David Zwirner is pleased to present an expansive exhibition of new work by Rirkrit Tiravanija, on view at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. A primary reference and significant inspiration for the works in this exhibition is Chinese author Liu Cixin’s acclaimed Remembrance of Earth’s Past science-fiction trilogy, one of the most successful book series to emerge internationally from China. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at David Zwirner since the announcement that he will be working with the gallery. In May 2021, Tiravanija’s seminal early work untitled 1990 (pad thai) was featured in The Real World, a group exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. untitled 1990 (pad thai) and other seminal pieces from throughout Tiravanija’s career will be featured in a major survey of the artist’s work—his largest exhibition to date—that will open at MoMA PS1, New York, in October 2023.
For this presentation, Tiravanija will replicate an umbrella repair shop, of the kind commonly found in Hong Kong. Installed on the gallery’s sixth floor, the shop will be stocked with a full inventory of umbrellas and other elements inspired by its real-life counterparts, continuing Tiravanija’s longtime practice of highlighting and incorporating local, vernacular objects and forms into his works. Within the shop, a transistor radio will be playing an audio recording from Death’s End, the final book in Liu’s trilogy. In this excerpt, a character tells a series of deeply allegorical fairy tales that have several art historical references—to portraiture and linear perspective specifically. A spinning umbrella, which protects the tale’s protagonist from being painted into a picture, figures prominently in the three tales.
Other spaces within the exhibition include augmented reality, robotics, and other advanced technologies, which the artist has increasingly incorporated into his work, resulting in unique experiential environments that engage the viewer’s perception of time, space, and reality. The shop itself also reflects Tiravanija’s longstanding interest in sites of exchange as spaces for critical reflection on relational structures—from the individual to the communal, the intellectual to the transactional, the casual to the ritualistic—that define the contemporary experience.
Tiravanija is best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around personal and shared communal traditions, such as cooking Thai meals, that are, in the words of curator Rochelle Steiner, “fundamentally about bringing people together.”1 At the forefront of the shift in avant-garde art practices in the 1990s away from traditional art objects and toward “relational aesthetics” that incorporate diverse cultural spaces, practices, and temporalities, Tiravanija has continually challenged and expanded the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the personal and poetic spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. Over the course of his thirty-year career, he has also come to incorporate into his art and installations a wide variety of media, including painting, printmaking, video, photography, mixed-media assemblage, and music.
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires in 1961. The son of a Thai diplomat, he moved frequently during his youth, growing up primarily in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada. He received his BA from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, in 1984, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. From 1985 to 1986, he participated in the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York.
Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, many of which center around unique participatory installations or practices. He was the subject of two major retrospectives in the 2000s: Nothing: A Retrospective, at Chiang Mai University Art Museum, Thailand, in 2004, and A Retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day), which was presented simultaneously at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2004 to 2005, and later at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2005. A comprehensive catalogue for the retrospectives was published in 2007. Conceived as an artist’s book, the monograph also documents the trajectory of Tiravanija’s work, starting in 1989, using a unique storyboard-style presentation. In 2007, David Zwirner presented its first exhibition with Tiravanija, which featured the artist’s Untitled 1992 (Free), that is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Other important solo exhibitions of Tiravanija’s work have been presented at prominent institutions worldwide, including the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (1996); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1999); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan (2000); Portikus, Frankfurt (2001 and 2004); Kunsthall Oslo (2001); Secession, Vienna (2002); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany (2003); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005); The Drawing Center, New York (2008); Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2009); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2009); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2009); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2012); Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2014); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2014); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasília (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); and National Gallery of Singapore (2018).
From 2019 to 2020, Tiravanija’s Fear Eats the Soul, a major solo exhibition featuring several interactive and participatory elements, including a soup kitchen and T-shirt workshop, was presented at Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland. Also in 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, hosted Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green, in which Tiravanija transformed the museum’s galleries into a communal dining space where visitors were served curry. The artist also created a large-scale mural on the museum walls over the course of the exhibition.
