K11 Musea and the White Cube gallery unite for an innovative art/retail collaboration

Part of Encounter at White Cube Hong Kong

It’s a first: The White Cube gallery and the K11 Art Foundation have launched their first collaboration, in which three major works by the gallery’s artists are on view at the enormous millennial-friendly art-retail space K11 Musea in Tsim Sha Tsui. K11 already has an abundance of high-quality artworks on display by a wide range of luminaries including Erwin Wurm, Carsten Höller, Carol Bove, Zhang Enli, Samson Young and Ron English. 

Theaster Gates, Afro-Ikebana (2019)

For the collaboration, on view until May 31 and called Encounter, the three artworks comprise American installation artist Theaster Gates’s Rushmore (2016) and Afro-Ikebana (2019), as well as Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s Zizaach (2016). Together, these pieces explore the encounter between culture and the materials used in their creation. 

Gates’s work combines objects and ideas drawn from diverse cultures and human history, as well as political and social engagement. Rushmore is part of the Black Madonna series of sculptural works, and is inspired by the history of black women and their identity in gender politics; Afro-Ikebana is made up of Japanese tatami mats and a bronze sculpture of an African mask. 

Meanwhile, Mahama uses materials from everyday life in Ghana, such as scrap metal and jute sacks used to transport cocoa beans, for Zizaach. All the objects Mahama employs are transformed to create installations that examine themes of globalisation, migration and commodity exchange. 

The collaboration is an extension of White Cube’s current Encounter exhibition at its Hong Kong gallery space until April 17, which studies the connections, similarities and contradictions in the concepts, methods and processes of a range of artists – including Cerith Wyn Evans, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Dóra Maurer, Sarah Morris and Virginia Overton, among others. Now that Perrotin gallery has also relocated from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, we’d expect to see more of these types of collaborations between K11 Musea and blue-chip global galleries.

Ibrahim Mahama, Zizaach (2016)

Theaster Gates, Rushmore (2016)

Images provided to China Daily

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