Wolfgang Tillmans’ Frank Ocean Shows in Shanghai

Wolfgang Tillmans b. 1968, Germany Follow +

Wolfgang Tillmans’ portrait of a mossy-haired Frank Ocean, which was famously used on the cover of the singer’s 2016 album Blonde, is among the works showing in a new exhibition at the Shanghai K11 Art Mall. Ocean reportedly spent time in Shanghai after the Grammys in 2013.

The exhibition, titled Yuen-Yeung (7 November 2023 to 7 January 2024), was organised by art advisors Ed Tang and Jonathan Cheung. It opened as part of Shanghai’s biggest art week, which includes art fairs West Bund Art & Design and ART021.

Twenty-one works are included in the exhibition, which offers Bruce Nauman‘s two-channel video work Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) as its starting point. The organisers described the work as both in and out of sync, analogous to the blend of tea and coffee from which the exhibition takes its name.

(When I interviewed Michelin-starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his restaurant on Shanghai’s Bund roughly a decade ago, he described the Cantonese drink as one of his favourite culinary discoveries in China.)

Intriguing parallels and contrasts also appear in works by other artists in the exhibition, who include Hernan Bas, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Etel Adnan.

‘By blending different media and including artists both long-admired and recently discovered, Yuen-Yeung is about combining voices and sharing, and ultimately revealing the ever-shifting swirl of [the] 21st century,’ Tang and Chueng said in a statement. —[O]

Main image: Wolfgang Tillmans, Frank, in the Shower (2015). Installation view, Yuen-Yeung (7 November 2023 to 7 January 2024). Courtesy Shanghai K11 Art Mall.