Bruce Nauman

“The point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry or art occurs.” —Bruce Nauman

Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present a major survey of the US-born artist Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential artists working in the present day. Known for his broad range of works made in a variety of media from sculpture, photography, and video, to neon, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Nauman is widely recognised and admired as an “Artist’s Artist”. Part of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s series of major exhibitions spotlighting pioneering artists of our time, Bruce Nauman will be on view to the public from May 15 to August 18, 2024.

Bruce Nauman at Tai Kwun Contemporary is the first major exhibition of Nauman’s in Hong Kong and features 35 works that traverse six decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition revisits fundamental elements ever-present in the artist’s oeuvre, and provides a unique opportunity to explore a group of key artworks by this legendary figure in contemporary art. The exhibition at Tai Kwun is organised with the support of Palazzo Grassi—Punta della Dogana, and is inspired by the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, curated by Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois in 2021–2022 at Punta della Dogana in Venice.

Nauman’s art intersects and dialogues with many art movements from the second half of the 20th century onwards. Attempts to categorise his works into any specific movement may prove a futile endeavour. It can be posited that Nauman’s work eased the transition from post-minimalism to performance and conceptual art, blazing a path for artists since the 1960s and leaving a profound and enduring impact that can still be felt to this day. Throughout his career, Nauman has inspired artists, curators, dancers, musicians, and writers around the world. Indeed, in 2009 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale; this presentation was curated by Carlos Basualdo.

Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Bruce Nauman, curated by Carlos Basualdo (Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), Caroline Bourgeois (Chief Curator at the Pinault Collection), and Dr Pi Li (Head of Art at Tai Kwun), draws on elements from Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, initially presented at Palazzo Grassi—Punta Della Dogana in Venice in 2021.

The Tai Kwun Contemporary exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Bruce Nauman Studio, highlights the artist’s wide-ranging practice and is based primarily on works from the Pinault Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as loans from Tate, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Dia Art Foundation, The Sonnabend Collection Foundation, Sperone Westwater, New York, as well as other lenders. Situated in the unique architectural space of Tai Kwun Contemporary in the heart of Hong Kong, the exhibition features an extensive body of work from the artist, with the aim of highlighting the significance of Bruce Nauman’s work and its potential dialogue with the regional context of Asia.

At Tai Kwun, Bruce Nauman’s first solo institutional survey in Hong Kong encompasses all of the gallery spaces of JC Contemporary and F Hall Gallery. Echoing the spiral upward structure of the space, the exhibition revisits fundamental elements in the artist’s portfolio, from the artist’s early neons to the recent Contrapposto series, along with drawings, large-scale sculptural and sound installations spanning more than six decades of the artist’s practice. The curators of the exhibition emphasise the diversity of media that characterise Bruce Nauman’s practice, as well as the subjects to which he has constantly returned over his career, such as the studio, the body, language, and sound.

Artist: Bruce Nauman
Curators: Carlos Basualdo (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Caroline Bourgeois (Pinault Collection), and Pi Li (Tai Kwun Contemporary)

A major new publication (in English and Chinese editions) featuring interviews “on/with” Bruce Nauman, edited by Joan Simon and Tai Kwun Contemporary, accompanies the exhibition.