Yosemite in all its intimacy
Feminist photographer Catherine Opie’s first solo Hong Kong show features western landscapes
Professor Catherine Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her masterful portraiture and landscape photography studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity.
"Hong Kong’s art market suffers from a lack of diversity. Lehmann Maupin is the one exception, and bringing Catherine Opie to Hong Kong is consistent with the international art gallery’s commendable efforts to include gender parity and sexual diversity in its programming.
“Tree” (2015). Catherine Opie/courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong
But be warned. The works chosen for the American photographer’s first solo show in the city are natural landscapes that are thoroughly safe and unobjectionable (unless one takes issue with what Opie describes as the “vaginal” cropping of images of a particular waterfall).
You may feel slightly short-changed if you were expecting some direct reference to the defiance and audacity of her unforgettable portraits (and self-portraits) of the American queer community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (There is one recent portrait hanging inside the gallery’s office.)
It is not because domestic bliss has made her mellow, says one of America’s most successful lesbian artists. Laid-back and amiable, there is little hint today of the angry radical who in 1993 photographed her own bare back, the blood still seeping out after two female stick figures holding hands in front of a house had been cut into her skin.
You can’t get a more visceral representation of the pain of being denied a right as basic as living openly with someone you love – a life she thought was unattainable at that time.
Today, she is married to artist Julie Burleigh and the couple have a son, Oliver, together, as well as a daughter from Burleigh’s previous marriage and a grandson. Professionally, she is thoroughly establishment: Opie is a tenured professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and sits on the board of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."— Enid Tsui, May 22, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the South China Morning Post website.
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