Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Installation views Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
© Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, New York
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

Curated by Larys Frogier and Li Qi, the Rockbund Art Museum is thrilled to present the very first solo exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in China as a unique tribute to this major international contemporary artist - one who decisively subverted the codes of artistic production and envisioned new practices of exhibition and experiences of art.

Rather than a mere retrospective of past works, the exhibition aims to push forward those unique qualities in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work to infiltrate and subvert contexts: shifting histories, combinations, gaps, ruptures, and links will resonate throughout the exhibition between the artist’s oeuvre and its relevance vis-à-vis the transformative changes in Chinese society today. It is, for instance, very exciting to consider how his paper stacks, photostats and beaded curtains offer visitors powerful signs that echo the contemporary practices of memory, disappearance, circulation, frontiers, and structures of power.

From Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ critical, fragmentary, and anti-monumental photographic work “Untitled” (Natural History), to his candy spills “Untitled” (Public Opinion) or “Untitled” (Placebo), to his blue sheer curtains “Untitled” (Lover Boys), there are infinite possibilities for viewers to experience how power structures and identity constructions complicate the relationship between the individual and the multitude.

In such a process, there are some anachronistic historical contexts and contemporary challenges that could be particularly worthy of being questioned within the context of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum. For example, if the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s in America and Europe generated myriad debates, protests, and activist movements, this was not the case in the Chinese political context where debates about AIDS were blatantly absent and occluded.

With immense subtlety and wit, Felix Gonzalez-Torres developed representations of the subject as an extended space, an experience of life that is permanently interconnecting with the fluctuations-mutations of languages, with the individual and the multitude, with subjectivities and politics. From the generous act of offering to the exhaustion of the image, from the subversive critique of power to his poetic way of testing the limits of language, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s art is profoundly meaningful, subversive, and challenging in representing the processes of subjectification.