Visions in Silk

December 16, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Dragon robe, China, Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 19th century, silk with metallic threads, 130.5cm x 198cm, gift of Dr T T Tsui, Tsui Art Foundation Ltd, HKU.T.1996.1096

When Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci set foot in Nanjing in 1582, he was struck by the aesthetic splendour he encountered. “There are 200,000 weavers here and they weave a cloth made entirely of silk,” he wrote. To Ricci, the long, loose sleeves worn by the Chinese were redolent of Venetian fashion and style. Yet silk wore multiple silhouettes in China that surpassed the physical appearance of dress.

Prized by Chinese and foreign merchants as an essential commodity on a vast trade network, silk had numerous purposes: as fabric for garments, as a form of currency (until the introduction of silver in its place), as a method of tax payment, and as a medium and subject matter for professional artists and the literati. What Ricci couldn’t appreciate was just how rich and pervasive silk’s influence would become.

Originating in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) – though a Chinese legend credits Leizu, the wife of the mythological Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, who taught the Chinese the art and invented the silk loom in the 27th century BCE – and flourishing into the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), China’s craftspeople used shuttles and needles as their brushes and silk threads as their pigments, creating meticulous, exquisitely woven and embroidered works.

Kesi (weft-woven silk tapestry) and cixiu (embroidery) became elevated into an interdisciplinary art form – a fusion of painting, calligraphy, and hand-weaving or embroidering. During the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), kesi panels were even being exported to Europe, where they were being incorporated into cathedral vestments.

Double the Art

November 18, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Seldom has the art scene in Hong Kong been so dynamic and proactive as it was in the last ten months, with pop-up and fast-fit solutions to counteract the dilemma of postponed and cancelled shows. Numerous highlights emerged, with the Ying Kwok-curated Unscheduled at Tai Kwun in June becoming a new franchise-in-the-making along the way.

Now comes the year’s big-ticket entrant to the market, as Fine Art Asia 2020 will host Hong Kong Spotlight by Art Basel – a new platform showcasing the work of 22 galleries, all of which run spaces in the city and have exhibited at previous editions of Art Basel in Hong Kong. Held from November 27 to 30, it will be Art Basel’s first and last physical presentation of the year, after cancelling shows in Hong Kong (March), Basel (May) and Miami (December). The fair is expected to resume normal service next year when it revisits the city in March for Art Basel in Hong Kong.

Among the highlights are a first solo show in Hong Kong of paintings by Korean artist Lee Bul at Lehmann Maupin, in which the artist will show recent work from her Perdu series, exploring the binary between the artificial and the organic. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery will promote a sculpture-only booth via works in bronze and wood by Wang Keping, and gravity-defying bamboo creations that swing and draw curves through the air in calligraphic fashion by Laurent Martin “Lo”. Perrotin’s booth will be dominated by an eight-metre Eddie Martinez canvas as well as a number of works on cardboard that the artist is debuting with the gallery. 

Gallery Exit will show new works by Stephen Wong Chun-hei, who invites gallery-goers to contemplate the complex relationship between humans, nature and virtual reality; Simon Lee Gallery will exhibit works from Jim Shaw’s Man Machine series, which stems from the artist’s interest in hair as a source of power; and Axel Vervoordt Gallery brings the circular-shaped patterns of renowned female Japanese artist Yuko Nasaka, one of the most prominent voices of Gutai’s second generation.

“Our collaboration with Fine Art Asia will be a wonderful opportunity for the Hong Kong cultural community to come together and celebrate the creative spirit of the city,” says Adeline Ooi, Art Basel’s director for Asia. “Art Basel is dedicated to supporting the region, and we are therefore delighted that we are able to provide a physical platform for galleries and their artists in what has been a challenging year.”

Angelle Siyang-Le, Art Basel’s project lead on Hong Kong Spotlight and the regional head of gallery relations for Asia, adds: “Hong Kong Spotlight is a special occasion for our Hong Kong exhibitors to present their premier programme and an opportunity for the art community to exchange ideas. I’m excited to see a great line-up of exhibitors for the project and look forward to seeing artists’ works in person again.”

Hong Kong Spotlight’s line-up of 22 innovative galleries in the city includes 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Massimo De Carlo, Empty Gallery, Gallery Exit, Gagosian, Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery, Pearl Lam Galleries, Simon Lee Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, Lévy Gorvy, Contemporary by Angela Li, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Galerie du Monde, Nanzuka, Anna Ning Fine Art, Galerie Ora-Ora, Pace Gallery, Perrotin, de Sarthe, Tang Contemporary Art and Axel Vervoordt Gallery. 

