Art Metropole

01 Jan. 2007

The Quiet Americans

by Will Kwan

Artist

Will Kwan

Art Metropole is pleased to announce our newest FWD edition with the celebrated, young, and nomadic Will Kwan.

With The Quiet Americans, 2007, Will Kwan has re-purposed a Briggs & Riley carry-on bag. The bag has been etched with suggestive excerpts from 2 text sources: The Quiet American by Graham Greene, a spy novel about U.S. naïveté in Vietnam, and the 2006 Council of Europe report on extraordinary rendition networks, an EU judiciary report looking into secret flights shipping post 9/11 detainees outside US-EU territory to be tortured by third parties. The novel is included as a paperback and the Council of Europe report comes stored on an USB key. The actual copies of these texts are included as part of the multiple and serve both as “in-flight reading material” and as a furtive mnemonic of the dark side of jet fueled globality.

Please join us at Art | Basel Miami | Beach on Friday, December 7 between 3-5pm at Booth T5 to launch this edition and to meet the artist.

About the Artist

Will Kwan was born in 1978 in Hong Kong. He received an MFA from Columbia University in 2004 and from 2005-2006 was a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands. His work has been presented at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Venice Biennale in 2003, the Montreal Biennale in 2007, the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, Art in General in New York, the CAC Vilnius, the Polish National Museum in Poznan, Galleria Enrico Fornello in Prato, and Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy. Will is currently a lecturer in sculpture at the University of Toronto at Scarborough and most recently during Nuit Blanche in Toronto.

Born in 1978 in Hong Kong, Will Kwan received his MFA from Columbia University in 2004 and from 2004-2006 was a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands. His work has been exhibited at the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the 2007 Montreal Biennale, the 2003 Venice Biennale, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Art in General, and Cooper Union in New York, the Duolun Museum of Modern Art and Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe (DE), the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius (LT), the Polish National Museum in Poznan, Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella (IT), the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and The Power Plant in Toronto, and The Western Front in Vancouver.

Images

1: Setup from a different angle.
2: Setup.
3: Other visitors at booth.
4: Visitors at booth.

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