If you wanted a venue to start a traveling art exhibition that was transported in cargo containers and paid homage to a handbag, you couldn’t do much better than Hong Kong.
Of the 3 million-plus cargo containers offloaded onto the city’s docks this year, 56 carried a snap-together mobile gallery that will tour the world showing works inspired by Chanel’s padded bag. “Mobile Art” gathers the works of some 20 artists, including Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and Yoko Ono, widow of slain Beatle John Lennon, in a flying-saucer-shaped pavilion designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid.
When Hadid and Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel got together to realize their dream of a traveling museum, they named Fabrice Bousteau, editor-in-chief of Beaux Arts magazine, as the curator.
“It’s a sort of UFO that lands for a number of weeks in the middle of some of the largest cities in Asia, the U.S. and Europe,” said Bousteau, in a statement from Chanel.
The exhibition runs from Feb. 27 through April 5 in Hong Kong, a mecca of shipping and shopping, before moving to Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow and finally Paris in 2010.
The artists were told to base their creation on the best-selling Chanel quilt bag, called 2.55 after its month and year of issue.
After the French artist Sophie Calle received Chanel’s commission, she advertised in a Japanese magazine in the fall of 2006 seeking an artist to carry out her project. She wanted to stop passersby, tell them to empty their bags, and offer to buy both contents and carrier. Soju Tao signed up, and the result of this collaboration will be shown at the exhibition.
Araki, known for his erotic photographs, will put up a slide show “The Dance of the Seven Veils,” depicting the image of a young woman untangling herself of Chanel bag chains transposed against languid, close-up shots of poisonous flowers. Music by Fumio Yasuda and vocals by Aki accompany the exhibit.
Paying homage to Coco Chanel, founder of the fashion house, South Korea’s Lee Bul builds a plastic sculpture, lit from the inside, and crowned with hundreds of re-assembled bags and chains.
Visitors will be guided through the tunnels in the exhibition hall with an iPod presentation by Stephan Crasneanscki, a French photographer and sound artist who works under the title Soundwalk.
Subodh Gupta has a video installation in two parts called “All Things Are Inside,” reflections on people in transit and their aspirations, such as the life of an Indian laborer who returns from prosperous Dubai where he packed gifts.
Near the end of the tunnel lies Ono’s “Wish Tree,” where visitors may write a wish on a piece of rice paper and tie it to the branches of a tree, which will be collected and sent to the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, a tribute to Lennon based on his peace anthem, “Imagine.”
Ono, a veteran at mixing social, political and corporal elements into her performances, will participate alongside Tabaimo, a 32-year-old Japanese video artist who exhibited her “Doll House” installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Personal fantasies and visions of the world are celebrated in the work of photographic duo Pierre & Gilles. Italian Loris Cecchini, on the other hand, distorts reality physically and visually – from cinema chairs that crumble into themselves to optical illusions of people climbing up buildings.
Other artists at the show include the U.S. photographer Stephen Shore of Andy Warhol’s The Factory fame, whose images highlight social issues; fellow American David Levinthal; Russia’s Blue Noses; Sylvie Fleury of Switzerland; Y.Z. Kami from Iran; and Argentina’s Leandro Erlich.