Venue | Messe Basel (Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland)
Unlimited Booth | U55
Participating Artists | Su Meng-Hung (b. 1976)
Opening Hours |
Unlimited Opening
06.16 (Mon.) 4:00-8:00 p.m.
VIP Preview
06.17 (Tue.), 06.18 (Wed.) 11:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m.
Vernissage
06.18 (Wed.) 4:00-8:00 p.m.
Unlimited Vernissage
06.19 (Thurs.) 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Public Days
06.19 (Thurs.) -06.22 (Sun.) 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Unlimited: Su Meng-Hung, Desolate Landscape on the Golden Screens |
First introduced at Art Basel in Basel in 2000, the Unlimited sector offers a dedicated platform for participating blue-chip galleries to present large-scale projects that transcend the constraints of traditional booth formats. These include monumental sculptures, spatial installations, video works, murals, photographic series, and performance art. This year’s edition is curated by Giovanni Carmine, Director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and features 67 large-scale installations ranging from canonical historical works to new pieces by contemporary artists.
Following the enthusiastic reception of the large-scale installation Farewell, Spring and Autumn Pavilions by Taiwanese contemporary art pioneer Wu Tien-Chang (b. 1956) in the 2024 edition of Unlimited, Tina Keng Gallery returns this year with a new spatial installation by Su Meng-Hung (b. 1976), titled Desolate Landscape on the Golden Screens. Selected by the curator for inclusion, this monumental new work makes its world premiere on the foremost global stage of Art Basel.
Taking traditional Chinese carved lacquer folding screens in ebony as a visual inspiration, Su Meng-Hung builds up thick layers of paint, then sands them down to reveal silkscreened outlines beneath — leaving behind mottled lines and color fragments that become the primary visual language of the work. Scattered across the surface of the screens are non-linear pictorial patterns: illustrations excerpted from classic texts such as The Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Golden Lotus. Through the dislocation of temporal and spatial contexts, these ornamental fragments shimmer with imagined glimpses, and proliferate into a constellation of visual signs. Juxtaposing the void and the ornate, elegance and kitsch, literati aesthetics and contemporary consumer culture, Su deftly reimagines the traditional East Asian folding screen as a conduit for modern artistic expression.
At the same time, Su investigates the screen’s inherent humanistic qualities — its mobility and function as a semi-permeable divider — unraveling it into intangible psychological boundaries and markers of power. The hidden erotic imagery interwoven into bird-and-flower motifs on the screen panels quietly alludes to a web of binary relations: appearance and essence, public and private. In Desolate Landscape on the Golden Screens, Su transforms the installation into a metaphorical vessel composed of object, painting, and spatial logic. As the viewer meanders and peers through its folds, they encounter a rich visual language of symbols, colors, and arrangements drawn from Eastern heritage. Resembling an elaborate Eastern garden framed by lacquered screens, the setting ushers the viewer into a space governed by the silent choreography and pliable boundaries of power.