ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, 09|17|2011 – 02|05|2012
 
Will Kwan
* 1978 in Hong Kong (CN), lives and works in Toronto (CA)

Artist Statement

I make artworks in order to understand how cultural and political authority is produced and regulated through diverse visual practices. I work with photography, video, and installation to stage counter-narratives that question the iconography, vocabulary, material culture, and protocols of dominant ideologies. In the prevailing contemporary belief system, I take a critical interest in globalization. I examine the way that globalized entities perpetuate myths of a synchronized, impartial, and frictionless world-space while marginalizing the exclusions, exceptions, and contradictions that haunt any attempt at establishing a global picture. My approach is to contaminate material that claims to be universal with traces of historical context, cultural perspective, and socio-economic reality. As a result, my artistic research also documents histories of encounters between cultural identities at the level of trade, urbanism, and warfare.


Clocks that do not tell the time

Clocks that do not tell the time, 2008
courtesy Will Kwan