Mother Earth

November 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Raquel Gralheiro, Portugal, The Office (2020), acrylic on canvas, 180 x 140 cm

Like many of the best-laid plans over the course of the past 12 months, Artfem 2020, the second edition of the Women Artists International Biennial of Macau, hasn’t gone exactly according to design. But the fact it’s now happening and running until December 13 makes it something of a miracle – and more than the sum of its original parts. 

The collective exhibition brings together the work of more than 100 female artists from around the globe in four different venues in Macau; Albergue SCM, the Former Municipal Cattle Stable, Galeria Lisboa and the Casa Garden gallery. The project is based on the theme “Natura”, a concept linked to environmental protection, which according to Carlos Marreiros, an architect and the president of Artfem’s organising committee, “allows a broad spectrum of interpretations”. 

That versatility, or fluidity, has marked the entire event. Originally scheduled to open on March 8 for International Women’s Day, COVID-19 forced the postponement of Artfem, but organisers were still determined the show should go ahead. “We didn’t want to postpone the exhibition to next year,” says Marreiros. 

The original thinking about the event in 2018 (which took place at the Macao Museum of Art) and this year was that the biennial should extend to other cities in the Greater Bay Area. “But that’s impossible for the moment,” says Marreiros. “We must foster ground, regionally and in the world, gain experience, and then open the event to the Greater Bay, of course. But the pandemic hasn’t allowed for any of these intentions to manifest.” 

What has manifested across the four sites in Macau in the meantime is an aesthetic feast for the senses – and a topical one at that. “The first edition of the biennial in 2018 had no aggregating theme,” explains Marreiros. “So this time we were very brave in the second edition of the biennial to start with a theme: Natura.” The idea arose at a time when environmental issues were at the centre of the debate. “When we discussed the organisation of this biennial in 2019, it made perfect sense, especially due to issues including the Amazon fires, global warming and other concerns worldwide,” he says. 

The unexpected onset of COVID-19 has not only heightened that sense of Earth’s fragility, but also the place of humanity on it. “Natura is a current topic,” says Marreiros. “It affects all of us, in the present and in the future, because the life of the planet is at stake. In addition to these issues, it also allows for more symbolic aspects and research on the symbolism of Mother Earth through ethnic and folkloric manifestations from the entire world.”

Look out for works by artists including the Macau-born fashion designer and painter Leong Man Teng, who incorporates her material designs into artworks using her signature “cat head” as a model; the Macau-born, New York-based Crystal Chan, whose unsettling paintings explore notions of displacement, estrangement and sadness; the Macau-based multimedia artist Kit Lee, who loves depicting flowers on video recording, sound installation and graphic painting platforms; and Lau Sut Weng, who explores the conflicts between nature and humans, and mankind’s total dependence on it.

Other artists worth checking out include young Chinese Central Academy graduate Liao Wen, who highlights the link between the human body and technology with sculptures that invoke glamour and disgust, as well as reality and fiction. Kay Zhang, the youngest Macau artist nominated for the prestigious Sovereign Asian Art Prize, focuses on painting and book-making, while Jiang Miao, a graduate of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, recently showed at Whitestone Gallery in Hong Kong. 

Window on the World

October 21, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Hilarie Hon, Sunlight Murmur, 2020, acrylic and oil on canvas, 75x100cm

Local artist Hilarie Hon invokes bold colours and comical imagery to create a nightmarish, surreal world. Her canvases depict fleeting moments tantamount to watching a film in a cinema – a tree about to fall, a man walking in heavy rain, fireworks. She deploys notions of gazing and painting as a visual art device and a metaphor. All of this is readily apparent in her latest exhibition, Yesterday Brightness.

The site-specific work Tree in Kowloon Park explores the nature and functions of windows through a juxtaposition between the actual space and the painted space. The work consists of a three-panel painting of a large bare tree, with a curtain in front of it that can be drawn open or closed.

With form and function comparable to an actual window, Indoor is a painting with foldable wooden panels, which allows the painted scenes to be seen or hidden from view. It’s a triptych when opened and an installation object when closed, thereby transforming between 2D and 3D forms.

