As artificial intelligence redraws cognitive boundaries, as warfare and natural disasters destabilize existential foundations, BANK's presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong emerges as a prism between the present and the afterlife, as well as the corporeal and the spectral. Here, artists chart pathways to reforge connections between psyche and materiality in an age of dislocation.
Drawing inspiration from banners in Buddhist temples, commercial advertisements, and the modern financial elite, Duyi Han's textile installation is a hybrid of a marketing message and a mantra that oscillates between worship and fear, endeavoring to encapsulate the psychological instant when humanity invests its faith in AI. This dialogue with the uncanny deepens through Lin Ke’s "Sky Paintings". These hovering digital wraiths, neither fully present nor absent, transform the booth into an electronic seance. (Notably, BANK will expand this exploration in Lin Ke’s concurrent Shanghai solo exhibition.) Another arresting portait at the booth is Tim Crowley’s poster painting of the Duchess of Argyll. Mirrored by the wry slogan on the canvas, her scandalous private life became a lightning rod for 18th-century Britain’s voyeuristic scrutiny and moral censure.
Aqueous poetics anchor the booth’s opposite wing. Patty Chang’s seminal performance is archived here photographically in this work Ice (1999), capturing the artist’s brutal interaction with a 200-pound ice block. Raw and visceral, the work oscillates between feminist manifesto and existential vanitas, its melting contours mirroring the fragility of embodied experience. Chang's enduring exploration of the symbiotic relationship between the feminine corporeal and planetary hydrospheres will reach its crescendo in her forthcoming commission for The MET, slated to debut March 2025. Nearby, Zhang Yibei’s marine organism-inspired sculptures encode post-pandemic survival metaphors. Their armored shells and pulsating apertures echo the calibrated rhythms of human social distancing.
These reflections on existential anxiety resonate with Ji Yun-Fei’s ink-wash elegies tinged with dark humor. As one of the first students admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts after the Cultural Revolution, Ji wields classical brushstrokes to document urbanization’s human flossam. In addition, works from two artists' estates dialectically depict the trajectory of existence through material alchemy: Tang Song's feral, alcohol-spattered abstract linear paintings confront Ching Ho Cheng's meditative therapeutic gouache work, manifesting two polarized modes of spiritual self-anchoring. The exhibition’s final act turns to emerging voices. Liang Hao’s evocative canvases with the laboratory-like cold light and Wenjue’s paintings—simmering cauldrons of subcultural references—negotiate flickering thresholds between the immediate present and speculative futures.
