Celebrated Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco is currently holding his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong at White Cube, featuring a body of entirely new works.Curated by Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art at University College London, the exhibition offers revealing insights into some of the most recent evolutions in Orozco’s work, all set against the backdrop of Tokyo, where he has based himself for the last year.Although quite dramatically different in terms of visual impact, especially when compared with works from past series such as Black Kites (1997), “Suisai: Tokyo Strokes” is a body of work motivated by many of Orozco’s longstanding procedures and preoccupations. Propped up against the wall, or sat quietly on shelves scattered throughout the gallery, these watercolor paintings borrow their material textures from the Japanese art materials that Orozco found ready to hand during his Tokyo sojourn.BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke with exhibition curator Briony Fer to find out more about Orozco’s working processes and choice of media for this latest body of work, and his interest in vernacular Japanese aesthetics and traditions.Can you elaborate on the golden paper, Japanese brushes, and other art supplies that Orozco used for this series? How were these materials and tools different from the ones he is more accustomed to using, and how did these differences translate in visual terms in the final works?Briony Fer: Orozco gets the gold paper and brushes from an art supply store in central Tokyo. This is in keeping with the way he likes to work with the local materials that he finds around him.In Japan, the materials, brushes, and so on are obviously very specific and traditional, and have different standards and measurements from those he is used to using in Mexico, or other parts of the world where he has worked. Watercolor is a highly sophisticated medium, and especially important within the traditions of Japanese and Chinese painting. These are all issues that interest him — for instance, the fact that the colors, and the names of the colors, are different from those found elsewhere. So things that are supposedly “universal,” such as “standard” sizes, or even the colors themselves, are not universal at all. Rather, they carry very strong and specific associations to place.The gold card that Orozco uses is a regular and inexpensive material, but you don’t find this in art stores anywhere else. It refracts the light. In Mexico, he used gold leaf a lot in his paintings, because that’s a material that belongs to local Mexican artisanal traditions.To what extent was Orozco conscious of Japanese and Chinese ink painting in making these watercolors? When did Orozco first start spending time in Tokyo, and how has living in Japan influenced his practice?Orozco knows about Japanese ink painting, but he has also learnt about a very wide range of techniques as practiced in the complex traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting.He has been living in Tokyo since he went there to have his show, “Gabriel Orozco: Inner Cycles,” that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in January 2015. Living in Japan has definitely influenced his practice. He makes art out of what is around him, or in his apartment, with what is “to hand,” and very much by hand.It’s important that he is not trying to make “Japanese watercolors,” instead approaching them almost like an exercise. Each one is also overlaid with his own trademark pattern of circles, so the two different “languages,” if you like, get entangled.How do these watercolors relate to another new body of work that Orozco produced in Japan last year, shown at the "Visible Labor" exhibition at Tokyo's Rat Hole Gallery, which was inspired by the wooden beams and joinery of traditional Japanese carpentry?Although they don’t look at all like the pieces at Rat Hole, similar principles apply. For “Visible Labor,” Orozco went to look for pieces of scrap timber. The beams that he found were very specific to Japanese construction methods and measuring scales. He became fascinated by Japanese carpentry joints that are very beautiful and also very sculptural, interspersing them with little Buddha figures and racing cars.As opposed to the sculptural installation at Rat Hole Gallery, this exhibition explores watercolor as a material and a process: how to make an installation of about 80 watercolors in five standard sizes, propped up at intervals on shelves around the walls of the gallery. With these watercolors, he is also finding readymade materials and techniques, and putting them together with his own methods and processes.Oddly enough, I sort of see the little circles superimposed on the gestural marks of the watercolors as “joints” from his “Visible Labor” works, where you can see a kind of mingling and joining of parts, but also a sort of mismatch.As a matter of fact, for another major series produced while he was in Japan, which was exhibited at Marian Goodman in London in June 2015, Orozco took standard-length wooden bars used in construction and wrapped them in colored tapes. All of these materials were bought at the Tokyu Hands department store in Tokyo that stocks all things DIY.How has Orozco's work evolved in the time between the last show of his that you curated at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery in 2012, "Thinking in Circles," and this exhibition in Hong Kong?Although they are visually very different, I see the same driving ideas at work in everything that Orozco does. There is always a kind of improvisational approach, whether it involves drawing a pattern of circles over an airline ticket, or any other kind of exercise in drawing. And these new watercolors are exercises in drawing, too.Orozco isn’t a colorist in the conventional sense, but I would say that he now seems much more interested in color and pigments than he was before: how these things behave, and how watercolor is made of pigment, which is dust and liquid.He explores the way liquid flows, but also how it congeals and pools into puddles by chance. That combination of rules and chance has always interested him, but it’s now taken on a new form. Being in Japan seems to have taken the work in this direction.Gabriel Orozco’s “Suisai: Tokyo Strokes” runs at White Cube Hong Kong through August 20, 2016.
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