Bruce Nauman
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

While many artists interrogate language, music, and philosophy in their practices, few have made the same impact as Bruce Nauman. At his first retrospective in Hong Kong, Tai Kwun Contemporary reviewed the American artist’s lifelong investigation into these themes through 30 works spanning video, sketches, installation, and a multichannel audio work. The exhibition opened with a spiraling neon sign titled, and depicting the phrase, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967). The lettering is a “serious” declaration about artists’ role in society, but is satirized by an “unserious” medium (typically used for advertisements and storefronts), exemplifying his thought-provoking practice. 

Nauman’s fascination with linguistics is evident in his other neon works Raw War (1970–72), Eat Death (1972), and Perfect Door/Perfect Odor/Perfect Rodo (1972), incorporating palindromic, nested words, and anagrams, respectively. This Ludwig Wittgenstein-inspired wordplay later resulted in theatrical, long durational videos such as I’m Sorry and No, No, No, from his Clown Torture installation series (1987), and Thank You (1992). The actors in I’m Sorry are dressed as the stock character clown Pierrot and repeatedly shout, “I’m sorry for what I did. I don’t know why I did it,” for almost an hour. This nonsensical phrase recalls the irrational speech from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s works, from which Nauman is also known to take inspiration.