Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms: Curator Christina Li shares her favorites
Martha Rosler, Leelee Chan, and Rossella Biscotti are among the picks
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Martha Rosler, Roadside Ambush, from the series ‘House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home’, 1967-72
Some of the noteworthy pieces in the cross-generational showcase of works by artists tackling codes and representation in contemporary society include Martha Rosler’s famous photomontage series ‘House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home’ (1967–72). For this commentary on the televised ‘living room war’ Rosler spliced pictures of the seemingly faraway conflict in Vietnam with images of the interiors of well-off Americans. These juxtapositions reveal both an increasingly connected world, where a war can be collectively experienced through the media, and a dizzying sense of disconnect, where human empathy has been numbed by overexposure to violence.
Presented by Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne, Berlin, and Munich.
Ken Lum, Cheeseburger, 2011
Taking a humorous approach, Ken Lum’s Cheeseburger (2011) is part of his ‘Portrait-Repeated Text’ series. It pictures ordinary people, in this case an Asian kitchen worker on a break, on billboards accompanied by an imaginary internal monologue. The piece is a stark reminder of how viewers project and impose their own interpretation onto other people’s realities.
Presented by Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne, Berlin, and Munich.
Rossi & Rossi’s presentation solely features pieces from the 1960s and 1970s by Siah Armajani, who is known mainly for his public works. The more domestically sized paintings, collages, and sculptures on show here demonstrate the Iranian-American artist’s wide range of interests and influences. They reflect both formal Persian traditions and Armajani’s own calligraphic training: His use of text as image mirrors the way quotations from the Koran are often used as decorative elements in Islamic art and architecture. A particularly intriguing piece is Moon Landing (1969), a television set Armajani bought to watch the landing on, which was padlocked after splashdown and inscribed with ‘This T.V. set has witnessed the Apollo 11 Mission’, signaling his interest in technology and the cosmos.
Presented by Rossi & Rossi, London and Hong Kong.
Santiago Bose and Yee I-Lann
Silverlens’ display focuses on the artists Yee I-Lann and the late Santiago Bose (1949–2002), who reimagine the definition of craft and storytelling. Rooted in Indigenous Filipino culture, Bose’s idiosyncratic work Philippine Amulet Series 1 (1998) reflects the hybridization of folk traditions in a society shaped by the aftermath of colonialism. Yee’s ongoing collaboration with mat weavers from land- and sea-based communities in Sabah, Malaysia, casts new light on the assigned meanings and use of their creations within the region.
Presented by Silverlens, Manila.
Leelee Chan, Receptor (willow-green), and Receptor (caterpillar-yellow), 2019
In her sculptures, Hong Kong artist Leelee Chan mixes discarded industrial and household ephemera, natural materials, and other ready-mades to reflect the city’s extreme urbanization. Completed in 2019, Receptor (willow-green) and Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) are inspired by the camouflaging capabilities of peppered moth caterpillars, which famously became darker during the Industrial Revolution. They and their natural habitat, tree branches, are reimagined here through the use of upright metal columns lined with multidirectional wheels, recalling the vertical cityscape of Hong Kong. These tactile works are typical of Chan’s ongoing exploration of our co-existence with nature in our rapidly changing post-industrial condition.
Presented by Capsule Shanghai.
Shi Hui and Maryn Varbanov
Shanghai-based Bank showcases works by the contemporary artist Shi Hui alongside pieces by her mentor, the late Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov (1932–89), who founded the Institute of Art Tapestry at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art). Hui’s refined mixed-media installations, which employ her signature materials of paper pulp and mesh, are on display alongside Varbanov’s bold and vibrant ‘soft sculptures’ woven from goat wool, and works on paper produced in the late 1970s. Presented together, these pieces demonstrate how these two important figures have radically reinvented the woven tradition and opened up a new field of possibilities.
Presented by Bank, Shanghai.
Rossella Biscotti’s poetic juxtaposition of materials uncover individual memories and their relation to society. In Other (Former Residents) (2014), she blends the technological histories of punch-card systems and the jacquard loom with statistics of those who were profiled as ‘other’ in recent censuses carried out in Brussels, the city she lives in. Taking the form of monumental woven fabric, the piece visualises information about the contemporary profiling methods and data processing that usually remain hidden. In a similar manner, Biscotti’s A shirt, blue pants, blue jeans, a towel (2018) cast used textiles in concrete cubes, as if to materialize the history of their previous owners.
Presented by Mor Charpentier, Paris.
The Online Viewing Rooms launched on March 18 and closed on March 25, 2020, but collectors can still contact galleries using the contact details on the individual gallery page. Information about the next edition will be released soon.
Christina Li is a curator and writer who works between Hong Kong and Amsterdam. She was the curator-at-large at the nonprofit arts space Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, where she served as the director between 2015 and 2017. Projects she curated there include ‘A Collective Present’ (2017), ‘Wu Tsang: Duilian’ (2016), and ‘Wong Wai Yin: Without Trying’ (2016). Her exhibition ‘Dismantling the Scaffold’ (2018) was the inaugural exhibition at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. As a writer, she has contributed to publications including Artforum, ArtReview Asia, Leap, Parkett, Spike, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She was the curator of ‘Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice’, Hong Kong’s participation at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and was recently named curator of the Pavilion of Finland at the 59th Venice Biennale (2021). On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Art Basel, she is currently working with Kasper König and Hamza Walker on a special project that will be presented this year.