Wet Conceptualism: Levey Kwok, Brussels, BE
Levey Kwok is pleased to announce Wet Conceptualism, a two-part exhibition proposing a new reading of Conceptual Art. Taking its title from a term coined by artist Warren Neidich in 2023, the exhibition asks what happens when an idea refuses to remain an idea.
The canonical accounts of Conceptual Art, from Sol LeWitt's instructions to Lucy Lippard's "dematerialization" of the object, describe the concept as independent of its material support: a proposition, a sentence, a system, tending toward a platonic ideal, liberated from form. Yet throughout the past century, artists, sometimes invisibly, have made rigorously conceptual work that argues the opposite: that concepts are embodied, situated and performative. Across mediums and subjects, these artists insist that thought cannot be separated from sensation and desire, from language and labor, from institutions and technologies, or from histories of race, gender and power. These are the Wet Conceptualists: engaged, fluid, emotional, vital, queer, feminist, interrogating the conceptual messiness of life itself.
To name Wet Conceptualism is to imply a Dry Conceptualism, though the difference lies less in style than in where meaning is understood to reside. The dry model privileges linguistic clarity, enlightenment systems, instructions and the dematerialized object; it is best understood as Conceptual Art's official account rather than its full scope. The wet model lets the material conditions around an idea enter the work itself, opening a space for thinking that is posthuman, situated and affective.
Dry Conceptualism took shape in opposition to a twentieth-century economy of mass-produced things and industrial labor. Wet Conceptualism comes into focus now, as a reaction to the knowledge economy of digital production, where attention, knowledge, creativity and thought have themselves become forms of labor and resources to be extracted. We are on the precipice of what Bernard Stiegler calls de-noetization; the gradual destruction of human thought, reasoning, and judgement at the hands of automated technical systems.
Long subsumed by its dry counterpart, Wet Conceptualism it is not a rejection of Conceptual Art but its rehydration: an additional vocabulary with which to confront the unique challenges of our time.
Chapter I, opening in October 2026, maps the foundations of Wet Conceptualism across generations and geographies. It brings together Alighiero Boetti, Marcel Broodthaers, TR Ericsson, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, My Barbarian, Martha Rosler, Walter Swennen and Ria Verhaeghe, among others: artists who share neither a style nor a medium but arrive at the same conceptual territory by different routes. Chapter II, opening in March 2027, turns to perception, cognition, pharmacology and media, with Agnieszka Kurant, Hito Steyerl and Emmanuel Van der Auwera, among others.
Presented in Brussels, the two chapters also build toward a distinctly Belgian experience. Broodthaers, Swennen, Verhaeghe and Van der Auwera anchor the exhibition in a local lineage of conceptual thinking, placing it in conversation with international peers across a season rather than a single opening.
On November 6th, a symposium of the same name, organized in collaboration with Cloud Seven and sponsored by Neidich's Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA), will bring other artists, theorists and critics into dialogue with the exhibition.