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HONG KONG
Empty Gallery
EVERYTHING VISIBLE IS EMPTY
The late filmmaker and theorist Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) was a seminal figure of the 1960s Japanese avant-garde movement, and worked in the ranks of graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop). In his video Everything Visible Is Empty (1975), katakana and kanji drawn from a Buddhist prayer appear in a sequence of fast-paced frames spliced with images depicting the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology, ending with flashes of color and light. This work is the namesake of an exhibition mounted at Hong Kong's Empty Gallery that surveys Matsumoto's postwar creations. The career of the pioneer, striving to lead the vanguard in documentary practice, is traced through a selection of eight of his experimental endeavors and two made-for-TV documentaries.
Matsumoto and his contemporaries contended with the popularization of television and mediated news spectacles, though a brief contextual introduction at Empty Gallery removed that framework, leaving visitors with the feeling of displacement from historicity. The show, presented through a maze of rooms, was bookended by White Hole (1979) and Black Hole (1977). The former refers to a...