For the first time in Anatsui’s metal practice, the constructive logic of the bottle-cap works is fully reciprocal: conceived and displayed as double-sided, the sculptures offer no privileged face. The caps’ reverse resolves into shimmering, monochromatic planes of modulated silver, set in counterpoint to the earthy chromatic register of browns, blacks, ochres and oxidised reds that distinguish the opposite branded surfaces. Suspended freely in space or attached loosely to the wall, this bilateral condition unsettles any fixed orientation, drawing attention to the mode of construction itself: innumerable bottle caps cut, flattened, folded and sutured into accretive sections with copper wire, their exposed joinery bringing thickness, porosity and seam into view.

The formal propositions advanced by the metal works emerge from a longer trajectory in which Anatsui’s engagement with sculpture has, from the outset, been shaped by a sustained and exacting attention to material conditions and the possibilities they afford. Born in 1944 in the former Gold Coast, Anatsui was educated at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where his training was structured within a predominantly British colonial academic framework orientated towards Western modernist models. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria to take up a teaching position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka – an institution that had by then emerged as a vital site for post-independence debates around artistic form, material practice and cultural identity. There, Anatsui entered an intellectually charged and interdisciplinary milieu of artists, writers and thinkers engaged in a collective reassessment of inherited conventions, animated by the search for alternative models of artmaking adequate to post-independence realities.

The circular wood plaques from the early 1970s, prior to his move to Nigeria, marked Anatsui’s first decisive departure from academic convention. Repurposing the utilitarian trays found in Ghanaian markets, Anatsui relocated sculptural attention from volume to surface, carving linear signs, informed by the graphic grammar of Adinkra – an Akan symbolic system through which proverbs and philosophical concepts are given visual form – into the planar wooden supports. Soon after, Anatsui turned to clay, a shift that opened new formal possibilities and enabled a more radical rethinking of sculptural objecthood than the plaques could sustain.

In the terracotta works of the late 1970s, including the pivotal ‘Broken Pots’ series, Anatsui worked through processes of fracture and reassembly, producing vessels from assorted fragments of clay, roughly patched and joined so that their seams remained exposed. The resulting forms, whose integrity is never fully secured, refuse the logic of restoration to an original state. What emerges instead is a mode of making in which breakage and reconstitution are treated as productive operations – an approach that registers the pressures of the post-independence moment within which Anatsui was working. As he later observed, ‘the idea of breaking is an opportunity for reformation. Breaking is not destruction but a necessity for rebirth.’¹ Such an understanding finds its counterpart in the Akan principle of Sankofa – ‘to go back and retrieve’ – a concept that threads through Anatsui’s practice and speaks to a wider postcolonial conviction that the past remains a vital resource for building anew. In the metal works, this inherited sensibility is neither literalised nor resolved, but rescaled: fragmentation operates as an organising principle, with seams, joins and accretive units structuring expansive surfaces that suspend closure and remain contingent on site, orientation and display.

This commitment to form as structurally open – so fully articulated in the metal works and constituting a key tenet in Anatsui’s sculptural thinking – has clear antecedents in the wood reliefs that he developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and with which he has recently reengaged. Returning to wood, Anatsui worked with salvaged hardwood planks, cutting, burning, carving into their surfaces with power tools whose blunt force and graphic imprint became integral to the works’ visual and structural language. Like the ‘Broken Pots’, and in ways that anticipate the metal works, these reliefs refute the idea of a unified sculptural mass in favour of construction through parts: discrete wooden elements set side by side, their surfaces differentiated by incision, scorch, pigment and grain. Crucially, the reliefs were conceived as mutable assemblies, their constituent planks capable of being reordered so that each presentation generated a distinct articulation. While the rigidity of wood necessarily constrained this variability, the reliefs nonetheless established a principle that is granted even greater latitude in the metal works, where form is determined anew through orientation, drape, gravity and environment, allowing aspects such as contour, scale and spatial disposition to remain perpetually in play.

What becomes newly insistent in the works unfolding across Hong Kong and Seoul is not simply their now-familiar alchemy of discarded matter nor metamorphosis as an end in itself, but the clarity with which the conditions that enable transformation are brought into view. Where Anatsui’s earliest metal works Man’s Cloth and Woman’s Cloth (1999–2002) – conceived after he discovered a sack of discarded liquor bottle caps while out walking – marked the threshold at which his metal practice came into being, and later monumental installations such as Logoligi Logarithm (2019) tested the expansive, environmental reach of that proposition, the sculptures presented here recalibrate this enquiry around singular, upright forms that can appear to hover autonomously in space. Though they present as flat and self-contained, their surfaces are punctuated by small apertures, circular voids and irregular interruptions – points at which wire, absence or raw structure briefly assert themselves.

This being their first presentation, the sculptures are nonetheless conceived with the expectation that they will continue to shapeshift, assume new configurations, and register differently over time. In Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor’s comprehensive study of Anatsui’s practice, The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022), these successive iterations are recognised as ‘new shapes’, each constituting ‘distinct markers in the evolving life of an entity that theoretically has the potentiality to live forever’.² In Hong Kong, the presentation appears under the title ‘MivEvi’, a reworking of the Ewe word for fragrance. Paired with the translation of Hong Kong as ‘fragrant harbour’, a name rooted in its history as a trading hub for incense and other aromatics, the title conceptually entwines the exhibition site with the animating principle that runs through the works. Operating within a cyclical conception of time, in which each installation marks a moment of return rather than finality, Anatsui’s practice gives form to an understanding long affirmed in West African philosophy: that no condition is permanent.