Gregory Edwards, World Painting 1, 2015; Oil on canvas, 182.88x213.36cm
What do we mean when we talk about post-internet art? For curators Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey, it is in part a question of geography. For this exhibition, they have selected eighteen works by Chinese and Western artists that explore how regional diversities and differences are informed by our digital age and consequently affect contemporary art practices. It represents the first sortie of an ongoing research partnership between the K11 Art Foundation and MoMA PS1. Many of the works, which range from Wang Xin’s virtual-reality installation The Gallery, 2014–, to Oliver Payne’s classical trompe l’oeil mural Untitled (Portal Painting), 2017, seem to find form and subject in between the digital and analog realms. In Aleksandra Domanović’s film From Yu to Me, 2013–14, the .yu domain becomes a tangible relic of the vanished country, Yugoslavia, where the artist was born. She reminds us of the fragility of universalizing systems in a period of nationalist retrenchment. An untitled 2015 silk-screen print by Laura Owens was created with an early twentieth-century cartoon of Nikola Tesla that lampooned the inventor’s prophetic World Wireless System. Over the purposely fragmented and pixelated image, Owen applied paint in thick, textural strokes. Finally, in a pair of surreal video pieces by Cao Fei (The Birth of RMB City, 2009) and Sondra Perry (Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016), each artist’s virtual avatar navigates urgent realities. Such clever juxtapositions throughout the show challenge the notion of the World Wide Web as a utopian space unencumbered by boundaries, territorial or otherwise.
Text by Samantha Kuok Leese
About the exhibition
Dates: March 21–April 30
Venue: K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space
Address: G/F, Costco Tower, 33 Wing Lok Street, Sheung Wan
Courtesy of the artists and K11 Art Foundation, for further information please visit www.k11artfoundation.org.
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