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The Korea Times

By Park Han-sol
What do large-winged albatrosses, ageing Virginia Oak trees and artists have in common?
In the eyes of Moroccan Swiss artist Latifa Echakhch, they all embody qualities seen as inefficient and ungainly by “real, everyday society”.
Albatrosses, as depicted in Charles Baudelaire’s 1841 poem L’Albatros, face ridicule from sailors after being snared from the sky onto ships’ decks, left to hobble pitifully with their now uselessly big wings.
Mature Virginia oak trees, unable to bear the weight of their own growth, are recognised by their drooping limbs that plunge towards the ground instead of rising upwards.
And what about artists? Neither their way of life nor their work is optimised for efficiency. In the strictest sense of functionality, art can seem downright pointless and detached from reality.

“Having all these loud feelings and incapacities, we artists are not adapted to [so-called] ‘normal’ life. We are too sensitive. We look like strangers all the time,” Echakhch says.
But for her, the very things that render these three existences inefficient are what can make them most beautiful – the seabirds’ formidable wings fluttering freely in the sky, the tree branches that sag more and more with the passing of time and the artist’s ability to come to terms with their precise position within this world.
“It’s about accepting that your wings may be too large for the ground but are majestic and useful in the sky,” she said. “I don’t believe an artwork can save someone, but it can make somebody feel not alone any more.
“My social function is to be aware of that and to pick out this feeling to give it back to people, who may not have the time, patience or tools to do it [on their own] – feelings that they can understand and recognise themselves in.”
The unlikely trio of motifs beautifully converges at Echakhch’s first solo exhibition in Asia, “Les Albatros”, at Pace Gallery Seoul.

Stepping into the gallery’s ground floor, visitors enter a pitch-dark room, with the only colours emanating from the artist’s five new paintings of evergreen oaks.
Even these pieces are mostly swallowed by darkness, however, as the draped canvases have been flipped to reveal their black-painted back sides.
The sagging shapes of 8-metre-long pieces of fabric evoke both the heavy wings of the albatross stuck on land and the plunging limbs of Virginia oak trees.

“All this last year, I saw so many paintings by Monet, Cezanne and other historical artists who treated this subject. I suddenly had the desire to paint a landscape myself. But at the same time, [this desire] seemed so pretentious,” she says.
“Monet was painting during the war; there was a war outside and he was in his garden painting vegetation. I found that so crazy, but I also felt so related to that.
“We are living in times of total uncertainties and violent extremes. And I felt this arrogance of an artist wanting to paint the natural landscape and believe in the idea of beauty. This was something I had to resolve in my head,” Echakhch says.
In the end, by choosing not to let her creative labour shine alone, and instead presenting it as if it were physically merging with the surrounding space, she reconciled with what it means to paint a landscape in our times.
In recent years, the artist has begun incorporating music in her installations.
“I came to realise that the two worlds – sound and visual art – are not so different. They both deal with space, gesture and temporality,” she noted.

For The Concert, her project for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale, she envisioned the sensation of arriving in the space moments after a concert had come to an end.
“When the music stops and there is silence, you still hear music in your memory. Just like how we can close our eyes and imagine an exhibition we saw before, we can close our ears and imagine the concert we heard before.”
For her Art Basel project Der Allplatz in Switzerland the following year, she introduced live performances of experimental musicians to her deconstructed stage.
“This journey into sound and music opened my eyes in a new way, much like when I first discovered contemporary art,” she says.
Les Albatros runs until August 17 at Pace Gallery Seoul.
Read the full story at The Korea Times.


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Why artists are like albatrosses on land, and how there’s beauty in their inefficiency

Latifa Echakhch’s solo exhibition Les Albatros at Pace Gallery Seoul. The Moroccan Swiss artist’s show dwells on the beauty to be found in inefficiency. Photo: courtesy of Pace Gallery

Moroccan Swiss artist Latifa Echakhch. Photo: courtesy of Pace Gallery

The sagging shapes of pieces of fabric in Latifa Echakhch’s exhibition are meant to evoke the heavy wings of a grounded albatross and the plunging limbs of Virginia oak trees. Photo: courtesy of Pace Gallery

One of Echakhch’s pieces of fabric painted with an image of a tree. Photo: courtesy of Pace Gallery. 

Latifa Echakhch’s installation The Concert in the Swiss Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale, photographed by Samuele Cherubini. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

5 exhibitions and dance shows this weekend July 20-21 in Hong Kong to catch

Detail from Jin Yucheng’s work Jing’an Temple (2018), on show as part of the artist’s solo exhibition in Hong Kong. It’s one of several options this weekend for lovers of art and dance. Photo: Jin Yucheng 

Visitors to the “Soundtrack of Our Lives: Joseph Koo x James Wong x the Rise of Cantopop” exhibition at Tai Kwun, Central. Photo: Eugene Lee

A screenshot from Jeffrey Shaw’s “Legible City Hong Kong” (2024), on display at the M+ museum in West Kowloon. Photo: courtesy of the artist

The entrance of Blossoms. Photo: Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery

A scene from “As If Snowing”, a new production by Hong Kong’s City Contemporary Dance Company, performed by Qiao Yang (right), Luo Fan (middle) and Kelvin Mak (left). Photo: Carmen So

High-end gallery closure in Hong Kong raises questions over state of city’s art market

The exterior of Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, photographed under an old name, in Central, in 2020. Photo: Google Maps

The exterior of Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei, photographed under an old name, in Central, in 2020. News of the gallery’s closure at the end of 2024 has raised questions over the future of Hong Kong’s art market. Photo: Google Maps

Rebecca Wei is Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei’s partner in charge of Asia. Photo: Rebecca Wei

Amanda Hon is managing director of Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong and co-president of the HKAGA.

Lifestyle

Arts & Culture

Like trees whose branches sag or a giant-winged bird on land, art may appear pointless yet it does have a role, artist Latifa Echakhch says


What use is an albatross on land, a tree that can’t support its branches, or an artist? Latifa Echakhch, who draws on these motifs for her show at Pace Gallery Seoul, finds beauty in their very inefficiency.


South Korea

Korea Times