Mike Kelley’s recreation of a much-loved wishing well in the Chinatown of Los Angeles has been transported to London’s Mayfair by Hauser & Wirth for its impressive solo show of the late US artist (23 September-19 November). Lent by the Rennie Collection of Vancouver, the monumental work is based on a cross-cultural curio in LA that Kelley found “orgasmic” as well as fascinating. The well, or "framed" section, is a spray-painted concrete grotto sprouting kitsch Buddhist and Christian statuettes, while its surrounding, or “frame”, features a faux-Chinese gateway, paper lanterns plus spotlights and barbed wire. The grotto comes with a typically Kelley twist: a crawl space. Look closely and there’s just enough room below the grotto at the back for a brief encounter, with a mattress, pillow, Vaseline and condoms provided. “All the trappings of a lustful evening,” says Mary Clare Stevens, the executive director of the Mike Kelley Foundation, who was the late artist’s studio manager. Framed and Frame was made by Kelley in 1999 in his garage—no mean feat given its scale. "It was like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind," says Paul Schimmel, curator/partner of Hauser & Wirth, who knew Kelley well. The work also harks back to the golden age of Hollywood and bad old days of ethnic discrimination in LA. Among the accompanying documentation provided by the artist’s foundation is Kelley's publicity still of the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, who planted a tree at the wishing well in the 1930s. He seemed taken with the story of the first Chinese-American movie star who could never play a leading lady in Hollywood as even an innocent kiss by a Caucasian male was a no-no under the Hays Code of moral correctness.
