HONG KONG.- Ben Brown Fine Arts is presenting Wish You Were Here, an exhibition curated by New York-based curator, art advisor, and independent scholar Jie Xia. On view at Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong, the exhibition evokes the intoxicating pull of summer: the heat, the haze, and the promise of escape. Featuring works by leading postwar and contemporary artists – drawn from the gallery’s programme and beyond – the exhibition explores the iconography of travel, the sea, and the rituals of seasonal escape, approached with varying degrees of meditation, longing, and nostalgia.
Wish You Were Here is a reflection on how we construct and consume paradise – through postcards, advertisements, snapshots, and stylised memories. The beach is explored as a mirage of freedom, mythologised in oil paint, photography, and glossy idealism.
Miquel Barceló’s Bot and Bot Buit (2021) plunge viewers into a dense, meditative blue. These richly impastoed canvases evoke the motion and materiality of the Mediterranean, where solitary boats drift on pigment-churned waters. Painted in the relative seclusion of Mallorca during the pandemic, the works reflect a paradoxical moment of stillness and rejuvenation – an ocean without swimmers, a coastline without tourists.
Tseng Kwong Chi’s Paris, France (Sacre Coeur) (1983) stages a different kind of journey. Wearing his signature Mao suit and mirrored sunglasses, Tseng inserts himself into tourist settings with deadpan authority. At once diplomat and imposter, he parodies the ritual of sightseeing while critiquing the exoticisation of the outsider. His images are both playful and sharp, teasing out tensions between identity, performance, and place.
The relationship between memory, travel, and image is pushed further in Vik Muniz’s Hula Dance (Postcards from Nowhere) (2014). The work, assembled from hundreds of torn postcards, reconstructs the quintessential tropical fantasy: a hula dancer in mid motion. Muniz’s practice underscores how destinations are often consumed as representations first, places second – flattened into airmail clichés, then recollected as fragmented souvenirs.
Enoc Perez’s The Mixable One (2023) channels the syrupy glow of 1970s commercial imagery, while subtly deconstructing its seductive power. Beneath the surface sheen lies a more complex story of desire, nostalgia, and consumer mythmaking. Also working within the still life tradition, Hilary Pecis’s Dinner (2018) shifts the scene from glamour to grounded intimacy. Rendered in a soft, neutral palette, the painting captures the quiet aftermath of a shared meal – plates half- cleared, glasses nearly empty, the ambient hum of conversation implied rather than shown. Where Perez draws from the seductive unreality of commercial imagery, Pecis anchors her composition in the textures of domestic life, in which she finds expressive freedom.
Milton Avery’s Bird by Wild Sea (1961) and Lucas Arruda’s Untitled (2016) explore the emotional register of the seascape across generations. Avery’s stylised dove hovers before an abstracted shoreline, capturing a sense of lightness and calm. Arruda, by contrast, conjures a darker, more introspective scene: murky, swirling skies pierced by soft light. Together, they chart the sea as both physical space and psychological terrain.
Gerhard Richter’s 20. Nov. 14 (2014) offers a moment of rupture, presented an abstracted meditation on memory. In this overpainted photograph, vivid green and white oil paint cuts across a muted base image, disrupting its legibility. The result is an unresolved dialogue between memory and material, surface and depth. As with much of Richter’s oeuvre, the work sits on the threshold between image and abstraction, where recollection becomes unreliable, and perception slips.
Together, the works in Wish You Were Here map out a topography of longing, spectacle, and escape. Whether through paint, photography, or collage, each artist probes the fantasies we construct around travel and paradise. In a time when borders have reopened but our sense of movement remains changed, this exhibition asks what it means to go somewhere – and what we hope to find when we get there.