Sparkly Waters, Blurry Eyes is a four-metre long work comprising 11 panels with different scenes, sizes and perspectives, all loosely connected with each other on a grid. Many of the painted scenes look near-identical to Hon’s previous paintings, such as the centrepiece of the sunset, another panel depicting birds flying in the darkening sky, and a scene of human figures drifting in boats. The work is a response to her 2018 series The Daily Disappearance of the Sun.

Once Upon Bamboo

October 7, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Tamotsu Nishimoto, Teppachi Morikago, 2020, bamboo and lacquer

If you haven’t yet had the chance to visit Crafts on Peel’s first thematic exhibition, you should definitely make time for Imagine the ‘Im’possibilities: Bamboo before the end of the year. The show consists of impressive work by ten artisans from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong who specialise in reinventing the traditions of bamboo craft.

Curated by Penelope Luk, the creative director of Crafts on Peel, and Benjamin Wang, an artisan from Taiwan, the exhibition delivers an interactive journey that explores the utilitarian elements, contemporary aesthetics and traditional craftsmanship of bamboo. Each section also addresses the various processes and historical context that have shaped our engagement with the material over thousands of years.

“Embodying a spirit of purity and infinite creative possibility, bamboo is a material with an elaborate living culture across Asia that transcends countries, cultures and history,” says Wang. “The artisans presented at Crafts on Peel articulate a unique exchange of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary aesthetics that immerse the viewer in the infinite possibilities and creativity of bamboo.”

Surprises lie in store, such as discovering how lifestyles and values developed during China’s Song Dynasty elevated bambooware from a rustic item to a crafted object of aesthetic value. Japanese contemporary artisan Tamotsu Nishimoto’s Teppachi Morikago and Takezaiku Basket focus on “achieving beauty in life at the moment of usage” and combining art with functionality, echoing the sentiments espoused by 1920s Japanese philosopher Yanagi Soetsu, who believed the aesthetic value of craft lay in its practicality. Bamboo has a long history in Japan, where excavations have uncovered bamboo baskets dating to the Late Jomon period (circa 2000–1000 BCE). 

“This exhibition is the result of extensive research trips and studies that continue Crafts on Peel’s exploration of Hong Kong’s traditional bamboo craftsmanship, and which reinterpret the connections between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary lifestyle,” explains Luk. “We are glad to continue to provide a platform for collaborations not only across generations, but also across regions and cultures.”

Paper Trails

September 23, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above:  Zun Ei Phyu, Lost in Thought, 2019, papercut, 53x79cm

There’s nothing like a fresh eye in matters of art and aesthetics, which makes the work of a clutch of artists at Karin Weber Gallery’s exhibition Reflections on Paper all the more interesting. This selected group of 11 up-and-coming artists from Hong Kong, Macau, Mainland China and Myanmar mine their childhood memories, nostalgia, thoughts and emotions from the past, and mix historical commentaries with contemporary ones. Paper is the common medium that the assembled artists use to capture their diverse expressions, and the versatility and imaginativeness with which they use it to tell their individual stories.

Hong Kong artist Bosco Law’s Focus Point invokes contemporary imagery as well as deeper philosophical overtones. Says Law: “From dots to images, drawing with a technical pen is like making connections on life’s long winding road,” he says.

Notions of life’s arrivals and departures and the emotions they convey are predominant in 3/365 by Carmen Ng, which depicts the Tung Shing calendar and images of Ng’s room during the last three days she spent in it before moving out. She has drawn items in the room on the space normally left blank on each calendar day. “I emptied the furniture and contents, leaving behind a vacant room, which was very poignant and memorable for me,” explains the artist.

Using only masking tape, Elvis Yip creates an illusion of a swimming pool in his work A Leaking Pool. The illusion lies not only in the subject matter, but also the medium.

Meanwhile, Katy Lau’s paintings are mindscapes depicting her feelings and spiritual experiences during a visit to Venice last year. The day and night scenes convey the depth of her own emotions and awareness while she observed the sky and the sea.

Kurt Chan explores the poetics of Chinese calligraphy characters. He uses special software to generate them, combining a stylus pen and modified brushstrokes in an unconventional way.

Beijing-based Yang Shewei’s delightful watercolour portraits of gatherings in Bikini Girl and Reading reflect leisure activities and pastimes while subtly posing deeper questions.

From Myanmar, Zun Ei Phyu’s layered paper-cut creations focus on social themes and societal issues facing the Southeast Asian nation.

