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Cuban-American visual artist F\u00e9lix Gonz\u00e1lez-Torres died in 1996 at the age of 38 due to Aids-related complications. With an acute awareness of his own mortality towards the end, the artist focused on developing a body of ever-changing works with guidelines for galleries exhibiting his art after he died.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe instructions, or lack of them, guarantee that once I am no longer here, this work will still be alive, in constant change, in different configurations. As in a dream, taking almost no space,\u201d he said in 1995.<\/p>\n
Today, the F\u00e9lix Gonz\u00e1lez-Torres Foundation is the guardian of the Core Tenets \u2013 a document describing the artist\u2019s bodies of work that have specific, yet sometimes open-ended parameters.<\/p>\n
David Zwirner gallery follows the guide in its preparation of \u201cSomewhere Better Than This Place \/ Nowhere Better Than This Place\u201d, which is technically the artist\u2019s first Hong Kong solo exhibition, although it can be viewed as an interpretation of his work.<\/p>\n
His works have been shown around the world, and the exhibitions vary slightly each time as curators interpret the Core Tenets differently.<\/p>\n
Ambiguity is very much part of Gonz\u00e1lez-Torres\u2019 practice. Born in Cuba in 1957 and originally trained in photography, he created works with oblique meanings to bypass censorship as a queer and highly political artist working in his adopted home of New York City.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n