It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve

It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve at Para Site in Hong Kong is a group exhibition featuring works by Philippe Grandrieux, Lü Yue, Masao Adachi, Patrizio di Massimo and Mladen Stilinović. It brings together art pieces, films and biographies in which the artists’ individual gestures, positions, statements, counter-manifestos, silences and escapisms share a certain tension about art’s uncertain intersection with the present.

“The Obscure”, Lü Yue‘s feature film, talks about a group of prominent Chinese writers of the same post-cultural revolution generation gather in a provincial hotel to discuss at length their views on the place of poetics in contemporary China.Philippe Grandrieux‘s portrait of Japanese film maker and revolutionary Masao Adachi is centered around the exploration of Adachi’s inner self and avoids thus to be an exercise of melancholy on the ruins of the international left. Active in Japan’s avant-garde film scene of the 1960s and a member of the Japanese Red Army, Masao Adachi provides a deeply moving introspection of a life lived mostly outside mainstream society and with firm beliefs on art’s possibilities. The decision to not enter the production logics of the art system is to be read in Mladen Stilinović‘s 1993 manifesto “The Praise of Laziness” while in Patrizio di Massimo‘s series of portraits of various characters, ranging in style from a fantastical realist painting to lush abstract velvet curtains bring to the foreground of the exhibition artistic subjectivity as a dominant specter in the crafting of artistic vocabularies. Desire (inconspicuous in the prudish panorama of today’s art) insinuates itself at every fold in the piece and completes the exhibition’s narrative.

Curated by Cosmin Costinas.