of tension. It consists of eight black two-dimensional rabbits standing rigidly in a line like some kind of fairground shooting gallery.
Eyes meet in a fashion photograph by Irving Penn – a model, snapped in Penn’s iconic black and white, gazes through a net covering her face. A white silk scarf wraps around her neck and a dramatic black collar protrudes, chiming aesthetically with Collar and Bow 1:16. In another of Penn’s photographs, a model wears a long black gown featuring a voluminous top that envelopes her face, framing it with swathes of silken material like a flower.
The first encounter in the second gallery space is a painting by Mao Yan, Oval Portrait of Thomas No. 2. Tropes of traditional portraiture are utilised yet subverted by Mao – the sitter gazes up awkwardly, his large, glassy eyes mysteriously preoccupied by something unknown. The mysteriousness of Mao’s portrait is also found in a painting by Zhang Xiagang, Green Wall – White Bed. A sparse interior is depicted with a bed, TV and bare bulb hanging from a wire, set against a green wall. It is a space that is at once utilitarian and yet personal. Whomever sleeps there is absent, yet their presence is known through a red, bodily imprint on the bed.
Xiagang’s painting is positioned in conversation with Louise Nevelson’s Untitled, which hangs directly opposite. A multi-media piece that falls somewhere between collage and sculpture, it also hold an element of domesticity, featuring parts of dining room chairs attached to a piece of board and roughly painted black. Nevelson utilised objects that others discarded, creating assemblages that explore form, light and shadow.
Concluding the works on display, two sculptures by Sui Jianguo from his Island in the Cloud series transform the artist’s fingerprint. The sculptures depict enlarged fingerprint copies created through 3D printing and cast in white copper. They straddle the line between nature and manmade, existing through an amalgamation of both.
Works take on a new life in a group exhibitions like ‘Chewing Gum V’. They become contributors to a discussion with the other works they are situated with. Links and common ground can be found, even between the most disparate pieces of art. Viewers take on an imperative role in the discussion; they bind the works together with the commonalities they discover.
On display at Pace Hong Kong 22 July – 1 September 2022