The artist’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 1993, 1999, 2011, and 2015. He also exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 2006, and the Whitney Biennial in 1995 and 2006. At the 2012 Paris Triennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Tiravanija presented Soup/No Soup (2011–2012), a twelve-hour banquet that was open to all visitors at the Grand Palais.
Among his many awards and honors, Tiravanija was the recipient of the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Work by the artist is represented in international museum and public collections, including Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) Occitanie Montpellier, France; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Fundación Tantica, Buenos Aires; Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Tiravanija lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.
1 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Shall We Dance?,” The New Yorker, October 17, 2005, p. 82.
Image: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled, 2022 (detail).
For all press inquiries, contact:
Victoria Kung vkung@davidzwirner.com
Rosie O’Reilly rosie@suttoncomms.com
里克利·提拉瓦尼
「店舖」
2023年3月20日–5月6日
香港中環皇后大道中80號
H Queen’s 5–6樓
在此次展覽中，提拉瓦尼將重現一個香港隨處可見的修傘舖。搭建於畫廊的六樓，這個店舖將備好充足完整的各式雨傘，以及其他現實中的修傘舖裡常見的商品，由此延續提拉瓦尼長期以來將本土的、民間的物件及形式雜糅到其作品中並加以凸顯的實踐方式。在店舖裡，一台晶體管收音機將會播放出自劉慈欣三部曲最後一部《死神永生》中的錄音。這段節選的內容，由一個虛構角色講述了一系列極具深刻寓意的童話故事，它們有諸多藝術史的參考——尤其是肖像畫和線性透視：在三個故事中佔據最重要地位的是一把旋轉的傘，它可以保護寓言中的主人公不被描繪到平面的畫像中。
展覽中的其他空間包括了增強現實、機器人技術和其他的先進科技，而藝術家越來越多地將這些融入到他的作品中，從而形成了獨特的試驗性環境，讓觀眾得以深入有關時間、空間和現實的感知。 《店舖》本身還反映出提拉瓦尼長期以來對發生交換的場所的興趣，他視其為一種批判反思的空間，所針對的是那些定義了當代經驗的「關係美學」式的結構——從個體到社群，智識到交易，隨意到儀式。
提拉瓦尼以其私密的、參與性的裝置作品最為著名，這些創作以個人及共享的集體傳統為核心，例如烹飪泰式食物，用策展人羅謝爾·施泰納（Rochelle Steiner）的話來說:「本質上，這事關如何讓人們歡聚一堂。」1 1990年代的前衛藝術實踐，從傳統的藝術物件轉向了各種包括多元文化空間、實踐及時空的「關係美學」，提拉瓦尼身處這一轉變的前沿，他持續地挑戰並拓展著藝術的社會維度，邀請來自各行各業的人們棲居於由他建構起來的、私人化而又充滿詩意的空間中，並且協同著參與到共享的儀式和行動之中。在他三十多年的職業生涯中，提拉瓦尼將一系列範圍開闊的媒介融入到他的藝術和裝置中，包括繪畫、版畫製作、視頻、攝影、綜合媒介的「集合藝術」物件以及音樂。
