An exhibition of the late Cuban-American conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum (until December 25), which includes more than 40 pieces spanning 1987 to 1995, eschews the heavy-handed explanation that is common in China, offering materials and wall texts that are minimal, vague and even poetic. But it also avoids any mention of the artist’s homosexuality, and the Aids crisis, both of which informed and are directly referenced in his works.
The omission was part of a larger decision to let the works speak directly to viewers, says Li Qi, the museum’s senior curator who co-organised the show with the director Larys Frogier. “We fully entrusted the conceptual openness of the works to reflect on the Aids crisis among many other social realities that concerned Felix, such as gun control, war and politics, and popular culture, as the artist intended,” Li says. “Felix was not an HIV/Aids activist. He was an artist who enjoyed watching TV. We talk about his sexuality the same way we talk about straight artists’ heterosexuality.” Gonzalez-Torres’ Latino and immigrant identities are also left as backdrops, and Li stresses that Gonzalez-Torres’s own HIV status “was not revealed publicly in his own lifetime”.
The exhibition also hit a logistical snag in China that had nothing to do with Gonzalez-Torres’ politics. A proposal to exhibit Untitled (For Jeff)—the artist’s billboard work of an open hand, dedicated to a healthcare worker who nursed a dying friend—in the Shanghai Metro was denied because of a local advertising policy that prohibits "outdoor" displays of text-free images, Li says. The curators instead found a commercial advertising agency that placed the work on indoor LED screens in 24 Shanghai malls.
At the museum, visitors interact directly with the Felix-Gonzalez’s replenishable, removable candy portraits and paper stacks. “[They] can choose to accept the invitation of the artist to pick up sheets of paper or candies, or simply experience the show empty-handed,” Li says. “Either way, I don’t think there is anyone who has left the exhibition without taking loads of photos and selfies, posting them on social networks with their smartphones, which perfectly echoes with the subject of narcissism in Felix’s works.”