Hauserworth Hong Kong Blockbuster Exhibition: "William Kentridge: The Weight of Tears" will be on display from 17 March to 29 May 2022.
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"William Kentridge: The Weight of Tears"
（William Kentridge. Weigh All Tears）
Exhibition Scene, 2022, Hauserworth Hong Kong
Photo by Kitmin Lee
I was fascinated by the weight of the history load.
– William Kentridge
For more than half a century, William Kentridge has continued to explore and question history—he responds to the past, because the past inevitably shapes our present and thus creates a world that mirrors reality. Through film, performance, drama, painting, sculpture, oil painting and printmaking, he tries to understand the world and analyze how meaning is constructed. His works make the audience aware of how they see the world, and guide the audience to observe and think more consciously.
From 17 March, Hauserworth Hong Kong will host the exhibition "William Kentridge: The Weight of Tears". The exhibition is curated by HauserWorth in collaboration with goodman Gallery. It was Kentridge's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and Hauserworth's first collaboration with the Johannesburg artist, who now lives in South Africa.
William H. Kentridge
Images courtesy of the artist
Photo by Norbert Miguletz
The title of the exhibition is taken from a new work of the same name. The six-metre-wide triptych is set against a backdrop of maps of Africa and collages of historical documents, in which silhouettes of figures march in a row. The phrase "The Weight of Tears" has appeared repeatedly in Kentridge's work and has been circulating and evolving. These phrases "are riddles to be solved, hovering on the edge of meaning emerging." These sentence fragments are taken from a vocabulary that has been used in other works over the years. Sometimes, they are taken out and recombined. ”
William Kentridge
The Weight of Tears (Partial)
2021
Oil paint Pencil poster paint canvas collage
3 parts, each part: 200 x 200 cm / 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches
Image courtesy of the artist and Hauserworth
The silhouettes of the figures in the triptych are like words from different works, and can also be seen in the exhibition's four new tapestries: Orator (2021), Spinner (2021), Mechanic (2020) and Colleoni (2020). Since 2001, Kentridge has been working with Marguerite Stephens' weaving studio on the outskirts of Johannesburg to translate his artistic ideas into handmade mohair tapestries. In the tapestry series on display, laser-cut silhouettes of figures stand in front of a map of the political divisions of Hebei Province, China (circa 1950-1970). The artist purchased this set of maps of China 20 years ago and has been waiting for the right time and pattern to use it. Tapestries bring together multiple times and places, with maps and silhouettes of People from Hebei Province from the 1950s to the 1970s, occasionally interspersed with traces of paint marks and collages, creating a space for questioning and doubt.
Colleoni
2020
Hand-woven mohair tapestry
269 x 253 cm / 105 7/8 x 99 5/8 inches
The silhouette of the character in The Tapestry in Colleoni (2020) is Bartolomeo Colleoni, the 15th-century Doge and mercenary of Venice. The image here is derived from the work of the 18th-century Italian artist Castiglione, which is depicted in a very similar way to the portrait of the Qianlong Emperor. The image of a horseman, which appears frequently in Kentridge's work, embodies his understanding of the male hero figure—the man's brilliance and majesty can be displayed by simply placing him on horseback and underneath it on a pedestal—and the subsequent collapse, decay, and destruction of these monuments. Here, the horses in the work are made up of seemingly different materials, which is a question of the nature of this heroic image.
The "Ladder Horse" (2021) is assembled from wooden materials (including ladder legs), which is not only a simplification of the form, but also once again questions the heroism in the image of the horse.
Similarly, the three (2016) laser-cut steel heads of Revolutionary I, Revolutionary II, and Revolutionary [There Was No Epiphany], borrow from the avatars of characters in the boilerplate play, present the gradual evolution of symbols, and add text to the third work. The model plays of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) interpreted the revolutionary story in the traditional form of Peking Opera.
