TSANG Kin-Wah's "Gymnopaedia" (2020) series of video installations have been acquired by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
Shifting from the text-based “Seven Seals” to working with found footage in his “Ecce Homo” series in 2011, Tsang began to question the notion of judgment, the possession of justice and righteousness. Focusing on the last moments of a dictator who was tried and executed in a brutal way. He appropriates footage in which a sinned human figure is the protagonist, thus projecting a series of thoughts on death, violence, and belief.
Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies serves as the main soundtrack in "Gymnopaedia", 2020. The title has a strong reference to Greece’s annual festival gymnopaedia where Sparta’s warriors or citizens perform war dancing and choral singing. Footages of night bombing in Gaza and the Gulf Wars, Saddam Hussein’s execution process and the movement of the hanging rope have been manipulated, to explore issues of war, terrorism, self-denial, and death.
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