Of ink, milk and Brooklyn skies

It turned out to be a journey in self-discovery when multimedia artist Wang Gongxin was going over the art he had created in the early stage of his career. He says he was touched, as it were, by his own "art history". The result was Rotation, the first solo exhibition of the artist's early installation works, in the city, presented by White Cube Hong Kong.

Unseatable, first shown in Brooklyn in 1994, is one of the highlights of the show. It is a kinetic installation of four chairs. Seated on them are containers filled, alternately, with ink or milk. His breakthrough project, The Sky of Brooklyn, was created in 1995. Wang dug a hole several meters deep in the floor of his house in Beijing, placed a video monitor inside it and played footage of the New York skies.

The artist says he is driven by "obsession with creativity and pursuit of a complete spiritual world".

This is Hong Kong's chance to sample the earliest examples of the works of an artist who is forever examining the relationship between materiality, space and time.

(HK Edition 09/01/2017 page10)