Also on display is a series of cast bronze sculptures created in 2021, cast by the Workhorse Foundry in Johannesburg. Some of these sculptures are amplified interpretations of cursive (Cursive, 2020), a work containing 40 small bronze sculptures. Gradually, these characters together form a three-dimensional vocabulary of the artist's work. At first, the images appeared in the form of pen drawings and paper cuts on dictionary pages. Kentridge experimented with converting images of characters and symbols into sculptures, exploring different combinations and progressive relationships on bookshelves—different orders would interpret the works differently. This group of seven larger bronze works is a combination of potential meanings and associations. For Kentrich, the character bronze works themselves and the connections between them can be seen as a kind of self-portrait. "As defined by the self, it is actually a collection of all our related things, waiting to be grasped and extended when the world approaches everything."
Cursive
Bronze, a set of 40 parts
Shelf overall: 133.5 x 190 x 26.5 cm / 52 1/2 x 74 3/4 x 10 3/8 inches
The sculpture is variable in size
The exhibition will also feature a 2020 video work, Sibyl, based on his 2019 opera Waiting for the Sibyl, Teatro dell opera di Roma, and composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd) did it together. The Prophetess is a collection of characters, symbols, and phrases that run through the exhibition, flashing through the pages of the book and accompanied by intense audio tracks. The image of the worker reappears in blue. Tree motifs, dancing prophetesses, smeared pages, household objects and abstract figures interspersed with hand-painted leaves. The film's text is excerpted from the opera script, including verses adapted by the poet from African proverbs, as well as lines written specifically for the opera. "The dawn will break more than once", "Everything is different from imagination", "Where is our hope?" "You'll never see that city" – these sentences appear and then disappear.
"Female Foreknowledge"
Single-channel HD video with a duration of 9 minutes and 59 seconds
The work was inspired by Cumaean Sibyl, who in ancient Greek culture answered questions and wrote the answers on the leaves of oak trees that disappeared with the wind, while in Kentridge's films, the pages turned formed a changing pattern, reflecting fate and life and death. Kentridge said, "The main thread that runs through the work is that we gradually realize that the original algorithm is the contemporary prophetess. Algorithms know ourselves better than we do, and we know our destiny. ”
About the artist
William Kentridge
Photo: Artist, Photo by Marc Shoul
William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and still lives and works here. Growing up, he witnessed the disintegration of apartheid in South Africa. At the same time, his father was a human rights lawyer, which influenced him to have a strong sense of social responsibility at an early age. In 1978, he received a bachelor's degree in politics and African studies from the University of the Witwatersran, and a diploma in art from the Johannesburg Foundation for the Arts. At the Foundation, he studied under renowned South African artist Bill Ainslie. To become an actor, he went to paris in 1981 to study mime and theatre choreography at the L'Ecole Internationale de Thé tre Jacques Lecoq.
During the period of style formation in the 1970s and 1980s, Kentridge worked as a writer, director, stage designer, puppeteer and actor. At the age of thirty, he had begun to incorporate his theatrical ambitions into a new interest in painting. He turned to charcoal painting, because just with a cloth he could erase the original traces and change the brush strokes without thinking. He found that using this feature of the carbon pen, he was free to create as he pleased, constantly redefining and changing his work.
William Kentridge: Sample Notes
（William Kentridge. Notes Towards a Model Opera）
Exhibition scene, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2015
Inspired by the painting process, Kentridge began to make stop-motion films, filming his own painting process under the influence of Neo-Expressionism and german film styles. These film paintings—or painting films—hover between silence and movement. Kentridge completely abandons the script and storyboarding, and is open to the natural formation of the object itself, presenting our understanding of the world. Many of the film's paintings have been profoundly influenced by the socio-political changes in South Africa. Between 1989 and 2020, Kentridge expanded his short film series titled Drawings for Projection, which traced the story of mining magnate Soho Eckstein, his wife, and her lover, Felix Teitlebaum, during the final decade of apartheid.
Kentridge's work has been in the permanent collections of many major art galleries and has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Louvre in Paris, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Louisiana Gallery in Copenhagen, the Queen Sophia Art Center in Madrid, the Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum of Contemporary African Art, the Novart Foundation Cape Town, and more. He received honorary doctorates from Yale University and New York University. Other accolades include the Kyoto Prize, the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Arts, the Prince of Asturias Prize, the Fairtrinelli Prize, and the Takamatsu Palace World Culture Painting Award.
Waiting for the Prophetess
Single-act chamber opera, 42 minutes
Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, 11 September 2019
Photo by Stella Olivier
For more details, please see the Hauserworth Gallery public account