Press Release

Hong Kong – American artist Jennny Holzer (b.1950) will present Light Stream, a major exhibition of new and vintage work in her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, at Pearl Lam Galleries, which will open on 18 September, 2013. For over 30 years, Holzer has present her astringent ideas, arguments, rapture and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions through the medium of writing. Light Stream features selections from the artist’s text series Truisms(1977-79), Living(1980-82), and Survival (1983-85) on elections signs and stone benches. Using Chinese text extensively for the first time, Holzer is exhibiting her most elaborate LED gallery installation do date. The show’s centerpiece, also titled Light Stream, mixes English and Chinese in dynamic light and color.

Jenny Holzer, “Survival Series- More Survival,” 1985, Horizontal LED sign-red diodes, black powder-coated aluminum housing
13.3 x 146.3 x 7.6 cm (5.25 x 57.6 x 3 in. )

Holzer’s text-based words were originally printed on posters and anonymously pasted on buildings and walls across New York City in the 1970s. Her groundbreaking use of non-traditonal media, such as LEDs, T-shirt, stickers, dinner plates, stone seating, the internet and light projections, greatly influenced the growth of a new genre of text-based art.

Holzer’s work has been exhibited internationally including at the museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was the first female artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition, for which she received the Leone d’Oro.