Visiting Artists' Talks at Gasworks

Hu Yun's 'Thank you for your Time.' Photo Cred: ArtLinkArt
This evening I attended a talk at Gasworks given by the four new visiting artists. The gallery organizes international residencies and helps produce exhibitions and collaborations for these artists. This season's artists are a broad mix, from the academically-inclined Swede Ingela Johansson, to the Hungarian provocateur Csaba Nemes, to the emerging Pakistani Mehreen Murtaza, and finally to Shanghai's Hu Yun.

The audience was particularly intrigued by Hu Yun's performance piece 'Thank You For Your Time' in which he hangs by a noose on one side of a wall, while the audience sees a real-time video of him on the other side. The catch is that Hu can be 'saved' from being hanged if the audience members sit on the see-saw bench that he is precariously perched on, shifting the balance to their side. In the three hour performance, Hu humorously observed that while the first 30 minutes of confusion and hesitation were very difficult, the audience soon figured out that they had to sit on the bench because the video placed in front of it was real. After that, audience members refused to leave the bench until someone else came to replace them, fearful of being responsible for the artist's death.