At Art Basel Hong Kong, artists are reworking traditional and spiritual forms to meet the moment
‘I like to think that rituals are integral to an art making process. A repeated intentional and almost devotional act,’ says artist Qualeasha Wood. ‘I think then, that would imply that the act is sacred, revered by the performer.’ Wood’s woven and tufted tapestries, which often feature the artist in selfie-mode framed by a golden halo, embody that ritualistic process in form and content. As a memetic replication of poses, a selfie is also an intentional, repetitive act that invokes a certain reverence, after all, and Wood should know. The artist developed her textile works after sharing compositions online and finding herself isolated. ‘My environment and my identity as a Queer Black woman pushed me into an idolized position,’ Wood explains. So she leaned into the aesthetics of Christian iconography to amplify the absurdity of idolizing a human behind a screen. ‘It was a rebellious and audacious act, to regain control by sort of making a mockery of my unwanted positionality and power,’ Wood says.
By producing woven images that channel the relationships between object and viewer, icon and worshipper, influencer and followers, ritualistic acts are embedded into every layer of Wood’s tapestries. These, in turn, illuminate how artists are reworking traditional and spiritual forms in the present. At the core of these new rituals, as demonstrated at Art Basel Hong Kong's 2024 edition, are the dynamics of transmission that connect past and present. In Wood’s case, who is showing with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, creating textiles is a family tradition passed down from ancestor to ancestor, which in turn connects to the legacies of textile-making in the history of Black America and the rituals of remembering embedded into those practices. ‘I always found it interesting that I had very little written history about my ancestry but I had a lot of pictures and a lot of textile objects made by the different women in my family,’ Wood notes. ‘That always felt special to me, that even when my people couldn’t access language, they found a way to communicate care, love, and family beyond generations and oceans.’
Wood’s compositions visualize a maximalist relationship to the iconic, sacred, and profane: a style that resonates with Rodel Tapaya’s paintings, presented by Tang Contemporary Art, where animist myths and folktales are enmeshed with historical events and current affairs. Take the face emerging from a purple entanglement of tree trunks and branches in The Messenger (2023), part of a series of paintings referring to the stone Buddha head contained within a tree at the Wat Mahathat Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya. Or the bodies and beings interlocked with webs of foliage and flora that populate the mural-scale canvas Adda Manok Mo, Pedro? (Do you have a rooster, Pedro?) (2015-16). Braided into the composition are four references: a Tagalog myth describing birds that the god Bathala turned into chickens after they waged war against humans; the story of St. Peter’s Rooster, which crowed after Peter denied Jesus; a game from northern Philippines, where players memorize answers to questions set by an appointed leader; and a deadly shoot-out in Mamasapano in 2015, between police and members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
For Tapaya, traditions and rituals of the past hold significance in how the present is understood – a view shared by Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar, whose sculptures presented by Flowers Gallery combine traditional Mongolian forms and stories with the materials and detritus of a post-Soviet present. ‘I believe no matter how things might change our initial coping mechanism reacts the same,’ Erdenebayar points out. Rituals are also coping mechanisms: acts that make sense of the world by giving form to its chaos, or, in the case of Dominique Knowles, giving shape to the emotions of earthly experience. Swathes of ochre oil paint on linen reflect on the loss of the artist’s horse in the series The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons (2023), where the animal appears like a shadow in the wind. But while these paintings sometimes invoke the commemorative, reverential elements of holy architectures – for example, arch-shaped canvases and altar-like triptychs – Knowles emphasizes their spiritual rather than religious dimensions.
Knowles’s clarification circles back to Wood’s resistance to becoming an icon, boxed in by a prescribed identity. There is a difference, after all, between religion and spirituality – a point that Knowles’s luminous canvases underscore in their enigmatic, boundless fluidity. An expansive, ineffable aura likewise emanates from the works of Jam Wu, who draws on traditions of paper cutting and shadow puppetry to create compositions that defy anchorage to a single source. In the video installation Shadow Puppeteer (2023), five large screens play out minimalist shadow performances focusing on what the artist calls ritualistic bodies. At one point, a single figure slowly walks across each screen, their hands held out as if in supplication. ‘The language of “walking,” whether via the perspective of animism or occultism, is all about reimagining various possibilities in the universe,’ the artist explains. ‘It is a creative structure with flexibility, connecting the collective consciousness of human beings.’
Untethered to ideologies, the ritualistic forms expressed by artists today make space to navigate a present in flux. Take Aracha Cholitgul’s ‘Little Sundown Resort’ project (2023-ongoing), which focuses on the shifting landscape of Koh Pha-ngan island. Showing with Nova Contemporary, drawings of stones presented as if they were stills from a film compose the project’s first chapter, Moving Images of Stones on the Island. They bear witness to what tourism, development, and gentrification has done to the island in the 21st century – particularly, as Cholitgul points out, after COVID-19, when locals have had to sell their land to make ends meet. ‘It’s quite traumatizing to see other Thai people slowly forced out of the island because they can’t afford to live here,’ the artist says. ‘Moving Images of Stones on the Island acts as a reflection and introduction to the current landscape through the perspective of a troubled human being trying to navigate life on the island.’
The function of art as a navigational tool, returns to Wood’s understanding of art-making as an intentional, devotional process: a ritual of the present that engages with the dynamics that are shaping it. Huidi Xiang’s latest sculptures, for example, showing with YveYANG, extend the artist’s concerns with the politics of labor in late capitalism, by focusing on cleaning – and the subcontracting of this age-old ritual to workers – as a magical process. Forms are drawn from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a segment in the 1940 Disney animation, Fantasia, where a sorcerer’s hat activates a broom to finish Mickey Mouse’s chores. ‘We all hope any clean-up could be this easy, charming, satisfying, and fantastical as depicted in the magical world,’ Xiang notes; but ‘as we see at the end of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the magic power actually gets out of control, resulting in an even larger mess.’ Here, ritual becomes a potent response to the pitfalls of such a fantasy, as a generative action grounded in reality.
Qualeasha Wood will be represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Rodel Tapaya will be represented by Tang Contemporary Art at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Dominique Knowles will be represented by Layr at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Jam Wu will be represented by TKG + at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Aracha Cholitgul will be represented by Nova Contemporary at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Huidi Xiang will be represented by YveYANG at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.
Stephanie Bailey is Art Basel's Conversations Curator, Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as the Art Basel Content Advisor and Editor, Asia.
