First solo exhibition in Hong Kong of works by renowned French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010). The exhibition is curated by Jerry Gorovoy, who worked closely with Bourgeois from the early 1980s until her death in 2010.
For more than 70 years, Bourgeois created forms that merged the concrete reality of the world around her and the fantastic reality of her inner psychic landscape. Her creative process was rooted in an existential need to record the rhythms and fluctuations of her conscious and unconscious life as a way of imposing order on the chaos of her emotions. The body, with its functions and distempers, held the key to both self-knowledge and cathartic release. ‘My Own Voice Wakes Me Up’ takes its title from one of Bourgeois’s ‘psychoanalytic writings,’ dated December 1951 and written at the very beginning of her intensive analysis. In this text, she describes how her own voice awakes her from a dream in which she was calling out (‘maman, maman’) while pounding on her husband’s chest. The exhibition focuses on distinct bodies of work from the final two decades of the artist’s life, including fabric sculptures, hand poses, late works on paper, topiary sculptures, and rarely exhibited holograms. | text Hauser & Wirth
Min Zhen painted this album for his friend Dailili Shanren in exchange for a scholar’s stone.
Cat and butterfly [ 貓和蝴蝶 ] are homophones for the characters “mao die” 耄耋 (octogenarian), so this painting expresses hope that the artist’s friend will live a long life.
Takahashi Hiroaki was the first print designer to collaborate with the publisher Watanabe Shôzaburô to revive the themes and techniques of 19th-century ukiyo-e prints. Between 1907 and 1923, when the Great Kantô Earthquake destroyed both prints and blocks, they produced over 500 designs. After the quake, Hiroaki began anew, sometimes creating modified versions of his earlier designs. This work, however, is from his output for a different publisher, Kaneko Fusui, who apparently allowed him to do more experimental designs. The swirling patterns in the background, done in soft yellow-orange, show the movement of the baren pad during the printing process. Takahashi worked with Kaneko for only four years, between 1929 and 1932, so prints from this publisher are relatively rare. (quoted from Portland Art Museum)
The draught of air caught the dancer, and she flew like a sylph just into the stove to the tin soldier.[The Tin Soldier and the Dancer ~The Brave Tin Soldier ~The Hardy Tin Soldier(1838)]
All illustrations are from : The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Illustrations by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Published in 1910. New York Public Library at internet archive
You could spend hours marveling at Arthur Rackham’s work. The legendary illustrator, born on September 19, 1867, was incredibly prolific, and his interpretations of Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Rip Van Winkle (to name but a few) have helped create our collective idea of those stories. Rackham is perhaps the most famous of the group of artists who defined the Golden Age of Illustration, the early twentieth-century period in which technical innovations allowed for better printing and people still had the money to spend on fancy editions. Although Rackham had to spend the early years of his career doing what he called “much distasteful hack work,” he was famous—and even collected—in his own time. He married the artist Edith Starkie in 1900, and she apparently helped him develop his signature watercolor technique. From the publication of his Rip Van Winkle in 1905, his talents were always in high demand. He had the advantage of a canny publisher, too, in William Heinemann. Before the release of each book, Rackham would exhibit the original illustrations at London’s Leicester Galleries, and sell many of the paintings. Meanwhile, Heinnemann had the notion to corner multiple markets by releasing both clothbound trade books and small numbers of signed, expensively bound, gilt-edged collectors’ editions. When the British economy flagged, Rackham turned his attention to Americans, producing illustrations for Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and later Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
Pragmatic he may have been, but Rackham’s detailed work is pure fantasy, alternately beautiful, romantic, haunting, and sinister. Nothing he did was ever truly ugly, although he could certainly communicate the grotesque. And his illustrations are never cute, although his animals—as in The Wind in the Willows—have a naturalist’s vividness, and he could do whimsy (think Alice in Wonderland, or his many goblins) with the best of them. Several generations of children grew up with this nuanced beauty; it’s probably wielded even more of an aesthetic influence than we attribute to it.
Rackham once said, “Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.” This is peculiar when one considers the moodiness of much of his palate, and the unflinching darkness of many of his illustrations. I think, rather, of a quote from his edition of Brothers Grimm: “Evil is also not anything small or close to home, and not the worst; otherwise one could grow accustomed to it.” He made that evil beautiful, too, and it was this as much as anything that enchanted. By Sadie Stein for The Paris Review Blog