For his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, American artist Glenn Ligon has created several new paintings that expand on his celebrity. the stranger series, which started in 1997. The works on display at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong are based on James Baldwin’s 1953 essay. Stranger in Town, the writer reflects on his encounter with the inhabitants of a Swiss mountain town where he had never met a Black person before. Ligon’s powerful compositions explore the visibility and invisibility of the Black experience, drawing Baldwin’s words on canvas and covering them with charcoal dust. says Ligon Art Newspaper about the beginnings of the series and how it has developed over the last two decades.
Glenn Ligon first encountered the work of James Baldwin in a college African-American literature class Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The Art Newspaper: When did you meet him? Stranger in Town and what effect did it have on you?
Glenn Ligon: I first discovered the essay in an African-American literature class in college. It resonated with me because it mirrored my own biography and upbringing. I transferred from a public school in the South Bronx to an elite private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in first grade. This disconnect between the world I experienced at school and the world at home, and the notion of being a stranger in those white spaces, was something I subconsciously related to when I first read the essay. But that was before I knew I was going to be an artist.
How did you come to choose the medium for the series?
Baldwin wrote in a very elaborate style: paragraph-long sentences about dense and weighty topics like colonialism, racism, and queerness. I wanted the material density of the paintings to match the density of his writing. Coal dust is a waste from coal processing. The name alone has wonderful metaphorical associations, but I also liked the material—black, shiny gravel. Baldwin talks about how the place of the “underdog” is where you learn the most about how a society works. The idea of bringing coal dust, a waste product, into the space of art was something that interested me. When I first started using bits of text in the paintings, the charcoal dust I added on top simultaneously enhanced and obscured Baldwin’s words. The readability and illegibility of the text is the work, the struggle to decipher something and find meaning.
Glenn Ligon’s Static #8 (2023), which will be on display at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Hong Kong until May 11. Photo: Ronald Amstutz; Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Now that you have been working with the text for more than two decades, what new meanings have emerged?
When I started the series, Baldwin wasn’t as ubiquitous as he is now. Initially, my project was about the revival of Baldwin’s work. At the end of his life, he was not in the public mind. His works were neglected and he was not the spokesman for Black America that he had been in the 1960s and 70s. In 1984 I was in a studio program at the Whitney Museum talking with my roommate about our readings—Foucault, Baudrillard, and all those other French philosophers. I said I’d been browsing Baldwin’s essays as a palate cleanser. He said, “Who is that?” It’s not that he didn’t read Baldwin: he didn’t know the name. It was then that I began to think that I could use my work as a platform to reintroduce figures like Baldwin to art audiences.
Early paintings the stranger the series were smaller, starting at the beginning of the text. How has your approach changed with each painting cycle?
They were the first papers to use the whole essay [in 2020-21] for Hauser & Wirth of Zurich. It took me 20 years to get there. I was interested in making canvases that engulf the viewer. Stranger in Town it deals with various issues in its ten pages, such as Europe’s relations with its colonies in Africa, cultural domination and the notion of otherness. The essay itself is very panoramic in its scope and this was reflected in the painting throughout the text. Now when I work with writing I use it more as a ground. It is important that it is there, but it is the foundation upon which the painting is built.
What are the considerations you or the gallery made for exhibiting the series in Hong Kong, since Baldwin’s work has not been as well known?
Not everyone in America knows Baldwin. People approach works of art with different levels of knowledge. Usually, the more you have, the better. But – and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging – the paintings are quite beautiful, which attracts people to the work. When I was younger, I used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and walk through the Islamic wing. I don’t read or speak Arabic, but I was fascinated by the calligraphy, especially the beautiful passages from the Koran. I didn’t have access to the language on these pages, but I knew it was the Qur’an, and I treasured those pages as beautiful objects of devotion. Their beauty was part of their power.
• Glenn Ligon, Hauser & Wirth Hong KongB/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central, Central until 11 May
• Glenn Ligon, Separating Piss from Rain: Essays and Interviews, Edited by James Hoff, it will be published by Hauser & Wirth on June 25
