At Axel Vervoodt (Antwerp / Hong Kong), KIMSOOJA presented Encounter – A Mirror Woman (2017–19), a reflective floor and wall environment with an accordion-style partition. More than just a selfie-destination—but that, too—Kimsooja’s installation invites us to see ourselves from many angles and come face to face with ourselves, or wonder why that is so difficult.
At the booth of Los Angeles-based gallery Commonwealth and Council, KANG SEUNG LEE uses graphite to painstakingly recreate black-and-white photographs captured by three artists who died of AIDS-related complications, namely Tseng Kwong Chi, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Seen above is Lee’s adaptation of Tseng’s self-portrait, taken in front of a Buddha statue in Kamakura as part of his East Meets West (1979) series. Tseng’s figure has been obfuscated, pointing to the omission of queer bodies and the legacies of AIDS from history.
Painting memories of everyday scenes, Hong Kong-born CHRIS HUEN SIN KAN draws from the compositional principles of traditional Chinese ink works. This is seen in the flattened perspective of Joel and Balltsz (2021), with objects appearing as though they are pressed against the picture plane. The canvas’s slivers of white also recall the spaces that are deliberately left blank in ink paintings, suggesting a faded, indeterminate recollection. The work is presented by Ota Fine Arts (Singapore / Tokyo / Shanghai).
Hong Kong’s veteran gallery Hanart TZ anchored its elegant mixed booth in a multigenerational exploration of shanshui painting’s essential motifs. Master calligrapher WANG DONGLING’s imposing, four-panel Tao Yuanming, “The Peach Blossom Spring”, Entangled Script (2018) references the classic Chinese fable about a hidden utopia through towering, jumbled characters, alongside LUIS CHAN’s prismatic, dreamlike scenes and TOBIAS KLEIN’s glass orb sculptures with fluid-looking 3D-printed elements.
Non sequiturs galore at Stephen Friedman Gallery (London), where DAVID SHRIGLEY’s distinctive, humorous drawings of awkward characters and situations capture a world wonderfully awry.
New York-based artist HUMA BHABHA’s solo presentation at David Kordansky (Los Angeles) showcased her latest series of cork-and-Styrofoam sculptures (all 2021) enacting religious gestures, surrounded by wall-mounted untitled collages depicting extraterrestrial creatures with hybrid animal and human faces. The booth appeared to evoke figures of a lost civilization drawn from the artist’s imagination.
On view at Perrotin (Paris / New York / Tokyo / Seoul / Hong Kong / Shanghai), LEE BAE’s signature charcoal-on-canvas series, Issu du feu (2002– ), creates an optical illusion of a three-dimensional, sculptural painting filled with charcoal shards. When one observes the works from different angles, the shade of the charcoal shifts under the light. The series is part of Lee’s years-long exploration into charcoal as a symbol of life and death.
In the Discoveries section, Seoul-based P21 presented a solo booth of HANEYL CHOI’s sculptures, composed of minimalistic, human-sized metal pillars decorated with fashion items in homage to his LGBTQ+ friends Mingyu Lee, Paiksuk Chung, and Mini Han (all 2021). The fourth sculpture, YOU, is a clever reference to the viewer, and appears not so different from the other three. The works lend visibility to queer narratives, and assert that members of the LGBTQ+ community deserve the same status, rights, and recognition as any other citizen.
At the booth of London-based Pilar Corrias, SOFIA MITSOLA’s paintings and drawings from her latest body of work, Aquamarina (2021), portray two pseudo-mythic female characters, Aqua and Marina, who inhabit a semi-aquatic world. Through storytelling, Mitsola explores ideas and topics around sisterhood, mythology, feminine power, and the male gaze.
Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou/Beijing) presented a suite of new FIRENZE LAI paintings (2020–21), including the large oil canvas Wedges (2021), which features a distended, distorted figure between two rock-like outcroppings.
