At Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023, artists tracing the contours of physical, emotional, and metaphysical bodies across cultures and contexts are highlighting the body as a vessel for transmitting and transmuting historically marginalized and underexplored positions.
At Yavuz Gallery, Alvin Ong and Stanislava Pinchuk interrogate the universal body marked by hyper-specific inflections. In Ong’s oil paintings, the intimacy of everyday rituals are amplified with languid, visceral choreographies that reframe how bodies occupy and navigate domestic spaces. Such that a portrayal of a body sleeping on a bed, as in the nocturnal, blue-scale Baby (2022), appears like a form stretched out and contorted to inhabit a mattress frame. Inviting a sensual reading of the mundane, Ong’s voluptuous off-kilter figures palpitate with a soft, almost gelatinous, energy to propose an equally off-kilter but pleasurable way of moving through the world. In contrast, Pinchuk’s bodies emerge on more conceptual terms as densely tactile constructs that carry stories of migration, forced or otherwise. Inscribed on tombstone-like blocks of marble composing The Wine Dark Sea (2022), are phrases from Homer’s Odyssey and excerpts from leaked documents discussing the off-shore Australian detention camps for asylum seekers on the Nauru and Manus Islands.

In the works of Pedro Neves Marques, presented by Umberto Di Marino, the imagined body flows through different spaces to distill experiences within the circulations of global capital and resources. The android ‘YWY’ (meaning land or territory in Indigenous South American Tupi-Guarani languages) was invented as a conduit to investigate such circulations for Marques’s ongoing multimedia series ‘YWY Saga’ (2017-present). In the film YWY, Searching for a Character Between East and West (2021), YWY takes on the role of spectator as it moves through street markets in Brazil and Hong Kong to problematize similarities and entanglements across time: China was once the biggest importer of South American silver; now Brazil is the biggest importer of Chinese soy bean.
As YWY demonstrates, the intrinsic significance of the body to the human condition allows for a certain dislocation – whether from the rigidity of sovereign geographies or from identification as a specific, singular body. Figuration works as a universal language: a geopoetics that threads together individual accounts embedded within specific times and spaces to create collective narratives. But to conceptualize a geopoetics of the body in plural presupposes a consideration of the mechanism behind how bodies are communicated, represented, and situated – a process that departs from figuration’s formal grammars and phrases. In presentations at Tang Contemporary Art and Yavuz Gallery, for example, the idiosyncrasies of formalism come to the fore.
At Tang Contemporary Art, the works of Yue Minjun and Etsu Egami are marked by an emphasis on the artists’ individual styles and flourishes. Known for painting figures frozen in mid-laughter, Yue centers human expression by hyper-focusing on the physical shape of the mouth and the gesture of laughing, evident in works like The Bones (2014), an oil on canvas painting that deploys Yue’s signature motif of a ‘self-image’ laughing exaggeratedly, this time with two bones jutting out of his forehead. Ambiguously poised, Yue’s exaggerated choreographies are simultaneously ambivalent and charged. The act of laughter could be construed as a primal proclamation of mirth, anguish, or disbelief. Egami, on the other hand, pares down on realism in favor of minimal compositions that create immediately recognizable profiles through the power of suggestion and association. Portraits like Rainbow-Ice Cold Girl (2022), a rough, oil on canvas depiction of a figure in profile, are powered by an astute understanding of how the collective subconscious remembers certain features and bodies, producing a sense of corporeal déjà vu that interrogates the functioning of memory and communication.

In the paintings of Amir H. Fallah, presented by Denny Gallery, the idea of the body as an unmarked subject and object prone to errors in translation and perception moves to the fore. Fallah’s work deploys unidentifiable bodies as props over which objects, images, and aspirations can be placed and amalgamated. In the acrylic on canvas The Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power (2023), for example, two shrouded figures break black rocks apart on the ground while surrounded by panels that resemble historical paintings and contemporary comics. Lushly composed and colored, these paintings merge motifs from traditional material cultures from across the world to propose alternate ways of narrative-making. Slipping between states of legibility, latent ambiguities emphasize the apocryphal nature of origin stories and monolithic cultural imaginaries.

Kenneth Tam’s ‘Silent Spikes’ series, presented by Commonwealth and Council, likewise resists hegemonic constructions of identity. Centering a relatively under-represented chapter of American migration history, where westward expansion intersected with early Chinese immigration to the United States, soft grayscale photographic portraits of Asian-American men – as seen in works like Alfred, Virgo, and Theo (all 2022) – perform the virile white archetype of the cowboy. Tam’s images complicate the idealized picture of tenacious white cattle-workers and the forcibly desexualized bodies of Asian-American men. Exploring the sensitive and sensuous possibility of homo-social solidarity, Tam frays the edges of toxic masculine ideals by portraying a productive vulnerability.

In Pauline Shaw’s practice, presented by In Lieu, the cultured and historied body approaches abstraction from both textural and haptic angles, highlighting the conditions of sensing and sense-making that influence how rituals and histories are inherited and propagated. In felted wool pieces like Throw a Coin and Two-faced (both 2022), which include the addition of copper and glass elements respectively, Shaw studies ornamentation and patterning as a way of investigating the role of decorative arts in shaping identities across time. Made with the labor-intensive process of wool-working, traditionally critical to rug- and tapestry-making, Shaw’s work draws on the key act of producing heirlooms as a craft transmitted through social bonds. Taking on a tactile quality, Shaw’s pieces are as inviting as they are engrossing. They gesture towards a geopoetics of the body at its most abstracted, where meaning can be found in acts of building kinship.

Alfonse Chiu is a writer, artist, and curator based between Taipei and Singapore. They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal Fellow and are currently the director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM).
Published on March 10, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Yue Minjun, Sunglow (detail), 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Seoul. A dark filter was applied over the image for readability. 2. Pedro Neves Marques, YWY, Searching for a Character Between East and West (video still detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Naples.