Material World: Interview with El Anatsui
By Ming Lin
The artist in front of his work Affirmation (2014), which was specially commissioned for the inaugural exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong this past May.
Sustainability is a catch phrase in today’s hyper-consumerist world. Similarly, terms such as recycling, re-using and up-cycling have been absorbed into both political and marketing rhetoric, to the point where their meaning seems even more obscure. With his scintillating textiles composed of bottle caps and other metal refuse, it is tempting to pin one of these coinages onto the work of Nigeria-based Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, but to do so would be to miss the point entirely. Selected as the inaugural artist to exhibit at Belgian gallery Axel Vervoordt’s Hong Kong debut this past May, several specially commissioned pieces by Anatsui undulated from floor to ceiling, transforming the former office space on the fifteenth floor of the Entertainment Building in Central, into a small richly-hued arena. Rather than seeing each tapestry as an assemblage of disparate pieces, Anatsui urges the viewer instead to acknowledge their human provenance; many hands have gone into its production both during and after the creation of the art object. Speaking to ArtAsiaPacific, the 70-year-old artist explains that matter has meaning only after people have interacted with it.
