Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition in Hong Kong highlights his ever-changing works

Cuban-American visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996 at the age of 38 due to Aids-related complications. With an acute awareness of his own mortality towards the end, the artist focused on developing a body of ever-changing works with guidelines for galleries exhibiting his art after he died.

“The instructions, or lack of them, guarantee that once I am no longer here, this work will still be alive, in constant change, in different configurations. As in a dream, taking almost no space,” he said in 1995.

Today, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation is the guardian of the Core Tenets – a document describing the artist’s bodies of work that have specific, yet sometimes open-ended parameters.

David Zwirner gallery follows the guide in its preparation of “Somewhere Better Than This Place / Nowhere Better Than This Place”, which is technically the artist’s first Hong Kong solo exhibition, although it can be viewed as an interpretation of his work.

His works have been shown around the world, and the exhibitions vary slightly each time as curators interpret the Core Tenets differently.

Ambiguity is very much part of Gonzalez-Torres’ practice. Born in Cuba in 1957 and originally trained in photography, he created works with oblique meanings to bypass censorship as a queer and highly political artist working in his adopted home of New York City.