Julie Curtiss Debuts First Art Film in Asia at White Cube Hong Kong

“I love experimenting with different mediums and materials. In the end I’m trying to convey images that stay in people’s minds.” 

Zooming with French-Vietnamese artist Julie Curtiss in Florida, one is struck by the contrast between her dreamy, pristine, Neo-Surreal canvases, and the scattered nature of the moment, given preparations for “Bitter Apples”, her pending exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, marking her inaugural solo show in Asia. “Can you hear me?” she asks, “there’s so much echo in here.” The Paris-born, Brooklyn-based Curtiss acquired this second home during Covid, though it functions more like a studio. “We don’t spend much time here,” she explains from the top of the structure, referring to her partner and fellow artist Clinton King, who sits downstairs as we talk. 

Less is evidently more. The new works at White Cube exude a Floridian flamboyance of birds (think black flamingo), insects, an alligator and lush tropical plants. “I have been so overwhelmed with nature, warmth, and liveliness. There are so many creatures, it’s like coming back to life,” she enthuses. And this being Curtiss, where there’s nature, there’s nurture, and a chance for to play with favoured themes; gender, temptation and sexuality. Since last year she’s been mulling content with “a biblical theme”, and “obsessing over” art-historical depictions of Paradise in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (Garden of Earthly Delights,1490-1510) and Jan van Eyck (Ghent Altarpiece, 1492).

“I did think about the Garden of Eden,”- her Eve has tan lines – “and the male element looking in. The relationship of the sexes but not in a sexual way, more a fun kind of way. That creeps into the work; like, I’ve had to paint a couple of penises. So, there are two Adam and Eve paintings in the show.” It’s not as though Curtiss hasn’t painted protuberances before but how does she think these iterations, ahem … measure up? She approves. “But… I didn’t want something that would make people say… ‘Oh, this looks like shallots.’” [Cue Laughter].

How very Curtiss. A graduate of L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, involving exchange programmes in Dresden and Chicago, she moved first to Japan before settling in Brooklyn, working in the studio of American arts KAWS, before evolving into the art phenom she is today, straddling the high and low divide across the global aesthetic radar. She is followed equally by private galleries yet also by legions of social-media aspirants, collectors, fellow artists and hypevisualites. She wears a humbled and honoured disposition about her. My first meeting with Curtiss, having never seen her before, was the occasion of her White Cube Mason’s Yard, London show in 2021. I arrived 30 minutes early for the 10am opening, with a woman who opened the door for me. “So, who do you work for?” I enquired once inside, thinking she must be a journalist or gallerina. “Oh…” she blushed. “I’m the artist.”

For one so on the radar, she’s remarkably sub-radar. She elaborates. “Maybe I could be more visible, but first of all, I’m an introvert. I can disappear. I’m not really into the trend of an art persona. It might be cool with other people, but the work is more important than a specific agenda.” Indeed. “I prefer things that are layered and don’t give clear answers. I don’ have a clear place where I sit. I have a very psychological relationship to my work.”

And what work. Curtiss paints seductive, seemingly perfect pictures, which on closer inspection very quickly unsettle. Think René Magritte meets Meret Oppenheim. Curtiss evokes faceless bodies and mines themes of opposition; attraction and repulsion, animate versus inanimate, doppelgängers and twins, with highly polished dollops of fetishism and erotica. She takes point-of-view to an exaggerated point-of-voyeurism (one of her works is called Voyeuse, 2018) by depicting close-up, unusual views of familiar subjects creating a dreamlike universe in which we can’t ascertain the sense or direction of the narrative. We become discombobulated and almost conspiratorial as Curtiss fixates our gaze on Medusa-like hair (which for her functions like skin), extended painted fingernails, sushi, fish scales, heels, hats, feet, nipples like cones, Oxford brogues, pieces of cake, cuts of meat, and more. “I’m very narrative driven in my work. I feel that I’m dreaming, like there’s a story but you’re not quite sure, you as a viewer have to make the story.”

And that story’s about to up a notch at White Cube Hong Kong with Curtiss’ first video, or short film, the titular Bitter Apples. At the time of our discussion it was still a work in progress. “There’s a scene I haven’t finished yet. The film will probably be seven minutes [it is]. There is no dialogue, but there is sound, there are voices, like a Jacques Tati movie. It’s doesn’t mean anything but they do convey something. It’s going to be the video as an extension of my thinking, like a living tableau. It’s very much theatrical.”

The film happened more by accident than design. Accompanying her partner on his Tokyo artist residency in March, Curtiss hit a stuck-in-a-rut Lost In Translation moment. “I thought that I have to make something, but each morning I woke up and realised I was highly unmotivated to paint. I was bored. So one morning – at that point I didn’t have much time, like a month-and-a-half – I woke up and thought I’d shoot a short film. I have a good friend who’s a video maker there.”

She took inspiration from legendary American female experimental auteur Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, a 14-minute short film, which also features its maker as protagonist, and low-tech effects instilling a sense of disquiet into everyday settings and objects. Curtiss, taking on an ‘Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass’ role, sleeps in a ‘Love Hotel’, wanders through the Tokyo Metro, a cherry blossom orchard, and a kitchen. Lights flicker, fish wink, tentacles curl and toes unfurl on a pair of Nature’s elevated sandals. Very little is as it seems. “It was so low budget,” she says of the film. “I have a scene with a spinning hat, it’s very dreamy but quite ridiculous. It spins! (And gets appropriated in the canvas Waiting for UFO, 2023, in White Cube).

How was the transition to video? “I happen to be mainly a painter but I need a constant stimulation or input; that’s also why I do sculpture,” says Curtiss. “And I love experimenting with different mediums and materials. In the end I’m trying to convey images that stay in people’s minds. I liked working with video, it was great because it’s new and stimulating. But with video you have to be more directed in telling the story while still keeping it open.”

Despite being half-Vietnamese and having spent time in Tokyo, Curtiss doesn’t consider herself especially “Asian literate” when I tell her how much the vibe pervades her work. During the course of DM-ing on Insta, I share a post featuring Jennie [Kim] from all-girl K-Pop band Blackpink promoting the new Chanel 22 bag campaign: “I’ve heard of her! K-Pop is a world unknown to me :-)” she responds. I’d asked what she feels about the work of Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara during our Zoom. “Nothing,” she says, but caveats: “I used to like his work, and used to like his posts, but now I don’t feel anything anymore.” Yet Curtiss can conjure a faceless Tokyo-inspired Ramen girl, Noodle Shop (2023), that matches the poignancy of any Nara.

Curtiss, whose most expensive sale to date at auction is US$466,200, credits Instagram for her success. “Social media made its way into the art world. It was all very new and green. Mine was the right kind of work, at the right time ,at the right place. It was already my central interest. Plus, I’m an intuitive person.” And global citizen. “The Asian influences you sense are the influences in Asia in general on the culture and I’m at the intersection of both. Maybe that gives me an advantage,” she adds.

Maya Deren once wrote in 1946 that “for more than anything else, cinema consists of the eye for magic – that which perceives and reveals the marvellous in whatsoever it looks upon.” As does Curtiss. But where frames and scale and gallery borders limit even her most creative painterly and sculptural wonder – extravagant and considerable though they are – in moving pictures she appears to have thrown the leash off, albeit in subtle, deft, psychological, playful and innovative ways. Her seven-minute filmic fable Bitter Apples is so unexpectedly intense, suspense-laden and fabulous, it all but out-Lynch’s David. “I like to create branches like open doors,” she says, “so I can come back to them later.” If that sounds like a threat and a promise – the classic Curtiss confrontation – then bring on Bitter Apples 2.