Andreas Gursky

Gagosian is pleased to present Andreas Gursky’s first-ever exhibition in Asia. The exhibition combines his most recent work with earlier works to provide the context for a broader and deeper appreciation of his oeuvre by new audiences.

Contemporary Asia has provided extraordinarily rich and surprising subject matter for Gursky and, over the last twenty years, he has photographed in Japan, Thailand, China, and North Korea. Some of the first pictures he made were in Hong Kong in 1994—among them Sha Tin racetrack, Hong Kong airport, and Shanghai Bank, the last of which appears in this exhibition. The Bangkok series of 2011, shot on the Chao Praya river in central Bangkok, represents a bold new direction in his work.

By pure circumstance, Gursky found himself fascinated by the phenomenon of the river flowing beneath a city overpass, the intense light effects, and the flotsam and jetsam carried by in the dark water. A major arterial waterway that is as compromised by man-made pollution as by disequilibrium in the natural hydrological regime, Chao Phraya is revealed by Gursky to be at once a dumping ground for all manner of man-made detritus (used condoms, a child’s bed mattress, a car tire); a crucible for ecological disorder (as evidenced by a dead fish, and the pretty but devastating weed known as water hyacinth); and a reflecting, refracting surface for the modern city itself. But it was only during the post-production process that a clear relationship emerged with abstract painting, as well as the broader implications of depicting an ecologically threatened waterway in seductive visual terms. Gursky captures the toxic reality of the urban water mass, and spins it through the lens of the abstract sublime to dramatic and resonant effect.

For the Hong Kong exhibition, Gursky continues the approach he took for his most recent exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, combining the large-scale, painterly and almost abstract Bangkok series with other works—in both large and small formats—that deal primarily with social and cultural production, from the bamboo-weavers of Nha Trang (2004) to the concert fans of Madonna I (2001). The selection includes some of his best-known works, such as the iconic 99 Cent II (2001), in which the banality of an American supermarket becomes a complex abstract aggregation of saturated color, compulsive arrangement, and dizzying selection.