Picture postcard: Gabriel Orozco’s new works at White Cube Hong Kong

‘I get bored very, very easily,’ warns the globetrotting Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, whose latest series of works – inspired by his 18 month-long residency in Tokyo, Japan – is on show at White Cube Hong Kong.

The 80 watercolour paintings range from postcard- to poster-size and are produced on the simple gilt-edged card ubiquitous to Japanese stationery stores, which he covers with gold leaf before painting. 

The works feature Orozco’s trademark semi-abstract geometrical circles dissected with precise lines, along with an ethereal natural landscape quality that evokes the fluidity of sumi-e brushstrokes.

‘I see the gold surface like an empty space,’ he says. ‘I start with brush strokes to activate that perfect gold surface.’

The paintings are deliberately propped up on a narrow unvarnished timber shelf, that runs throughout the pristine white two-storey gallery space; to be experienced ‘more as objects reclining on the shelf’, the artist explains.

While best viewed as a complete collection, the standout piece of the exhibition is one of the smaller and more simple iterations, a sole leaf that the artist painted in a single brushstroke.

This eagle-eyed focus on space is his trademark. ‘Emptiness is my favourite subject,’ he says. ‘Here it was about what to leave empty like the spaces in a Zen garden.’

Fear of boredom keeps him moving to different countries, a process that helps him learn by continually trying new things, he says.

‘It’s very strange, though, because I tend to go to the same restaurant and order exactly the same things off the menu,’ he laughs. ‘But not with my work.’

INFORMATION

’Suisai: Tokyo Strokes’ is on view until 20 August. For more information, visit the White Cube Hong Kong website

Photography: Vincent Tsang, White Cube. Courtesy the artist

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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