Installation view of the ‘What’s Up’ exhibition curated by Lawrence Van Hagen in Hong Kong

Lawrence Van Hagen set out to start a travel tech company, and somewhere along the way, ended up curating a successful series of art exhibitions dedicated to supporting emerging artists. Now, Van Hagen runs LVH art, a business dedicated to helping clients navigate the international art market. Here, we speak to the entrepreneur about his unexpected career path, his favourite places to see art and how to start building a collection.

Lawrence Van Hagen

1. Can you tell us more about the What’s Up exhibitions and how you found yourself in the role of curator?

I started a travel start-up and in order to raise funds for it I decided to curate an art show. I wanted to curate a show since my family is in the arts. My mother has her own art foundation, collects, curates exhibitions and writes books on art. We decided to curate a show called What’s Up based on what’s up today in the art world with a focus on artists to look out for, whether they are young or established. We had the first show in Soho, New York with two spaces, 50 artists and 100 artworks. The next show turned out to be even more successful than the first.

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We have now had shows in New York, London, Hong Kong and Seoul. I work closely with my mother. It’s more my project, but my mother gives me a huge amount of advice and help. It is nice to be able to bounce ideas off one another. The good thing about working with family is trust, you know for sure with family. My mother has kind of been my mentor and taught me what I know today since I didn’t go to art school. However, since I was a kid I was immersed in the arts and always lived with art which led me to start started collecting at a young age.

2. Do you see yourself as a mediator between established and new artists?

A big thing I do with the shows is I tend to bring emerging artists or mid-career contemporary artists together with very well known names. I blend them and create a dialogue between both. I find similarities in inspiration, historical aspects, colours or medium between the established and emerging artists. I do the shows this way since I think that it is interesting and I believe that in order to attract people to a show with emerging artists, you need work by household names as well. Also, when you have younger artists at a show, it keeps the older generation more current. This way of curating shows has enabled me to have a client base from 20 to 80 years old. The older collectors have the most amazing collection of well known artists but now consider acquiring work by a young artist from the shows. I have noticed that the public enjoys shows set up this way.

3. Do you buy art for its beauty or as an investment?

My taste is very classic, I tend to focus on art that is more beautiful than conceptual. However, one thing I tell everyone including myself is to focus on buying what one likes. Whether it is beautiful work or not, it is important to know that you love the work. Second, it’s important to consider investment. For me, it’s a factor of the acquisition in my collection. If it is a very young artist, I tend to not look at it. However if I spend a certain amount of money, it has to have an investment purpose. I will not just spend a big amount of money on something I like, it has to also be of value and something I believe in. One thing to know about the shows I do is that many of the artists we showcase are artists that my mother and I collect. I love to promote the artists from my shows. Lastly, it is more important for people to find what they like, than to have an advisor tell them if what they like will be a good investment.

Artworks featured in one of the ‘What’s Up’ by artists Franz West, Stefan Bruggemann and Lucio Fontana

4. Which artists’ work do you have at home?

I have a selection of young and old artists. I have beautiful work by Georg Baselitz, who is a well known German painter and sculptor. I have two works by a young artist Donna Huanca, who is based in Berlin. She is an incredible artist, who just did a show at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. In my entrance, I have a work from the 90s by the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. I have work by Sean Scully, Stefan Bruggemann, Stanley Whitney and George Smith. In the bedroom, I have a beautiful 60s Kenneth Noland. There’s a lot more too.

In my house, I mainly have contemporary work, but with simple classic older artists. Most of the younger artists are a part of my collection and the other work is from my mother. I tend to borrow as well. I always move the artwork around in my flat to create a different aesthetic. I am lucky because the ceilings in my apartment are very high which is rare in London, so I can hang up 3 metre work. It is important for me to keep a lot of art in my house since it is my passion and profession, and I also throw dinner parties where friends come over and they can see what I do. A few pieces of art makes a big difference to a home.

5. Best place to see art in London?

It depends what type of art you are looking for. In terms of galleries, if you want to see more established artists or big shows, all the major galleries from David Zwirner and Gagosian Gallery in New York to Simon Lee in London are great. In London, if you want younger artists, it is good to go to the east end or south of London where you have Carlos Ishikawa and Emalin gallery. When it comes to museums, my favourites are Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery for contemporary art. Tate Britain and Royal Academy are also great. Auction houses always have incredible work. If you are not looking for a curated show and you just want to see beautiful paintings, I would recommend the private view before sale at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips. The auction houses have anything from contemporary to established and renaissance pieces. Lastly, to be honest the number one place to see art in London is in people’s homes. Often artists have incredible work in their homes since they trade with people they know.

