K11 Art Foundation is pleased to announce that in collaboration with ArtReview, one of the world’s leading international contemporary art magazines, the exhibition Breaking the Waves will be showcased in Hong Kong from 17 December 2021 to 23 January 2022 at K11 HACC. As we begin to emerge from a time of solitude and isolation, Breaking the Waves brings together the works of 14 highly acclaimed artists and artist collectives from around the world including Larry Achiampong, Chim↑Pom, Adriano Costa, David Horvitz and Yuko Mohri, Eisa Jocson, Michael Joo, Jac Lierner, Ho Tzu Nyen with Ripon Chowdhury, Laure Prouvost, Slime Engine, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Zheng Bo, to explore discussion and dialogue as a cornerstone of contemporary art, and highlight the role of communication and social interaction in contemporary practice. The exhibition also examines the vast potential of art as a means of social development, communication and connectivity with the world through art.
The exhibition title, Breaking the Waves, refers both to persistence, the endlessly repeating climax of waves breaking on a shore, and the act of swimming against the tide, or coming up for air. In the current moment, it also seeks to convey optimism about the latent potentials for renewal as we slowly begin to re-enter a world reshaped following the COVID-19 pandemic. As a celebration of art’s propensity for thinking differently and going against the grain, the exhibition seeks to speak to community, solidarity and the inspiring, sometimes challenging, visions of new futures and new possibilities that art is uniquely placed to offer.
K11 Art Foundation has been actively establishing partnerships with leading art and cultural institutions and experts around the world to create impactful cross-cultural exchange, and contribute to the expanding global contemporary art discourse. The exhibition is curated to highlight dialogue and mutual influence, by staging each work as a form of ‘conversation’. Balancing the poles of work and play, the art on show tackles relationships between humans and nature, conditions of migration and mobility, exploitation and cooperation, the potentials of new technologies, and the ways in which artists collaborate or enter into dialogue with the work of their peers. More than anything; however, it examines the many ways in which art allows us to view the world and locate ourselves within it through a fresh or alternative lens.
Featuring a mixture of both static and interactive works, the audience is invited to become a ‘fellow traveller’ on a journey that is staged to highlight both the development of individual points of view and the operations of a shared vision or a collective social consciousness. Cumulatively, the exhibition teases out the ways in which the personal becomes public and the ways in which art allows the individual to adopt the perspective of the other—the very basis around which equitable social dialogue is founded, bridging generations and cultures, linking, contrasting and exploring new or renewed waves of creativity.
Wave upon wave – Exhibition and activities
To accompany the exhibition, K11 Art Foundation will present a series of events, including a talk, and online and offline guided tours.
