Empty Gallery is pleased to present The Garden of Loved Ones, the first solo exhibition by Los-Angeles based-artist Richard Hawkins in Greater Asia. Since emerging in the early 1990s, Hawkins has developed an idiosyncratic practice centered around the intense pleasure of looking and the dynamics of desire which animate both sexual and art historical expression. Employing collage as an underlying mode structuring his work in painting, sculpture, and various other media, Hawkins intermingles and juxtaposes low culture with high art––operating in that fertile and unobserved intersection between graverobber and archaeologist, fanboy and connoisseur, degenerate and avant-gardist. Treating his varied materials with equal measures of reverence and insouciance, he imbues dusty reproductions of Greco-roman statuary with the lewdness of the teenage gaze whilst subjecting images of male idols to a nearly philological rigor. Inducing us to look at these subjects anew, his work destabilizes received ideas of origin and influence—suggesting a queerer, more generous, and infinitely more promiscuous reading of art history.

For his show in Hong Kong, Hawkins stages a return to his long held obsession with the figure of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), the enigmatic founder of Butoh dance. Embodying many of the artist’s most cherished fixations––the aesthetic potential of the grotesque, an obsessive regard for the male form, and a certain relationship to the occult––the avatar of Hijikata also comes to represent the concealed syncretism between east and west existing below the surface of modernism, and the ouroboric nature of art history. A suite of new video works are inspired by, and presented alongside, a series of collages in the manner of Hijikata’s scrapbooks. These bizarre and hermetic documents appropriate and disfigure now iconic fragments of the Western canon––Bellmer, Redon, and Picasso, amongst others––in order to translate them into choreographic instructions, contorting history in order to broaden the ways in which we might contort our bodies.