Among the Stars

August 19, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Yayoi Kusama, installation view of Stars: Six Contemporary Artists from Japan to the World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2020; photo: Takayama Kozo

This year’s COVID-19 pandemic has entirely rewritten and rescheduled so much of the cultural calendar, it’s a rare miracle when anything appears in the real world unscathed. All of which makes Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum’s (MAM) worldly, ambitious and audacious Stars: Six Contemporary Artists From Japan to the World (until January 3, 2021) a must-attend show and major art moment. Originally planned for April but postponed and now just reopened, MAM’s show highlights six globally influential artists – Yoshitomo Nara, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lee Ufan and Tatsuo Miyajima – whose careers after the Second World War propelled them beyond the confines of Japan and across the generations.

Tracing the artists’ journeys from their earliest to their most recent works, Stars explores how the practice of each artist has been evaluated in the global context. It touches upon their pursuit of universal issues that transcend nationality and culture, traditions and aesthetics, and technology and subculture, all the while keeping in mind the social, cultural and economic aspects particular to Japan.

Intriguingly, the exhibition also presents archival materials related to the major Japanese contemporary art shows staged internationally from the 1950s to the present, providing original archival material such as installation photographs and exhibition reviews. This shows how the organisers and curators of Stars endeavoured to express the concept of “Japan”, and how such attempts were received (some critiques suggest it was far from plain sailing) in the process of unravelling the history of Japanese contemporary art’s acceptance in the wider world. As such, for aficionados and amateurs alike, we learn what distinguishes each artist’s approach.

Murakami’s “Superflat” theory reimagines the sources of traditional Japanese painting and contemporary art through the visual logic of anime and manga. With its richly colorful ornamentation, peculiar deformations, and highly playful imagery, his work expresses a spirit that has pulsed beneath the surface of Japanese culture since the “eccentric” painters of the Edo era through to the contemporary. Murakami’s Cherry Blossoms Fujiyama Japan (2020), created especially for Stars, is a playful work that ironically depicts painting as a tourist attraction.

Yoshitomo Nara is known for using children and animals in simplistic, abstract and misshapen forms, across conflicting dispositions from innocence to cruelty that inspire the imagination of the viewer. Nara’s solitary protagonists represent those living on society’s margins, but with their depictions of the whereabouts of the soul, they take on an almost primitive form that transcends time. Fifteen of the artist’s early works from the 1980s are being shown for the first time as well as a new piece, Miss Moonlight.

Fusing elements of Buddhist thought and technology, Tatsuo Miyajima tackles the universal notion of time by way of installations and sculptures that use digital LED counters displaying changing numbers from one to nine. Since 2017, he has been working continuously on Sea of Time – Tohoku, an attempt to install 3,000 LED counters in northeast Japan’s Tohoku region, as tribute to the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Stars presents a new work featuring all the digital counters made to date for Sea of Time – Tohoku.

Renowned photographer and contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to New York in 1974. The first work in his “Diorama” series, Polar Bear (1976), emerged from Sugimoto’s experience of a kind of illusion at the American Museum of Natural History, whereby a diorama seemed to be alive when he viewed it with one eye covered. His debut film, The Garden of Time (2020), showing at Stars, captures the changing seasons in remarkable detail at Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa.

Lee Ufan moved to Japan 20 years after being born in South Korea in 1936 and has been a resident since. He was one of the pioneers of “Mono-ha”, a sculptural movement that rejected the idea of production and presented objects and materials as they were born. As Mono-ha has come to be reappraised at a global level, there is a rising tide of interest in the practices that have spanned Lee’s 50-year career.

Yayoi Kusama’s signature pumpkins, polka dots, infinity rooms, nets and mesh patterns have seen the 91-year-old artist transcend pop art and minimalism. Kusama moved to the US in 1957, and gained notoriety in fashion and for her participation in anti-war protests before returning to Japan in 1973. Since the 1990s, she has won universal acclaim with her large-scale exhibitions influenced by hallucinations and obsessions that have persisted since her youth, and now has her own museum in Tokyo.

Holding Court

July 22, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Shirley Tse: Stakes and Holders (2020) installation view, commissioned by M+

Shirley Tse works in sculpture, installation, photography and text, deconstructing the world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructing models in which differences combine. She fuses the organic with the industrial, moving between the literal and the metaphoric, merging narratives. Such is her acclaim that last year she showed Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice at the 58th Venice Biennale, which drew more than 100,000 visitors during its six-month run.

