Border(line)

EVENT DESCRIPTION

David Zwirner is pleased to present a group exhibition opening this September at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. Border(line) centers on the inescapable thresholds—literal and abstract—that demarcate nations, spaces, and contemporary life, and considers borders as conceptual and psychological states of being. Bringing together a diverse group of artists from the gallery’s program alongside voices from across Asia, this presentation offers an opportunity for global connection and exchange around the existence and possibilities of such partitions.

Works by David Zwirner artists Josef Albers, Raoul De Keyser, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres appear alongside others in various media by contemporary artists whose practices investigate the tensions between interior and exterior states of being, memory and reality, and nature and the built environment. These Asia-based artists include Chen Wei, Hu Xiaoyuan, James Prapaithong, Prae Pupityastaporn, Wong Ping, and Xie Nanxing.

A seminal video work by the Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs serves as the exhibition’s thematic anchor. In Painting/Retoque (2008), Alÿs repaints the fading median strips of a road that crosses the Panama Canal, a gesture that underscores the mutable and arbitrary nature of such boundaries. Since 1997, the artist has completed a number of projects exploring sociopolitical conflict in border regions—demonstrating his distinctive and poetic approach to artmaking as a means to foster understanding around some of our era’s most pressing issues. Among the most referenced artists by his peers, Alÿs’s wide-ranging practice has had a profound global influence and finds resonance with the works on view throughout this exhibition.

Works by David Zwirner artists Josef Albers, Raoul De Keyser, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres additionally explore the idea of frames, horizons, and boundaries from multivalent perspectives. An iconic example from Albers’s Homage to the Square series complements De Keyser’s Model for Cabinet (1989); both paintings employ related strategies of nested shapes and color play, while the architectural references in De Keyser’s composition form a contrast with the largely perceptual intentions of Albers’s work. In “Untitled” (Diptych) (1994) by Gonzalez-Torres, a pair of framed photographs show birds in flight. This recurring motif in the artist’s work alludes to themes of migration, belonging, and the porousness of borders—a reminder of how the many boundaries that govern modern life are not natural, but imposed.

In Border(line), these works appear alongside others in various media by contemporary artists whose practices investigate the tensions between interior and exterior states of being, memory and reality, and nature and the built environment. The photographs and illuminated installations of Beijing–based Chen Wei employ imagery that recalls moments of nightlife community, social isolation, and urban commercialism, while Thai artist Prae Pupityastaporn’s large-scale paintings depict serene, occasionally haunting snippets of natural and manmade landscapes.

Chinese painter Hu Xiaoyuan has created two new works for Border(line) that exemplify her nuanced perception and philosophical reflections on human nature, combining traces of the everyday and natural materials such as wood, silk, and marble in a sensitive exploration of the impermanence of time and the tension between interior states and external structures. A painting from Beijing and Chengdu–based Xie Nanxing’s Postcard series showcases the artist incorporating traditional techniques into his contemporary canvases, resulting in an abstract composition that exposes the potentials and limitations of the self as it interacts with nature. London–based Thai painter James Prapaithong presents a monumentally scaled diptych whose blurred, nostalgia-tinged imagery is reminiscent of a film still or found photograph.

Hong Kong–based artist Wong Ping’s hallucinatory and humorous animated video Sorry for the late reply (2021)—which was commissioned by the New Museum, New York, for his 2021 solo exhibition—explores the friction between personal desire and societal pressures. Together, these artists present a multifaceted, cross-generational, and transcultural vision of twenty-first-century life, one that is shaped and reshaped by constantly changing borders, both real and imagined.