FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES

Beyond the gallery, simultaneous manifestations of candy and stack works in the show will be displayed at significant public sites around the city. These installations will explore the complex relationships and negotiations between private and public space, and intimacy and anonymity, that inform Gonzalez-Torres’s practice. By embedding the artist’s work within the broader contexts and daily rhythms of Hong Kong’s urban environment, this project brings into question notions of access, who constitutes the public, and what defines public versus private space. Among the works to be displayed both in the gallery and a public setting are “Untitled” (Welcome Back Heroes) (1991). As with all of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works, in which viewers are welcome to take and consume a piece, “Untitled” (Welcome Back Heroes) evokes experiences of what it means to take on the responsibility to engage, as well as exploring ideas of disappearance and renewal, abundance and loss. Its presence in these contrasting settings introduces new layers of meaning shaped by the movement of bodies, the flow of daily life, and the shifting dynamics of access and attention, passivity and participation, within urban public spaces.

Also to be manifested simultaneously in the gallery and a public setting will be the artist’s double paper stack_“Untitled” (1998/1990)_. The work’s quiet, declarative phrases—“Somewhere better than this place.”—printed on the sheets of one of the adjacent stacks, and on the other “Nowhere better than this place.” conjure grappling with duality, hope, endurance, and the everyday labor of making meaning in the world as it is, while gesturing toward what it could become.