Theaster Gates, artist who’s doing it for himself – or is he?

If you visit Theaster Gates’ new show, which opened on Tuesday at Hong Kong’s White Cube gallery, you’ll see a large work hanging opposite the Connaught Road entrance. It’s made of bronze. The top half has a muted golden sheen but the bottom half has been so thickly covered with tar, it’s as if it’s been glazed, and therefore it has its own – separate – reflective quality. You’ll probably think (because the outline seems convincingly approximate, right down to Florida’s panhandle), “That is a map of divided America, 2017”.

The resemblance, however, is a coincidence. “No,” states Gates, flatly, in one of White Cube’s back rooms when I ask if he’d planned it. “It’s a section of a roof.”

It’s the Saturday before the show opens and labourers are still hanging works; a forklift truck downstairs testifies to the weight – literal, if not metaphoric – of that bronze, one of three in the exhibition.

“When I collapsed the pieces together, they were not in that orientation,” he goes on, after a silence. (There are quite a few silences during this interview.) “They ended up in that orientation because of the need for balancing the work. The piece was conceived as vertical.” For Gates, the most important thing to say about the work is that it’s been made from scraps of roofing that were someone else’s work. “Those things are becoming more and more tangible to me.”

The fragments came from a Catholic church called St Laurence, which was demolished in 2014. It was in Chicago, where Gates, 43, grew up and where his father tarred roofs for a living, with occasional help from his only son (one of nine children). By casting discarded pieces in bronze, Gates Jnr has preserved them as art­­work; he’s made something lasting out of obliterated, anonymous labour.

At the edges, he’s deliberately retained the supports that were part of “the gating system”, the technical term for a structure that controls the passage of molten metal into a mould. The pun on his own name would seem to be another coincidence; the point is that unseen toil should be made visual.

The show’s title is “Tarry Skies and Psalms for Now”.