The exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, featuring works by Juergen Teller (b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany) and Xiang Jing (b. 1968, Beijing, China), juxtaposes and subsequently explores disparate expressions of desire. While Teller’s photographs are laden with overt references to human sexuality and desire, Xiang Jing strips such notions from her sculptures of female bodies.
In Teller’s photographs of chef Antonio Guida’s extravagant menu at Hotel Il Pellicano on the Tuscan coast in Porto Ercole, Italy, the glistening, candy-colored dishes conjure a level of fetishized decadence bordering on the grotesque.
Xiang Jing’s approach to her hyper-realistic sculptures of nude female figures presents a way for her to circumvent the traditional notions of the male gaze that construes a woman’s body as an object of desire. The nude and often hairless figures rendered in fiberglass or marble are stripped of the overtly sexualized markers of the female form, and are personally representative, for the artist, of a pure, virginal state of being that is unaffected by patriarchal constructions.
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday-Friday, 10am–7pm; Saturdays 11am-7pm