Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls - Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

About

Curated by Bart van der Heide Over the last four years, Berlin-based artists Jay Chung (1976, Madison, USA) and Q Takeki Maeda (1977, Nagoya, Japan) have established quite a reputation with their unpredictable and elusive collaborations: they often depart from a dubious mystification or even a veritable lie. In so doing, Chung and Maeda have successfully established clandestine ways to take on board the aesthetic responsibility of Conceptual Art and challenge bourgeois notions of classification, private labour and style. The Cubitt exhibition Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls aims to continue this line of thought, while directing it at the same time to a particular case. Louis Vuitton was born in a tiny village, around 1820. His father was the proprietor of the village mill. He was very exceptional as a boy..." begins the main sound piece in Hardy Boys and Gilmore Girls. The simplified narrative tells the life story of the 'founding father' as a self-made man during the rise of the middle class in 19th Century France. Now, as the world's largest luxury-goods maker, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy [tm] is France's most visible exponent of arts patronage — 'inscribed under the sign of creative passion, and a profound love of human values'.