Now the Los Angeles-based, Hong Kong-born artist is back in town with Shirley Tse: Stakes and Holders. Showing at M+ Pavilion until October 4 and guest-curated by Christina Li, it’s Tse’s direct response to her work in Venice and comprises two installations. “I hope viewers will be inspired to see negotiation, play and agency in a new light, and curious about various possibilities in our contemporary moment, both in Hong Kong and far beyond,” she explains.

The ever-changing social and material landscape of Hong Kong is an enduring source of inspiration for Tse, and these works put the city’s dynamic relationships and unique conditions of negotiation in the foreground. All told, she examines interconnectivity in a pluralistic world, using sculpture as a mode of multidimensional thinking.

And the art of improvisation. Negotiated Differences is a sprawling installation of 3D-printed joints and wooden shapes that stretch across the pavilion’s spaces – balusters, handrails and bowling pins are connected by craft, mechanical and digital technologies as an integrated whole. Notably, COVID-19 prevented both the artist and curator from participating in the installation in person, so the work was improvised over phone and video chats by the M+ curatorial and installation team. If travel allows, Tse and Li may perform a “reconfiguration” of the work at a later date.

The other piece, Playcourt, comprises sculptural amalgams of equipment and anthropomorphic forms, as well as radio antennas that pick up local non-commercial frequencies. All of this encourages us to think about our role as individuals, our agency and the extent to which we are all stakeholders.

Continuing the Invasion

July 22, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Invader, Rubik Tournesols (green), 2020, Rubik’s Cubes on Perspex, 74.5 x 57.5 x 8cm (29 3/8 x 22 5/8” x 3 1/8”)

You might know the work of widely regarded French contemporary urban artist Invader without ever realising his brand of street art is, well… art. Bursting onto the global scene in 1998, the anonymous, masked artist quickly gained notoriety for his “invasions”, in which he uses guerrilla tactics to place ceramic-tiled mosaics of 8-bit video game characters (think Space Invaders and Pac-Man) on city streets and landmarks around the world – in highly visible but often out-of-reach spaces. From the International Space Station to the bottom of Cancun Bay, from the iconic Hollywood sign to the Louvre Museum, and from the coolest pair of Nikes to the most inventive waffle maker, Invader’s left his mark pretty much everywhere, including here in Hong Kong.

Parallel to his public art, Invader creates work for galleries and institutions, which ushers in Hanging at Hong Kong’s Over the Influence gallery until August 8. This series of 20 new works includes some of his Alias mosaics and his Rubikcubism series. The former are artworks that are unique replicas of mosaics he makes on the streets, but are signed and accompanied by identity cards showing a photo of the mosaic in situ, and are designed to be hung on a wall indoors. Hanging features works from Dijon, Djerba, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Malaga, Paris, Ravenna and Versailles, among others.

Meanwhile, his Rubikcubism works are a style of mosaic the artist developed in 2005, wherein he uses Rubik’s Cubes in various configurations to create six-colour, low-resolution images of famous paintings by the likes of Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh and Édouard Manet, as well as a slew of pop-culture references. Invader began that series with art’s most famous painting, creating the Rubik Mona Lisa. At Over the Influence, he features a catchy portrait of Princess Leia from Star Wars.

By highlighting the growing role of technology in our lives, Invader ultimately confronts the implications of contemporary culture’s biggest influence – the digital invasion.

Reactivate Art

June 3, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

WHITESTONE GALLERY

Andreas Mühe: Pathos as Distance (until June 27)

The gallery presents a retrospective (and the inaugural Hong Kong exhibition) by the celebrated German photographer Andreas Mühe. The project features 30 photographs taken between 2004 and 2018, which hover between notions of truth and construct. Mühe examines and questions the power and ambivalence of photography with a predilection for the German historiography and identity. His works are not designed for quick consumption or fleeting glances; instead, they’re long-lasting and reveal an inevitable need for discussion and consideration about what reality is. What is appearance? What is present and what is past? The artist makes us question everything. In the end, Mühe’s work suggests it’s all about power: “Whoever controls images controls reality,” he says.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

Georg Baselitz: Years Later (until August 8)

One of Germany’s foremost painters, Georg Baselitz stages a series of 13 of his new oil paintings, which were completed in 2019 and this year. Combining a vigorous and direct approach to art-making, he counts Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston among his key influences. In 1969, Baselitz began to compose his images upside-down to slow the processes of making, looking and comprehending. Over the last 50 years, often referencing and reinterpreting his own body of work, he has further augmented his visual language with a range of formal and historical allusions, yet has consistently returned to the human figure as his central motif. Notably, a fully illustrated catalogue of the exhibition contains a foreword by Zeng Fanzhi and an essay by Lu Mingjun, both acknowledging the influence of Baselitz’s approach.

