Living Time opens at TAG Art Museum
TAG Art Museum unveils Living Time, the most comprehensive presentation of Antony Gormley’s work in Asia to date. The exhibition spans nearly 40 years of the artist’s exploration of the body as a site of transformation and exchange.
Living Time activates two of TAG Art Museum’s contrasting spaces, Hall 4 and Hall 5. Proposing that an investigation of the ‘body as space’ can be more useful than a representation of its surface, the works on display range from Gormley’s seminal early lead works through massive ‘Expansion Works’ to the artist’s most recent attempts to treat the human body as architecture. In Hall 4 and responding to the space’s enclosed nature, 35 sculptures are displayed in a grid formation. This marks the first occasion that Gormley has shown his work without reference to chronology, allowing visitors to form their own connections between the works.
The exhibition culminates in Hall 5 with four ‘Expansion Works’ that came out of an obsession with renegotiating the boundary of the skin and are what Gormley has called ‘contained explosions’ that expand the skin’s surface by pushing outwards. Hall 5’s mezzanine level will allow visitors to look down on these sculptures – a unique opportunity and the first of its kind for these particular works.
Photograph: Installation view, TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, 2023. Photograph by Huang Shaoli.