Shanzhai, once a pejorative term for a copy but increasingly considered an innovative form of creativity, is finding its way into the art world. One of the latest examples is Hack Space, a pop-up show jointly presented by the K11 Foundation and Serpentine Galleries in London. The exhibition, which opened on 21 March (until 24 April) to coincide with Art Basel in Hong Kong, features sculptures by the New Zealand-born artist Simon Denny, alongside 11 Chinese artists whose works address themes of technology, hacking and shanzhai.
The exhibition is an expanded version of Products for Organising, Denny’s solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, which focused on the history of hacking and the ways in which corporations and organisations such as the online retailer Zappos and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have adapted aspects of hacker culture.
For Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of the London gallery, who is organising Hack Space with the institution’s exhibitions curator Amira Gad, it was important to “listen to and learn from the local context in Hong Kong” and not just “ship the exhibition to the next city”.
Obrist and representatives of K11 took Denny on a whistlestop tour of 30 artists’ studios in Beijing in just 36 hours. Those artists were whittled down to 11 earlier this year. “It was fun; there was lots of adrenaline. It was more like bar-hopping,” says Adrian Cheng, the billionaire art collector who founded the non-profit K11 Foundation in 2010.
Obrist has visited China around 40 times since 1996, when he organised his radical show Cities on the Move, but this is his first exhibition in Hong Kong. There are plans to take Hack Space to some of K11’s other venues in mainland China, including one space that is due to open in 2017 in Guangzhou, before the show visits Europe.
The line-up includes the artist
Li Liao, who joined the workforce of Foxconn in its Shenzhen factory in 2012 and used his earnings to buy the iPad Mini he was assembling. On show is documentation from his performance piece, Consumption, including his uniform, his labour contract and the iPad Mini itself.
Liang Shuo and Xu Qu share similar concerns in their work, notably through ideas of branding. Xu is showing a series of Minimalist metallic pillars held together by the spines of umbrellas that were collected during the Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong in 2014.
Meanwhile, the painter Zhai Liang and the Shanghai-based new media artist aaajiao bring a hacker dimension to the show. The other artists are Cao Fei, Cui Jie, Firenze Lai, Hu Qingtai, Tao Hui and Guo Xi.
Hack Space is on display in K11’s pop-up space in Hong Kong’s Cosco Tower, which is not always used for art exhibitions. But Denny has made the most of this fact, cutting up plinths from the previous presentation—which promoted property developments—to create pedestals for the other artists’ work. Together with a selection of Denny’s sculptures resembling skyscrapers, it forms an exhibition that is meant to evoke the Hong Kong skyline. “From a design point of view, the show is very connected to the architectural context, and from an artistic point of view, it’s almost site-specific,” Obrist says.
For Obrist, paying close attention to specific contexts could be a maxim for the art world in the 21st century. “The 20th century was about proclaiming loud manifestos in art. The 21st century has to be about the opposite; to be about listening,” he says.
Hack Space, until 24 April, Cosco Tower, 33 Wing Lok Street, www.k11artfoundation.org