Lisson Gallery at Art Basel Unlimited 2023
22 May 2023
At the 2023 edition of Art Basel, Lisson Gallery is pleased to present two solo artist projects at Unlimited by Cory Arcangel and Yu Hong.
Cory Arcangel presents Related to your interests (2020-2021), a collection of hundreds of bot-generated Youtube videos scripted out of repurposed content from ‘clickbait’ websites. The nonsensical and aesthetically dissonant narrative derives from text, images or articles assembled together and is read through an artificially generated voice. Each video composition is uploaded by the bot onto its Youtube channel – a process entirely devoid of the artist’s agency.
Arcangel has been exploring the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning — treating them as subject matter and medium.
Also at Art Basel Unlimited is Yu Hong’s colossal, three-panel painting titled The Ship of Fools (2021). Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous painting, the work similarly takes its themes from fantasy and mythology. Yu Hong depicts a crowd struggling and climbing onto a boat about to capsize in front of a magnificent glacier and raging waves, while the carefree animals reveling in the beauty of the landscape. The viewer is invited to reflect on how all living creatures, including humans, are all a part of the same ecosystem.
Yu Hong is known for her large-scale figurative paintings that vividly depict the nuanced experiences and psychological landscape of contemporary China. Trained in the Socialist Realist tradition, the artist evolved a style that uniquely and intimately stemmed from her own experiences, reflecting those of her generation, observing the rapid economic and social changes that took around her. Working primarily with acrylic paint on canvas, Yu Hong approaches her work through a distinctly female lens, considering the relationship between the individual – in particular the role of the woman in society – within the community as a whole.