6. As travel was your first business venture, what’s your next destination?

My next big trip is to Indonesia. I want to visit the Raja Ampat Islands on New Guinea. I also want to see the Komodo Islands with the Komodo dragon when I am there as it is close by. I travel every week as it is part of my work and I love it. I get to see many beautiful places on work trips, however it is still work for me. Therefore, my personal travels are very meaningful and I like to travel quite far to experience something different. My last big trip was to the North Pole. I like to do adventure trips. I am not a very resort-y person, but I always make sure the adventures are mixed with comfort. If anyone needs a travel guide, I am the guy to ask!

Follow Lawrence Van Hagen on Instagram: @lawrencevh

Interview by Andrea Stenslie

Installation shot from ‘Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today’ at the ICA/Boston, 2018: ‘Imagination, Dead Imagine’ (1991) by Judith Barry

We live in interesting times – so interesting, in fact, that not only are artists using ever-newer technologies and digital tools, but we are witnessing a whole new generation emerging: artists who were born, live and create with and on the internet. Anny Shaw investigates

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For several years now, neuroscientists have been arguing that the internet is remapping our brains, rewiring our neural connections – for better or worse. Now it appears that the internet is having a profound effect on artistic practice, with artists creating perpetual iterations of works or keeping projects in continual development, like the tabs left running in your web browser.

“There’s a freedom artists have now, which is perhaps a symptom of how the internet impacts on people’s thinking. There’s never a next stage or a finished version; the possibilities are endless,” says Elizabeth Neilson, the director of London’s Zabludowicz Collection.

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Neilson points to the artists in the collection who use virtual reality (VR), such as the Canadian artist and film-maker Jon Rafman, who continues to work on his animated film Dream Journal that he began in 2015, and the US artist Paul McCarthy, who has created 15 versions of C.S.S.C. Coach Stage Stage Coach VR experiment Mary and Eve (2017), a project first unveiled at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Watch Dream Journal by Jon Rafman:

Another, younger case in point is the painter and self-taught programmer Rachel Rossin, who has previously worked for the American VR firm Oculus. The Zabludowicz Collection pre-purchased her acclaimed VR work The Sky Is a Gap (2017), which Rossin has described as “a Zabriskie Point-like explosion of a building”. The piece premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2017 and the latest version, specially commissioned by the collection, is due to go on show in London in March 2019. “No matter that the work already exists in one form, Rachel will keep working on it,” Neilson says.

The London-based writer and curator Omar Kholeif takes the idea a step further. He suggests that works of art could soon start to evolve independently of the artist. “It’s not about upgrading the video apparatus, it’s about upgrading the coding and how a work of art might actually be produced,” he says. “You could acquire a piece that in 10 years might be completely different. Every time it’s shown, it could be different.” Kholeif is behind two ground-breaking shows examining new media and net art: ‘Electronic Superhighway’, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2016, and its technologically updated sequel, ‘I Was Raised on the Internet’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in June 2018.

‘Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation’ (2016) by Sondra Perry

Of course, net art, or art made on or for the internet, is nothing new. Its genesis can be traced back to the early 1990s, when a diverse group of artists including Vuk Ćosić, Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting began to exhibit online and to build programs to create software art. Even then, artists were exploring the idea of open-ended projects. In 1994, the Israeli-American artist Yael Kanarek began World of Awe, a fictional online diary of a traveler in search of treasure, which she updated several times before finishing it in 2011. Meanwhile, John F. Simon Jr has said that his ongoing work Every Icon, which began in 1997, will take several hundred trillion years to complete with the 1.8 x 10308 possible combinations of black and white squares in the icon’s 32-by-32 grid.

Read more: Artist Tom Pope’s ‘One Square Club’

For these pioneers, the internet was a nascent phenomenon, but, for Generations Y and X, blogging, Tweeting and posting to Instagram are second nature. Indeed, it is increasingly common for younger artists to be just as well-versed in programming as they are in painting. The American artist Ian Cheng, for example, studied computer science while Toronto-based Jeremy Bailey trained as a software developer.

Still from ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013) by Camille Henrot

Despite this, there is still a tendency to view the internet as a site for distribution rather than as a space where art can simply exist, Kholeif says. “Artists have a real discomfort with not being part of the white-cube gallery or institutional realm, because that is a space for validation where income is generated,” he observes.