里克利·提拉瓦尼（Rirkrit Tiravanija）1961年出生於布宜諾斯艾利斯。身為一位泰國外交官的兒子，他在年少時頻繁地遷居，主要在泰國、埃塞俄比亞和加拿大等地長大。 1984年，他從多倫多的安大略藝術學院獲得了學士學位，並於1986年獲得了芝加哥藝術學院的純藝術碩士學位。 1985到1986年間，他參加了極富盛名的紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館的「獨立研究計劃」。
自1990年代早期開始，提拉瓦尼便已經舉辦了多場個展，其中的許多展覽項目都圍繞獨特的參與性裝置或實踐而展開。在千禧年之初，他舉辦了兩場重要的作品回顧展：2004年舉行於泰國清邁大學藝術博物館的《無物：一場回顧展》，以及2004到2005年間同時舉行於鹿特丹博伊曼斯范伯寧恩美術館和巴黎現代藝術博物館的《一場回顧展（明天又是美好的另一天）》，並在隨後於2005年巡展至倫敦的蛇形畫廊。 2007年，這幾場回顧展的綜述圖冊出版。這本專著可被視作一本藝術家書，同時以獨特的「故事板」的形式，記錄了提拉瓦尼自1989年開始的創作軌跡。在2007年，卓納畫廊為提拉瓦尼舉辦了首場畫廊展覽，呈現了藝術家的《無題1992（自由）》，這件作品目前被珍藏於紐約的現代藝術博物館。
其他為提拉瓦尼的作品舉辦過重要個展的世界級重要機構還包括：科隆藝術協會（1996）；紐約現代藝術博物館（1997）；費城藝術博物館（1998）；俄亥俄州哥倫布的衛克斯那藝術中心（1999）；洛杉磯郡藝術博物館（1999）；日本北九州當代藝術中心（2000）；法蘭克福門廊博物館（2001和2004）；奧斯陸美術館（2001）；維也納分離派展覽館（2002）；萊比錫當代藝術館（2003）；紐約所羅門·R·古根海姆美術館（2005）；紐約繪畫中心（2008）；德國卡塞爾的弗里德利希阿魯門博物館（2009）；西班牙馬拉加當代藝術中心（2009）；聖路易斯的米爾德里德·萊恩·肯珀藝術博物館（2009）；德國的比勒菲爾德美術館（2010）；倫敦海沃德美術館（2012）；巴黎蓬皮杜藝術中心（2012）；巴塞羅那現代藝術博物館（2014）；德克薩斯州的沃斯堡現代美術館（2014）；莫斯科的車庫當代藝術博物館（2015）；巴西銀行文化中心（2015）；阿姆斯特丹市立博物館（2016）；以及新加坡國家美術館（2018）。
2019-2020年，馬里蘭州的格蘭斯通博物館呈現了提拉瓦尼的重要個展《恐懼吞噬靈魂》，其中呈獻了諸多互動性、參與性的藝術元素，包括一個常為救濟所用的「施食處」以及T恤生產工坊等。同樣是在2019年，位於華盛頓特區的赫希洪博物館和雕塑園為提拉瓦尼舉辦了個展《是誰在害怕紅、黃、綠》，在展覽中，藝術家將博物館的數個展廳改造成一片可供集體用餐的區域，並向觀眾提供咖哩食物。此外，藝術家還在展覽期間為博物館的展牆創作了一件大尺幅的壁畫作品。
提拉瓦尼的作品曾於1993年、1999年、2011年和2015年數次亮相於威尼斯雙年展。他還曾在2006年參加了聖保羅雙年展，並在1995年和2006年參加了惠特尼雙年展。 2012年，在由奧奎·恩威佐（Okwui Enwezor）策展的巴黎三年展上，提拉瓦尼呈現了作品《湯/無湯》（2011–2012），這是一場長達12小時的筵席，向巴黎大皇宮的所有觀眾開放。
提拉瓦尼獲得過眾多獎項與殊榮，2004年，他榮獲由古根海姆基金會頒發的「雨果·博斯大獎」。
藝術家的作品被珍藏於眾多國際博物館和公共收藏中，包括：奧斯陸的阿斯楚普費恩利現代藝術博物館、匹茨堡的卡內基美術館、佛羅里達州的康奈爾美術館、位於巴黎的FNAC法國國家當代藝術基金會、位於蒙彼利埃的FRAC法國區域當代藝術基金會、都林的山德雷托·雷·雷包登戈基金會、布宜諾斯艾利斯的坦提卡基金會、巴西因赫泰姆藝術中心、法國第戎財團美術館、丹麥胡姆勒拜克的路易斯安那現代藝術博物館、蘇黎世的米格羅當代藝術博物館、西班牙萊昂當代藝術博物館、曼谷當代藝術博物館、洛杉磯當代 藝術博物館、紐約現代藝術博物館、柏林新國家美術館、密蘇里州的聖路易斯藝術博物館、柏林的德意志聯邦共和國當代藝術收藏、舊金山現代藝術博物館、紐約古根海姆美術館、倫敦的泰特美術館，以及明尼亞波利斯州的沃克藝術中心。
提拉瓦尼現生活工作於紐約、柏林和清邁。