Cabinet Cabinet Curiosity Curiosity

Michele Chu, Chan Ting, Sasaoka Yuriko, Magdalen Wong, Xi Jiu, Zheng Mahler

Curated by PHD Group, Hong Kong

6 Dec – 11 Jan

The curiosity cabinet, or kunstkammer, has for centuries enthralled audiences with its arrays of wonders and oddities. Originating as privately kept miniature rooms or cupboards, the cabinet emphasized the abnormal, showcasing objects considered foreign to Occident intellectuals, and selected by wealthy royals, scholars, or merchants. This Orientalist history—and the elite few who decided what went into them—still dictates much of how we approach object and display today, with curiosity cabinets now existing in the public sphere as institutions and museum spaces. 

But what does it mean to be curious about an object from another place, dislocated from its context? How can the gaze of wonder confront and challenge the gaze of exoticisation and othering? Can curiosity be removed from concepts of ownership and possession? These questions are foundational to “Cabinet Cabinet Curiosity Curiosity,” a group exhibition curated by Hong Kong-based gallery PHD Group and hosted at Abraham & Wolff in Paris.

To name something once is to define it; to name it twice invokes a soft confusion, similar to when one repeats a word too many times, detaching it from meaning. The abstracted doubling in the title notes the experimental links between the artworks, and also playfully hints at the collaborative nature of the two galleries performing in tandem—one playing the host, presenting a literal cabinet that hints at its past as an antique drawing room, and the other playing guest, providing its curious contents. 

The artist duo Zheng Mahler presents abalone-encrusted porcelain pieces from their “A Season in Shell” project, in which they trace the abalone’s trade route from Africa to Hong Kong via Switzerland in a two-fold attempt to understand the mechanical workings of our sociopolitical exchange culture. Sasaoka Yuriko, from Japan, asks how we might be implicated in the capitalist labor of animals with a small singing bear that asks, ever so sweetly, to be employed in a work force. Xi Jiu evokes symbolism in paintings out of her Beijing studio. Hong Kong artists Chan Ting and Michele Chu show new works that engage in the relationship between material, form, and the artist’s hand. Magdalen Wong, also from Hong Kong, plays with the taxonomic naming of plants and the mass market, painting in great detail the plastic flowers she collected from various places over the years.  

With this wide range of works, “Cabinet Cabinet Curiosity Curiosity” delivers a missive directly air flown from Asia in an attempt to reverse and banish the cabinet’s problematic historical entanglements. Open-ended and fluid, the displays and selections do not express the stiff stereotypes of cabinets of old, but instead asks what it means to be curious today. We are left only with the barest suggestions of its charming form, and an invitation to open it up and take a look.

PHD Group, November 2024