Hua International’s presentation at Art Cologne 2023 will include three artists at the forefront of the gallery’s program: Rafael Domenech, Tong Kunniao, and Dorothea Reese-Heim.
The New York-based artist Rafael Domenech is part of a new generation of artists experimenting with the temporal and spatial modalities of book-making. Domenech understands exhibition-making as an expanded form of publishing. He considers the exhibition space as an active place for productivity rather than a repository container, thereby creating objects and situations that propose simultaneous functions and usages. With his series Meditating in the eye of the storm, a collaboration with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Domenech acts as a choreographer of light, inviting us to chart our own path through a variable landscape of vivid, refracting poetry.
The sculptural book-objects that German artist Dorothea Reese-Heim has been making since the early 2000s upend conventional associations with the book, emphasizing less their content than their structure and, by extension, how they operate in the world as objects. What kind of authority might the form of a book convey? How might a book relate to time and memory? Moreover, if we understand the book as a hybrid that oscillates between the immaterial world of thought and a material object that can be observed and felt, what might it mean to take a book out of “circulation,” so to speak, and transform it into sculpture? Reese-Heim’s sculptures encase found books within layers of paraffin. A wax-like substance used to make candles, paraffin evokes strong associations with illumination, the passing of time, memory, and malleability. Through sealing off these works, Reese-Heim evokes the ancient Roman wax tablets in which “content could be recalled or extinguished as desired.”
Tong Kunniao has built a reputation for creating immersive worlds that bristle with dark humor. He uses found materials and freely samples aesthetic impulses from Chinese and Western art histories to articulate idiosyncratic, highly personal multimedia reflections upon our current state of social, ecological, and political crisis. Many of Kunniao’s works foreground the fragility of equilibrium—whether finding balance within the self, one's community, or with the other. One of the most celebrated young artists working in China today, Kunniao’s drawings offer an intimate insight into his complex reflections on the quantification and mechanization of human experience and the fragility of all life in the Anthropocene.