There are, of course, exceptions. In 2011, the Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal wrote and made available, with the help of his lawyer and dealer, a sales contract specifically for the sale of websites as works of art – the domain name is transferred to the collector, who must renew it annually, while ensuring the website remains free and available publicly.

‘David, Florida, USA, 28th September 2015’ (2015) by Celia Hempton

Other artists have employed the internet as a form of activism. HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican, a collective of artists and activists, founded thewayblackmachine.net in 2014, an ongoing project that tracks via the internet the proliferation of images, mobile phone videos and news clips of the systemic violence against African Americans by white Americans. “The piece is a reality check about how little the needle has moved despite the wide access to and circulation of these images,” says Eva Respini, the curator of ‘Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today’. The exhibition, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston in February 2018, was one of the largest historical surveys of its kind to be mounted in the US.

Respini acknowledges that it is difficult to be optimistic in these divisive, post-truth times, citing “the proliferation of fake news, the internet’s nefarious influence on politics, mass surveillance, and in some areas of the world, strict control over information on the internet”. But she also believes that digital media has given “incredible power” to movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, “mobilizing and giving visibility to those with marginalized voices”.

‘Juliana’ (2014–15) by Frank Benson

Meanwhile, the artist and writer Miao Ying, who divides her time between Shanghai and New York but whose official biography states that she “resides on the internet”, dedicates much of her work to censorship in China. In 2016, she launched Chinternet Plus, a web-based project commissioned by New York’s New Museum that parodies the Chinese government’s much-hyped Internet Plus, which is aimed at rebooting economic growth but is carefully managed (read: censored) by the government.

Read more: In conversation with artist Victoria Fu

Miao describes her relationship with the Chinese internet as a form of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby she has formed a bond with her ‘captor’. “Chinternet Plus is self-censored,” she says, and consequently full of branding and devoid of content. Despite its seeming banality, Chinternet Plus has been blocked in China for several months. Miao adds that she would never show her political work in China. “A lot of my art has two versions; one is a self-censored version that I show in China,” she explains.

Still from ‘RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04’, (2007) by Cao Fei

At the end of 2018, Miao unveiled a new website, Hardcore Digital Detox, commissioned by the privately run museum M+ in Hong Kong. Due to open in 2020, M+ is already known for acquiring digital art, such as its recent purchase of the entire archive of the internet art collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, as well as the rights to all their future works by the duo.

The acquisition reflects the growing interest of institutions in net art. This has been spurred on in part by 2019’s 30th anniversary of the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal of the concept of the world wide web to his colleagues at the research organization CERN. As Respini notes, “1989 was also the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, and arguably the beginning of our global era that we cannot imagine without the internet.”

This article was first published in the Winter 2019 issue.

Christian Marclay “The Clock”, Installation View. Tate Modern

Frieze art fair might be over, but London’s still the top destination for art this month, says Digital Editor Millie Walton. Here are five exhibitions that you should see… and one that’s not worth the hype

1. Christian Marclay: The Clock, Tate Modern

Christian Marclay‘s epic 24 hour film made up of movie scenes which correspond exactly with the actual time is a masterpiece. Clear your schedule and settle in for the long haul, the more you watch, the more addictive it becomes. If you want the full experience, there are a handful of 24 hour screenings in which you can watch the film from start to finish, and leave with an acute awareness of the rhythm that dictates our lives.

Until 20 January 2019 at Tate Modern

Installation view of Richard Wilson, 20:50, (1987) at “Space Shifters”, © copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2018. Photo: Mark Blower

2. Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery

Some might recall staggering around the Hayward Gallery back in 2015, wearing Carsten Höller‘s goggles that flipped your view upside down? This is another perception-warping exhibition featuring work Richard Wilson’s 20:50 oil room (as seen in the old Saatchi Gallery) and various mirrors that reshape your silhouette beyond recognition. Be warned you might leave a little shaky-legged and light-headed.

Until 6 January 2019 at Hayward Gallery

Elmgreen & Dragset’s fictional swimming pool at Whitechapel Gallery

3. Elmgreen & Dragset: This is how we bite our tongue, Whitechapel Gallery

For their latest exhibition, the notorious Berlin-based art duo has built an entire swimming pool inside Whitechapel Gallery and given it a fake history that dates back to 1901. As usual, the work is filled with fun and subversion. The most striking piece is of a little boy staring up at a framed gun on the wall as if in awe, reminding us of how firearms are frequently glamorised and easily obtained by children in many countries.

