ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Liza Lou
With an emphasis on repetition, formal perfection and materiality, Liza Lou’s sculptures and environments thrive on the tension between the apparent impossibility of their construction, the seductive beauty of their surfaces and the often sinister implications of their subject matter. Over the past several years, while living and working in South Africa, Liza Lou has developed a body of work based upon further ideas of confinement and protection.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
In “ingxube” Liza Lou’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, the artist presents new works from her series with the same title. For this exhibition, the artist presents six colorful minimalist paintings comprised entirely of woven beads. Liza Lou uses tiny glass beads as her medium, completely canvassing entire surfaces and objects in a labyrinth of sparking specks. She expands on conventional interpretation of sculpture and installation by saturating her mock environments in intricately hand-crafted detail. Born in New York, Lou founded a studio collective in 2005 in South Africa, where the traditional craft of beadwork still thrives. Although she does not explicitly use African beading practices in her work, she founded a collective, in 2005, employing 30 Zulu artisans in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, who have worked with bead art for generations. For more than 20 years, she has worked with glass beads as her primary medium. From working alone on large-scale sculptures to developing unique community strategies, she investigates the beauty of labor, challenges the accepted definitions of art and craft, and addresses the socio-political issues of gender, class, race, and community. For her best-known installation, “Kitchen” (1991-96), she worked alone over five years to create a life-sized replica a suburban American kitchen, in which she hand-glued millions of glittering glass beads onto every surface, from the appliances to the dirty dishes in the sink. The “ingxube” series exemplifies Lou’s sustained interest in pushing the structural and aesthetic possibilities of her material while extending the creative conversation with her South African studio community. The Zulu word “ingxube” translates loosely to “random” or “mixture,” which alludes to the method of production of these works. Using selections of different colored beads that she blends into custom color groupings, much like mixing paint pigments, Lou assigns a variety of strips to be woven by the artisans in prescribed dimensions, requiring only that beads be chosen randomly. Selecting from the resulting hundreds of strips, Lou then builds and weaves each into a canvas.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 19/1-11/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
