How Wong Kar-wai’s noir films inspire Nicole Eisenman’s Hong Kong view

The show in question, also called “Fallen Angels”, is Eisenman’s first solo presentation in Asia and is at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong from March 24 to May 30.

It’s a surprising first for the celebrated artist who’s had numerous solo exhibitions at various galleries and institutions – such as her retrospective “What Happened” at Whitechapel Gallery in London – and at large-scale presentations such as the Whitney Biennale in 1995, 2012 and 2022.

Touted as one of her generation’s most significant painters, Eisenman is acclaimed for her formalist skills and painting techniques used to depict contemporary life, which often read like crowded tableaux. Beyond her technical capabilities, it’s her allegorical, often humorous take on sociopolitical issues and events that truly captivate critics and enthusiasts alike.

Art has been a constant in Eisenman’s life; her great-grandmother was a self-taught painter, and both her great-aunts were artists. “I grew up in a house full of my great-grandmother’s paintings and was just mesmerised by that,” Eisenman recalls. Her own proclivity for painting and skill was revealed at a young age. When recounting her earliest memory of making art – finger painting in nursery school – she describes it as an image of a mountain with a road going around it in a way that made it look three dimensional.

“It broke my mind open that I could create something like that, I just slipped into that world, it was as if I was inside the painting,” she says, pinpointing her early capability to see and interpret shapes. “As I got older, it became more and more apparent that [making art] was all I was capable of doing.”

Eisenman emerged on New York’s downtown art scene in the 1990s. Her murals and ink drawings such as Untitled (Lesbian Recruitment Booth) and Captured Pirates on the Island of Lesbos were irreverent and subversive, incorporating humour and eroticism to break down established notions about systemic patriarchy.