Until 13 January 2019 at Whitechapel Gallery

Doris Salcedo, “Palimpsest” 2013 – 2017. Concrete, water and hydraulic system. © the artist. Photo by Patrizia Tocci. Courtesy White Cube

4. Doris Salcedo, White Cube Bermondsey

Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo‘s latest exhibition is a powerful and moving examination of  “old news” and enduring pain. The ground is scrawled with the names of refugees and migrants who have died and been forgotten, whilst tables have been broken apart and reassembled, showing the scars to represent rape victims who have been left broken by abuse.

Until 11 November 2018 at White Cube Bermondsey

Mika Rottenberg, “
Mary’s Cheries”. Single-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Julia Stoschek Foundation. Installation view: Goldsmiths CCA, 2018. Image credit: Andy Keats, 2018

5. Mika Rottenberg, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition is a mad explosion of imagery, texture and objects, exploring the inequalities of our global economy, in particular female production lines. In one film a woman sneezes out noodles while watering a pair of feet. It’s bewildering and a lot of fun.

Until 4 November 2018 at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art

MISS: Yayoi Kusama – The Moving Moment When I Went To The Universe, Victoria Miro

No doubt you’ve seen the pictures on Instagram of the Japanese artist’s latest psychedelic installation. You might even have considered booking a ticket (after all, if everyone’s posting about it, it must be good), but your time can be better spent (see above). This is an exhibition made for social media – it’s superficial and neatly branded right down to giant, spotted pumpkins – one can’t help but feel that the sole purpose of it is to look good. You’ll get the pic but you won’t be moved.

Until 21 December at Victoria Miro Gallery

A scene from the performance piece ‘Alone Together’ at the Whitechapel Gallery with artist Seth Pimlott

As the world’s leading contemporary art galleries come together for this year’s Frieze London in Regent’s Park, Iwona Blazwick, director of Whitechapel Gallery, discusses the challenges and successes of working to enrich communities through outreach programmes

Iwona Blazwick

What is the ultimate objective of a public learning programme? For anybody who’s struggled to find recognition, has a difficult home life or doesn’t see what prospects there are for them, art holds the key. Perhaps this kind of experience might help somebody realise they’re an artist, but I don’t think it has to limit itself to that. We’ve had programme alumni go on to do everything from forensics to fashion design, psychology to filmmaking.

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I think the real asset of a good youth programme is that it can teach transferrable skills that take you in different directions. By encouraging participation and decision-making, we hope to bridge social, cultural and religious differences and instil some sort of epiphany in people that will help them for the rest of their lives, whether in a professional capacity, or as members of different communities. However, I don’t want to instrumentalise art. I also believe that it should be free to not do any of the above! But that very freedom too, I hope, can be found in our programmes.

In recent years there has been a shift from traditional media such as painting and sculpture towards moving-image work, performance and of course social media and digital. And yet, at the same time, artists working in the digital realms are also being drawn to ceramics and other tactile ways of making art. As a medium-sized institution, we can be quite nimble and offer a wide portfolio of activities to reflect this interdisciplinary time. For example, when we hosted Thick Time, our exhibition of work by the great South African artist William Kentridge, members of our youth forum, Duchamp & Sons, collaborated with the English National Opera, and our youth participants very unselfconsciously made extraordinary costumes, animations and even worked on a libretto.

A live street-art performance curated by artist Justyna Fedec

However, perhaps the bigger philosophical issue is: are we teaching people, or do we have something to learn from them? I believe our strength lies in reciprocity. Situated in East London as we are, we are uniquely placed to access rich and culturally diverse communities, and have one of the youngest populations of any borough of London. So many artists and creatives live in the area, and it is incredibly cosmopolitan, which gives everything a tremendous energy.

Read more: 5 travel experiences that will change your life

One challenge (and success) has been the fact that some communities here are fairly inward-looking, and are not engaging with the gallery. Perhaps this is because they are first-generation immigrants, or because they haven’t felt confident speaking English, or because of different religious backgrounds. To create a dialogue, it was important to recognise that each party had something to bring to the table. For example, in 2015, we launched a project in Stepney Green called Art Already Made: Skills Exchange and worked with a group of Bengali and Somalian women. For various cultural reasons, they had been a little bit isolated, and this project sought to recognise the tremendous skill sets they had and create an exchange of skills between the women and artist Rebecca Davies, ranging from engraving and bookbinding to embroidery and illustration. Having worked with them in a community centre, the next step was: how do we persuade them to come here, to the Whitechapel Gallery? That was the ultimate goal. And they did come, and they brought their families, and that was a great victory in that sense, to have convinced them to cross the threshold, to build up their confidence and work to keep them coming back and maintain that relationship.

