<p>The artist’s giant inflatable sculpture of Tutankhamun marks the first time Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector has ventured offsite&nbsp;</p>

Siddhartha Mitter

Awol Erizku creates Afro-Asian connections in Hong Kong

<p>A golden bust of Tutankhamun surges 10 meters high in the atrium of Pacific Place. The pharaoh wears a calm but searching expression, eyes raised slightly, as if to meet the gaze of shoppers and commuters who pass along the busy complex’s upper floors.</p><p>A cobra and vulture protrude from his forehead, and a narrow beard drops straight from his chin. Down at ground level, the immense effigy – a high-grade inflatable artwork with richly patinated colors, installed for the duration of Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 – reveals a darkened passageway that the public can enter to find precious cultural riches.</p><p>The reference image is familiar, even baked into the global subconscious: the gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun, the ‘boy king’ of Ancient Egypt, who died circa 1324 BCE aged around 19. It’s the scale and location of this iteration that may seem uncanny: What’s a huge King Tut doing in a Hong Kong mall? For&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/24415/Awol-Erizku">Awol Erizku</a>, the Los Angeles-based conceptual artist who imagined the installation, that visual dissonance is an invitation to communicate.</p>

<p>‘In globalization, cultures get fragmented and often misunderstood,’ says Erizku, who conceived the work, titled <em>Gravity</em> (2023), shortly before the pandemic and specifically for display in Hong Kong; it is now finally experiencing its premiere. ‘But there’s something beautiful that comes out of misreads and misappropriations at times. I’m interested in those things as a place to start a new conversation.’ Indeed, enter the passageway and the work switches mode from the spectacular to the thoughtful and intimate. Erizku has set up tables that display books and objects from his private collection, accumulated on his travels. Among them are African masks, along with books and DVDs on themes that touch on <em>Gravity</em>’s iconic reference point while moving outwards, affirming ancient Egypt for its fundamental role in both so-called Western and African civilizations. </p><p>These books, by the likes of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, can be erudite, while others may appear esoteric. All are commonplaces of the kind of popular knowledge that is distilled at the stands of street vendors in places like 125th Street in Harlem, where they join herbs, incense, CDs, and other items in a kind of continually self-inventing public epistemology that flows beyond institutions and across overflowing boundaries.</p>

<p>That street stall spirit is essential to Erizku, who invites passersby to pick up the items, leaf through the books (but not walk away with them!), and see what associations trigger. ‘Whether in Harlem or near the Eiffel Tower; the guys who are out there selling things – it’s borrowing from that culture,’ he says of the project. ‘It’s that energy, that vibe. I didn’t want a Westernized version of what a display should be; a vitrine with all these books in it. I wanted to make it accessible so people can pass through, read these texts, and hopefully take note.’</p><p><em>Gravity</em>, which is presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1342/Ben-Brown-Fine-Arts">Ben Brown Fine Arts</a> and supported by Swire Properties, forms part of Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong’s sector for large-scale sculptures and installations. While Encounters is customarily shown within the fair itself at the Hong Kong Convention Centre, Erizku’s installation brings it offsite for the first time.</p><p>One reason for this is practical, says Alexie Glass-Kantor, the curator of Encounters: <em>Gravity</em> is simply too big to fit inside the fair hall. But to stage the piece in public in one of Hong Kong’s major commercial shopping, office, and hotel complexes, where anyone can experience it without paying an entrance fee, is deeply consistent with the work’s vocation.</p>

<p>‘Pacific Place has a huge amount of foot traffic in terms of people transiting through the city,’ Glass-Kantor notes. ‘People can approach from above or from below, from corridors or from the street. It’s a beautiful work to have free and available. It exists in a point of intersection in the city and it brings together intersections in history.’ </p><p>Erizku has long operated at the crossings of places and artistic methods and planes. The Ethiopian-American artist was raised in the South Bronx in New York City, and now makes his base in Los Angeles. He is a highly regarded photographer who has made striking fashion portraits, notably of Black celebrities – most famously Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement photograph in 2017 – but whose practice ranges far wider, spanning painting, video, sculpture, and installation. A versed selector and mixer of imagery, his reach affords viewers multiple points of entry; from the canon of art history to images from news and popular culture. </p>