OVER THE INFLUENCE 

Mark Nixon: MuchLoved (until July 2)

Marking the first Hong Kong solo exhibition of Dublin-based portrait photographer Mark Nixon, MuchLoved presents a selection of 14 photographs from the series of the same name. They include the famed teddy bear from the television show Mr Bean, along with a stuffed bear that belonged to a close friend of U2 frontman Bono. Each photograph is accompanied by a descriptive paragraph sharing the story of the stuffed animal and its owner. Nixon started his professional career as an aspiring singer and songwriter, and bought his first camera in 1995 to relieve a severe case of writer’s block. Simultaneously, the gallery’s recently extended space is showing Connections, a group show with a focus on urbanisation and the human condition, featuring new works by Liu Bolin, Taku Obata, Daisuke Tajima and Alexandre Farto aka Vhils. 

TANG CONTEMPORARY ART

He Duoling: Thunder Afar (until June 30)

This solo exhibition is by one of China’s most iconic lyrical realists, He Duoling. The exhibition features the artist’s works since 2010, including recent series such as Wild Garden, Various Flowers and Nymph. A contemporary of Luo Zhongli and Zhang Xiaogang, He is a pivotal artist in the development of Chinese contemporary art. His work is distinguished by its tranquillity, harmony and hazy evocations of nature, be it the flow of water or a lush green garden. In search of a poetic expression, He has established a signature realism that is simultaneously melancholy and lyrical. As curator Kuang Wei puts it, “He’s works are a crystallisation of wisdom to help us see through the world.”

PACE GALLERY

Chewing Gum IV (until July 2)

With this show, Pace Gallery continues its sustained studies of individual creative states of contemporary artists from different temporal, regional and cultural backgrounds, with a specific focus on the contrast among the artists’ works in practices, aesthetics and cultures, especially in the time of global epidemic and social distancing. Among the notable and need-to-know names in this group show are China’s Zhang Xiaogang, whose Black Stone projects isolation and alienation; Israel’s Michal Rovner and her captivating digital works; New York’s Adam Pendleton, whose “Black Dada” approach is articulated by degrees of blackness and the avant-garde; Japan’s Kohei Nawa, champion of the so-called “virtual/real” PixCell series of works; and exciting contemporary Chinese conceptual artist Xiao Yu.

JC CONTEMPORARY

They Do Not Understand Each Other (until September 13)

What does it mean to understand one another? This group exhibition at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun art space draws from the title of an artwork by Japanese artist Tsubasa Kato, in which the artist attempts to communicate with a colleague from South Korea. Despite being unable to understand each other’s languages, it would appear they find some measure of connection, finally completing their coordinated task upon an island set in a sea that separates (or bridges) the two nations. Presented by Japan’s National Museum of Art in Osaka and the Singapore Art Museum, with respective curators from both organisations, Yuka Uematsu and June Yap, the artworks on show include artworks from both museums’ collections as well as new commissions in consideration of the premise of cultural exchange and the understanding it promotes. The exhibition presents art about exchange, communication, miscommunication, connections, tolerance, acceptance and representation, as well as revelations on desires and expectations of the familiar, unfamiliar and new. 

PEKIN FINE ARTS

Daphné Mandel: Organic City (until July 25)

Hong Kong-based French artist Daphné Mandel’s first solo exhibition with the gallery sees her continuing exploration of Hong Kong’s man-made urban landscapes juxtaposed against a backdrop of lush tropical greenery. The close-knit cohabitation of edifices and foliage, and the natural versus the artificial, provide the starting point for her representations of a city both real and fantastic. The Hong Kong of her imagination is familiar yet surreal, ultimately rendered as an exquisite city of the artist’s imagination. “Hong Kong, for me, is a city of densely packed contrasts, by virtue of its compact urban fabric that coexists and intersects with its lush and abundant natural environment,” says Mandel. “Organic City presents a series of works that transpose this paradox in my own visual language: a city, simultaneously man-made and ‘organic’ as living, breathing matter – alive and natural.” 