A Duchamp & Sons performance in collaboration with artist Ian Giles

Another example would be our efforts to counteract the gang culture that is sadly on the rise in East London. For a lot of youth, the issue is that there is nowhere to go that you don’t have to spend money. In our latest programme, we worked with artist Seth Pimlott, who ran yoga sessions and performance workshops, ultimately culminating in the performance piece Alone Together, all about physical release. To provide somewhere to go and something to do, hopefully it can help children who would otherwise end up in a spiral of violence. Working across so many communities, of course, one has to bear in mind various cultural sensitivities, but having said that, we would never tolerate someone being intolerant. If somebody was critical because of somebody else’s sexuality or whatever, that’s something that I think one would confront. What we hope is that through their networks the kids who are exposed to our programmes will reach out to those kids who aren’t – those kids who do feel much more alienated or hermetic.

Ultimately, in any programme, what’s most important is to share. All of our initiatives serve as case studies. The reasons why entities such as the Swarovski Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation before them, support our programmes is they want to learn from them. We’re moving into a post-industrial economy and have a generation facing changes and job shortages because of automation. Industry is changing, which is good, but it’s also a scary prospect and if you haven’t got the education and the confidence to deal with that, you are going to be lost.

Learn more about the Whitechapel Gallery and the gallery’s upcoming exhibitions: whitechapelgallery.org

Artist Sam Winston spent 7 days and 7 nights living and creating art in a darkroom

Darkness heightens our senses, challenges our perceptions and opens up new creative visions, according to London based visual artist Sam Winston. For this month’s poetry muse, Rhiannon Williams learns about the power of the dark for artists and poets alike.

Sam Winston spent 7 days and 7 nights living and creating in a darkroom. Out of this absolute darkness emerged some extraordinary art, and an even more extraordinary installation: ‘Darkness Visible’ at the National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London displays art and poetry that has been created in the dark. It brings to light both the privilege and drawbacks of physical sight, while simultaneously leading you to question what ‘sight’ really is.

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The title of the installation, ‘Darkness Visible’, is a phrase from John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost‘, the epic poem which Milton wrote whilst he was blind by dictating his verse. The title is apt, as the dichotomy of light/dark is overturned in the paradoxical idea of a darkness you can see. Living temporarily in darkness, Sam Winston was able to explore the boundaries of experience and his body in new ways, as the systems and orders that we impose upon the day and regulate ourselves by were made redundant by the dark. Time, for example, without differentiation between night and day becomes an endless mass. According to Sam it is this ‘walking along the shoreline’ of different boundaries and pushing the threshold of what we can experience which shapes his art.

Sam Winston, ‘Darkness Visible’ 2017

The idea took form after a series of studio experimentations and playing about with misleading ideas about darkness as ignorance, as lack. Instead Sam argues that darkness can and should be viewed in a new way: as a creative resource. As someone who is dyslexic, the way Sam sees words is different, which is reflected in the style of his artwork; a lot of the pieces take the form of intricate text webs, the words forming enormous shapes and shadows, hurricanes across a blank page. In this way, Sam attempts to change at a structural level the discourse that surrounds darkness and dyslexia, suggesting that sensory perceptions not involving sight and light should be explored more thoroughly.

Read next: Leading art dealer Marc Glimcher of Pace Gallery on the value of public art

Subsequently, Sam commissioned ‘darkness residencies’ from leading young poets in London including Emily Berry, George Szirtes and Kayo Chingonyi who all spent time in a darkroom and wrote about it afterwards – their work is currently on show as a part of the exhibition at the Poetry Library. ‘The idea of total darkness is not the same as total darkness. The idea of light is not the same as light’, George Szirtes wrote, linking to the idea that terms of knowledge such as enlightenment and illumination all conjure up imagery of light and vision, whereas terms of darkness suggest oblivion and ignorance. What Winston has created is a poetic inversion, revolutionary in the sense that it performs a full circle on what our notions of darkness-as-limitation are. In this installation darkness is, in a way, art itself.

Poet Kayo Chingonyi on a ‘darkness residency’. Image: Andy Sewell

‘Darkness Visible’ runs until 25 March 2018 at the National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre; Sam Winston, Emily Berry, George Szirtes and Kayo Chingonyi will be in conversation with other multimedia artists on 11 January 2018 at the Whitechapel Gallery.