SculptureCenter

Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit
Jesse Wine: Imperfect List
September 24, 2020–January 25, 2021

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Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit
Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit is the New York-based artist’s first museum survey exhibition in the United States. The exhibition traces Hsu’s key ideas and demonstrates how they clearly resonate in the works of younger artists coming of age today. In the mid-1980s Hsu began a series of works that considered the implications of the accelerated use of technology and artificial intelligence and their impact on the body and human condition. His work is distinct from well-documented approaches to artmaking in the 1980s that relied upon strategies of appropriation, a use of references to popular culture, as well as Neo-geo and other tendencies toward abstraction. Yet Hsu’s work takes on minimalist legacies in its reduced forms, and also processes the textures and colors of screens and other aesthetic clues of the emergent information age. The artist’s work throughout this period considers the object’s phenomenological properties and the shifting visual landscape.

Trained as an architect at MIT, Hsu’s art has an idiosyncratic materiality that is informed by his education and the budding East Village scene of the time. His use of tiles, for instance, suggests the architecture of domestic interiors, but also points to the construction of digital images as many discrete units of data. His use of alkyd, resins, and urethane responds to materials developed and used in burgeoning industries. Bringing together roughly 30 key sculptures, wall reliefs, drawings and media work from 1980 to 2005, the exhibition includes architectonic paintings and sculptures from the 1980s that considered the materiality of the image in the ever-expanding digital landscape; Hsu’s first experiments in Photoshop that mark some of the earliest instances of artists using the newly available digital photo manipulation software; and a selection of the artist’s drawings and other projects. The exhibition demonstrates Hsu’s prophetic practice and exemplifies how art responds to and processes the pressing questions of its time. Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit reintroduces the work of this visionary artist to a contemporary audience that has finally caught up with the issues he began to address over 30 years ago.

Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit is curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator-at-Large, with Kyle Dancewicz, Interim Director. The exhibition is accompanied by a color publication with essays by Jeannine Tang and Brian Kuan Wood, and a conversation between Tishan Hsu and Sohrab Mohebbi.

Jesse Wine: Imperfect List
Imperfect List continues British-born, New York-based artist Jesse Wine’s open and intuitive approach to sculpture, building upon a 15-year engagement with clay as his primary artmaking material. The exhibition brings together a wide variety of works, ranging from larger-than-life, abstracted figures, to segmented, floor-bound works displaying fragments of dexterous limbs and living room furniture, to modernist buildings and a fleet of small trucks.

Installed across SculptureCenter’s disorienting lower level galleries, Wine’s exhibition stages an anxious relationship between rest and activity. In one work, an angular apartment tower sits on top of a giant, sleeping head. Nearby, two monumental, leggy sculptures casually convene as vehicles pass below. Throughout, limbs and objects that seem to be spent, submissive, or otherwise idle evoke a churning matrix of stifled aspirations: to move from one’s childhood home to the city, to couple up, to reconcile productive efforts with un(re)productive sexuality, to be on call should an opportunity at success arise. Pairings of works in the exhibition pull the viewer back and forth between domestic interiors and domineering public settings, dissolving the human form into and out of the spaces that condition it. Though Wine’s distinctive approach to free-formed ceramic produces suggestive postures and attenuated gestures (count the number of fingers and toes in the exhibition), the work often appears malleable, sometimes even making itself. Wine hides its structure under alluring surfaces coated with admixtures of paint, minerals, and metals that wryly hint at a longer, “timeless” history of sculpture.

Imperfect List, the exhibition’s title, comes from a 1989-90 spoken-word track by Big Hard Excellent Fish, a short-lived project of British musicians Pete Wylie and Robin Guthrie. Over a downtempo beat, the voice of Liverpool musician and artist Josie Jones recites a public declaration of micro- and macro-affronts to personal dignity: “Heartbreaking, lying friend,” “acid rain,” “gut-wrenching disappointment,” and “the Tory invention of the non-working class,” among many others. In alignment with the song, Wine’s exhibition posits sculpture as a paradoxically over-productive yet ruminative activity where capitalistic desires are cyclically constructed, then run on empty and deformed—but not yet destroyed.

Jesse Wine: Imperfect List is the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. The exhibition is curated by Kyle Dancewicz, Interim Director.

About SculptureCenter
Lead Underwriting support of Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit is provided by Richard Chang / Domus Collection, and Joyce K.H. Liu.

Support for the exhibition is provided by Stephen Cheng and Empty Gallery.

SculptureCenter’s Exhibition Fund is made possible by Jill and Peter Kraus, Lee and Robert K. Elliott, Jamie Singer and Robert Soros, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Marinela Samourkas, and an anonymous donor.

SculptureCenter leads the conversation on contemporary art by supporting artistic innovation and independent thought highlighting sculpture’s specific potential to change the way we engage with the world. Positioning artists’ work in larger cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, SculptureCenter discerns and interprets emerging ideas. Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter provides an international forum that connects artists and audiences by presenting exhibitions, commissioning new work, and generating scholarship.

For more information, please visit www.sculpture-center.org.