This review was first published in Chinese on Artforum.com.cn.
Text by Robin Peckham
Joseph Kosuth and Tsang Kin-Wah
Para/Site
4 Po Yan St., Sheung Wan
29 November 2009 – 17 January 2010
The textual installation work of Tsang Kin-wah is much admired for its discretion, its ability to disguise itself as wallpaper or graphic design depending on the context. Surprisingly, his latest work, “If Someone Calls it Art, It’s Kun(s)t” (2009), rejects this emphasis on craft and architectural use of space, gleaning more from his recent video installations of floating text. In the exhibition at Para/Site, the front room is dominated by strings of black die-cut letter stickers plastered over walls, around corners, and even over the ventilation of the air conditioner. A bare light bulb dangles in the center of the space, dimming and leaving the gallery in darkness several times each minute. The allusion to the “Allegory of the Cave” may be overwrought but the execution is successful, forcing visitors to rush to finish reading any given line of text and avoid running into anyone else in the room.
The linguistic content is more self-consciously conceptual than his earlier work, which buried profanity deep within the excesses of color and typography. Here, the art world humor evident in the title recurs in spades, but the trying experience of viewing itself manages to overwhelm any play of language the artist might deploy. Joseph Kosuth’s work, perhaps the most significant progenitor of the rigorous but humorous conceptualism with which Tsang Kin-Wah works, is largely relegated to the smaller back room, and seems to be included primarily as a foil for the younger artist’s experimentation–a concession to local audiences with only loose familiarity with the generation to which Kosuth belongs.
The strongest point of the exhibition may be the one wall on which works from both artists overlap. Tsang Kin-Wah has chosen to hang the center panel of Kosuth’s “L’essence de la rhétorique est dans l’allegorie” (1997), reading simply “représentation,” within the space dedicated to the former artist; along the bottom edge, the die-cut letters forming the word “interpretation” are affixed upside-down. Allowing a degree of dialogue between two artists working in vastly different historical and regional contexts, this juxtaposition offers support for the hopeful hypothesis that contemporary art in and around China must be read according to the same standards as its international counterparts.