<p>‘There is in his work the ability for images to come from objects, and objects to become images,’ says Glass-Kantor. Indeed, she adds, some of the objects on display for visitors to examine in the passageway are of the kind that appear in Erizku’s photography. The Egyptian symbology reflects the broadly afrofuturist impulse in his work and echoes certain other of his pieces – for instance <em>Nefertiti - Miles Davis (Gold)</em> (2022), a suspended sculpture with disco-ball tiling – but in a completely new register and deployment. </p><p><em>Gravity</em> may be inflatable, and thus portable, but it is site-specific in the sense that it was imagined in and for Hong Kong. The idea germinated during Erizku’s Hong Kong gallery debut at Ben Brown Fine Arts in 2018. That show featured works in neon; a medium with resonance in Hong Kong where neon signage is ubiquitous and still handmade. This allowed Erizku to collaborate with expert artisans, explains Amanda Hon, the gallery’s Hong Kong managing director. ‘It brought his practice to a local audience that was able to not only understand Awol’s vernacular, but also found familiarity in the material’.</p>

<p>The inflatable was fabricated in Hong Kong in 2020, but the pandemic prevented its viewing until now, adding another layer to the project. ‘It’s taken a different iteration post-Covid,’ Erizku says. As a work about global intersections of history, imagery, and ideas, the work is charged by its presentation amid Hong Kong’s post-lockdown reconvening not to mention geopolitical uncertainty more broadly. With Art Basel Hong Kong returning at full-scale to a city newly free of pandemic restrictions, Encounters aims to meet this moment . ‘We’ve lived through global crisis in different ways and different registers, but that has impacted everybody,’ Glass-Kantor points out. In <em style="background-color: initial;">Gravity</em>, with its contrasting spectacular exterior and private interior – indeed vulnerable, with the artist’s selection of objects reflecting his inner life – Glass Kantor finds ‘an opportunity for a more intimate encounter, for something else to be revealed.’</p>

<p>Erizku’s installation also evokes a long history of Afro-Asian cultural and economic encounters that has nowhere near ended. ‘Cross-pollination, and the ways in which cultures and histories have been appropriated, amid the movement of not only goods but people, remains the undertone in <em style="background-color: initial;">Gravity</em> and in Awol’s work as a whole,’ explains Hon. ‘In Asia, this resonates from the old Silk Road to China’s new Silk Road project.’ The ties trace back to antiquity and range forward, Erizku points out, to the American civil rights movement and Chinese-American solidarity with the Black Panthers. But Erizku demurred from getting ahead of the public’s experience of the installation by overloading it with didactic meaning. "The most important aspect of the work," he says, "is the exchange."</p>

<p><em>Gravity</em> is presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1342/Ben-Brown-Fine-Arts">Ben Brown Fine Arts</a> and supported by Swire Properties, Official Partner of Offsite Encounters.</p><p>Siddhartha Mitter is a freelance art journalist and critic. He contributes principally to <em>The New York Times</em>.</p><p>Published on March 16, 2023.</p><p>Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: All artworks by Awol Erikzu.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts.&nbsp;1, 3.&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">Malcolm x Freestyle (Pharaoh's Dance)</em>, 2019-20 (edition of 3 + 2 AP (#2/3)).&nbsp;2.&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">Black Fire (Mouzone Brothas)</em>, 2019 (edition of 3 + 2 AP (#3/3)). 4.&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">Head Crack (Stack or Starve)</em>, 2022 (3 blocks).</p>

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The artist’s giant inflatable sculpture of Tutankhamun marks the first time Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector has ventured offsite 

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The artist’s giant inflatable sculpture of Tutankhamun marks the first time Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector has ventured offsite

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