White Cube<\/a> <\/strong>(50 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong) Nov 8, 2013\u2013Jan 4, 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Quinn, one of the most prominent and enduring members of the UK\u2019s YBA Generation of artists, is having his first solo show in Hong Kong. The exhibition is a primer of Quinn\u2019s biology-grounded practice over the last 20 years, including sculptures of a giant seashell and a polychromatic orchid, hyperrealist human irises, and an \u201call-over\u201d painting of pieces of meat. Randian spoke with Marc just prior to his departing for Hong Kong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Moore<\/strong>: Tell us about your new work for the exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Quinn<\/strong>: The show is called \u201cHeld by Desire\u201d and it\u2019s about our relationship with nature. The main work in the show, and which has the same name as the exhibition, is a brass sculpture of a bonsai tree, 1.2 meters high, and made from a scan of an actual bonsai tree in my collection. What I\u2019m interested in with Bonsai is that it falls halfway between an artwork and a natural thing. It\u2019s a tree that if planted in the ground would grow into a 5-meter-high Chinese juniper tree but as it is, grows in a dish and is 250 years old and is only 1.2 meters high. It seems to encapsulate our whole relationship with nature\u2014that we try to control its nature, its shape, to our desire. And yet, of course, holding that shape is only a temporary thing. Any garden left untended will get overgrown. So it is about how we try to control nature but in the end how nature has the last word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: What about the photorealist seascape painting \u201cBefore and After Humans\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: It is based on photographs taken in Australia under the waves, this oceanic place where the waves crash, absent of crowds or sky. So you don\u2019t know where the space is, whether it\u2019s in the sky or under the water or on another planet. It\u2019s sublime in a way, a terrible or beautiful thing\u2014the planet before or after humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: It combines elements of photography and painting but also notions of land art, sculpture and surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: You project yourself into it. Originally I did these underwater paintings with figures in them, with people actually at the beach swimming, and I quite liked those but then I realized when you take the figure out, you become the figure. Looking at a painting, you drift into it yourself. So it\u2019s like the 18th century genre of the sublime, which is the idea of something beautiful and terrible, and when you experience it in a safe way, like in a painting, you can kind of enjoy the frisson of it, the frisson of your own extinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: This frisson applies as much to \u201cSelf\u201d doesn\u2019t it? [(1991\u2013), the frozen cast of the artist\u2019s head made from his blood]<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Yes, it\u2019s the same kind of thing\u2014it\u2019s an effect that I like. Art for me is concrete philosophy\u2014making objects to help me understand what it is to be a person in the world. And because I think I am pretty much like other people, hopefully then so that other people can have an emotional connection to it as well. I\u2019m not interested in art for its decorative qualities; I\u2019m interested in art for its philosophical qualities. The meat paintings are a case in point, where genres meet. They look like abstract paintings in red and white, but in fact they are made of the material of figuration. They look beautiful, they also look disgusting\u2014they are attractive\/repellent. There are all these polarities, so you can never really resolve them, either in your mind or your eye \u2013 you keep on wanting to look at it. Art is [about] trying to create a situation within an image or an object that is unresolvable. Bad art is art that is resolved immediately, whereas with great art there is always an ambiguity there that keeps pulling you back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: I guess the meat painting is also a still life taken to the extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Yes, it\u2019s like this tiny corner of a carcass of a Rembrandt ox made into a whole painting\u2014\u201ca still-life biopsy\u201d. What is really interesting about art is how, with a piece of meat painted by Rembrandt in the 17th century and then painted by me now, the subject matter hasn\u2019t changed, only how you look at it. What\u2019s interesting to me is how the vision of the same thing changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Looking back now obviously \u201cSelf\u201d continues to influence your sculptural practice but how would you say it affects your painting practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Well you can look at the meat painting and the painting of Lara Stone [a model], pregnant on a bed of meat, which is in the show and is called \u201cPast, Present and Future\u201d, is connected to that too. In that image you have dead flesh in the meat, living flesh in her, and new life\u2014the child\u2014being made in her pregnant stomach. So you have the whole cycle of life. But essentially it\u2019s an optimistic image because it\u2019s a beautiful woman who is celebrating that cycle of life, something that can also be tragic and awful. And I think \u201cSelf\u2019 is also essentially an optimistic sculpture because it\u2019s a head of me, in my own blood, frozen, and I\u2019ve made one every five years, so five of them exist, and yet I\u2019m talking to you on the phone too, so it\u2019s also about the miraculous power of the human body to reproduce itself as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: \u201cPast, Present and Future\u201d also refers to your sculpture \u201cAlison Lapper Pregnant\u201d.