The artist Christo, in Hong Kong for Art Basel, talks Trump, the point of his art, and his plan for world’s biggest sculpture
Bulgarian-born Christo, once a refugee, says he scrapped long-planned US project because of ‘that man’, and tells of his hope he can sell art in Hong Kong to fund 150-metre-high sculpture in UAE he planned with his late wife
The artist Christo first visited Hong Kong 48 years ago when he and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, were on their way to Australia for the first of their monumental landscape wrapping projects. He didn’t have a particularly good time.
“I was afraid in Hong Kong. There was talk of Britain handing Hong Kong back to China already and back then, I was stateless, a refugee and deserter from Bulgaria when it was part of the Soviet bloc. I thought the Chinese Communist Party might stop me and send me back there,” the 81-year-old, back in Hong Kong again for Art Basel week, remembers.
A similar fear lay behind his abrupt announcement in January that he would no longer continue with a plan to suspend fabric panels over six miles of a river in the US state of Colorado. “Over the River” would have been his biggest project in the US and has cost him millions of US dollars, a quarter of a century in planning and numerous court cases. A final legal decision was in sight, but the New York-based artist said he wouldn’t produce an artwork on federal land with Donald Trump as America’s president.
The cloth isn’t the artwork. The whole thing is the artwork
“I will not do anything that brings benefit to land owned by the federal government as long as that man is president. I won’t say his name,” he says vehemently.