(1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Yes and also to the reclining nudes of Manet\u2019s \u201cOlympia\u201d (1863) and Titian\u2019s \u201cVenus of Urbino\u201d (1538).<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Some of the works in the exhibition relate to China. What are the connections?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: The jade eye \u201cTowards a Map of the Universe\u201d and the \u201cInvention of Carving\u201d sculpture were inspired by a trip to the Palace Museum in Taipei in January. Among the major exhibits there are a small sculpture of a piece of pork [\u201cMeat-shaped Stone<\/a><\/strong>\u201d, Ch’ing dynasty (1644-1911)], and rather beautiful jade discs\u2014Neolithic or quite old anyway\u2014that were seen as maps of the universe. So I made a carving in jade of a [human] iris with a map of the world on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: You made a similar disc that stands on its edge in a lake, water gushing out of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Yes\u2014it\u2019s in a river in Norway\u2014\u201cAll Nature Flows through Us\u201d, a portrait of the collector who commissioned it. It\u2019s 10 meters high and water flows through the pupil of the eye. Again, it\u2019s about our connection to nature. Which leads me to the other sculpture in the exhibition, \u201cThe Invention of Carving\u201d, which was inspired by the pork sculpture\u2014as a starting point\u2014and then I went to the British Museum, where there was an exhibition about Ice Age sculpture.(2) And one of the earliest pieces [in the exhibition] was a lion carved in bone. And I wondered how do you get to carving something in bone? And I thought what happens is, first of all you carve the meat\u2014there is a very intimate connection between sculpture and eating flesh. So I got this Serrano ham, carved the ham off the bone, and then had that re-carved in onyx\u2014making a carving of a carving\u2014as homage to the beginning of sculpture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Your interest in science, particularly genetics, is well known. And \u201cThe Architecture of Life\u201d, a giant seashell, speaks directly to this, as well as your paintings and sculptures of orchids speak, but perhaps less obviously also \u201cThe Invention of Carving\u201d, because of its references to human consumption of flesh and the social practices surrounding eating\u2014and by inference, our evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: And the ritual around it, such as the use of the stand that holds the leg. But also, with the \u201cArchitecture of Life\u201d, what I found amazing about the shells is that these beautiful, perfectly symmetrical, utterly harmonious forms, are made by tiny creatures without a brain or spinal column. It made me think, is art something we invented or did we discover it? It was in the world, and we discovered it. Shells are the first sculptures really, the archeology of sculpture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I looked at it further\u2014I loved the polished surface of the shell\u2014and I thought, if I cast it in bronze and polished its surface to a mirror finish, I\u2019d end up with an object that reflected the present moment in its finish. But, if you look at the size of the shell, you\u2019ve got these circles like on a tree, baring record of the time needed for its creation. It\u2019s as if you asked some mad scientist to design a three-dimensional model showing how the present becomes the past. It comes back to our origin and evolution. We have all come from the sea, and this is reflected even in our myths, with the birth of Venus, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Do you also look at Buddhism and regeneration?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Yeah, I\u2019m not a Buddhist myself but I have a lot of Buddhist objects around the studio so that probably rubs off as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Is contemporary art just repeating itself, endlessly remixing minimalism, pop and conceptual art? How does it reinvent itself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n MQ<\/strong>: Well, it can\u2019t because the world changes. I think that\u2019s the wrong question. The question is \u201ccan contemporary art repeat itself?\u201d And the answer is: if you tried to repeat yourself, you couldn\u2019t. Like Heraclitus said, you can never stand in the same river twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Interview conducted by telephone on November 1, 2013)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by \u4f5c\u8005\uff1aChris Mooretranslated by \u8bd1\uff1aLiang S … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/randian-art.s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com\/2023\/02\/zh-hans\/image-167.png\")
44 7\/8 x 37 13\/16 x 25 9\/16 in. (114 x 96 x 65 cm), 2013 (\u00a9 Marc Quinn; photo: Todd-White Art Photography; courtesy White Cube)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/randian-art.s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com\/2023\/02\/en\/image-168.png\")
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