HAUSER & WIRTH

Lorna Simpson (June 16–September 30)

Calling all graphic designers and photo-collage enthusiasts: Brooklyn-based African-American photographer and multimedia artist Lorna Simpson’s first solo exhibition in Greater China will highlight some of her work over the last 30 years, which has explored the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history, while expanding her practice to encompass various media including film and video, painting, drawing and sculpture. In 1990, Simpson became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale and the first to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art with Projects 23. This exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, which began representing the artist in 2018, features work from her Special Characters series, a selection of her photographic collages and some new painted works.

KARIN WEBER GALLERY

Bosco Law: I Am Fine (until June 22)

The title of the first solo exhibition by emerging Hong Kong ink talent Bosco Law references a popular Chinese greeting that translates to “How are you?” In fact, these are the first words most people learn to speak as babies or when one learns a foreign language such as English. Law believes that as one grows older, the response to this question has become almost instinctive and predictable. “I am fine” is now a standard response, irrespective of a person’s real state of mind, masking our true self to conform to societal norms and expectations. For Law, it’s important that prior to parroting “I am fine”, we contemplate the emotions we’re struggling with and burying deep into our subconscious. This self-examination aims to help us arrive at a response that’s more nuanced and, hence, genuine. Works displayed in this show try to reveal the conflict between the appearance on the surface and the reality beneath. Law’s ink paintings are distinguished by his intricate, slowly dotted, near-pointillist style. 

FLOWERS GALLERY 

Spotlight on Michael Wolf (until July 25)

To celebrate its first location in Asia, Flowers Gallery has opened in Sheung Wan with a showcase of works by the late German photographer Michael Wolf (1954–2019), who lived and worked in Hong Kong. This inaugural exhibition showcases work of his extensive investigation into the lives of ordinary Hongkongers. Wolf devoted his career to exploring the complexity of life in mega-cities, focusing in particular on the dense urban environment of Hong Kong. The exhibition presents examples of iconic works, including the internationally renowned series Architecture of Density, presenting an abstracted view of Hong Kong’s seemingly endless residential and industrial facades. Alongside the large-scale photographs will be works from Informal Solutions, a series of photographic typologies and vernacular sculptures that show an intimate perspective of the city from within its hidden network of back alleys, as well as Cheung Chau Sunrises, Wolf’s final project before his death in 2019.

ASIA SOCIETY

Next Act: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong (until September 27) 

This show features research-based works by ten local artists who respond to the shared history and collective memories of Hong Kong. One of those is Samson Young, recent recipient of the inaugural Sigg Prize. Throughout the creative process, each artist focused on different research methodologies as a starting point. This process has culminated in a collection of exciting works that are visually impactful, interactive and performative. Visitors are encouraged to open their senses and imagination when viewing the works by delving into the past to form new perspectives, savour the present and contemplate what the future holds. Pivoting away from the conventional perception that art is a sensual form of truth, the final works make the creation of art a journey of critical thinking.

Eyes on Asia’s Art Prize

May 6, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Almagul Menlibayeva, Caspian Palms, 2016–2018, Kazakhstan, digital inkjet print on archival paper

The 16th Sovereign Asian Art Prize looks to be one of the project’s most exciting line-ups yet, with 31 mid-career artists from the Asia-Pacific region shortlisted for the US$30,000 grand prize. Since launching in 2003, the award, presented by the Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF), has acted as a springboard for artists to achieve greater recognition.

Finalists for the 2020 Prize hail from 18 countries and territories. Hong Kong sees the strongest representation with four shortlisted artists (Chui Pui-chee, MAP Office, Peggy Chan and Rachel Cheung Wai-sze), followed by South Korea and Indonesia with three apiece. This year, more than 600 entries from 30 countries were considered – the largest number in the award’s history.

Among the 31 shortlisted artists, 13 are previous finalists and have opted to participate again. The overall winner will be announced in May. At the time of writing, Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva’s Caspian Palms, Singaporean artist Sarah Choo Jing’s Accelerated Intimacy (Matthew and Brenda) and Chinese artist Tao Xinglin’s Outdoor Sports No. 6 were among the works receiving high accolades.

“The winner of the 2020 Sovereign Asian Art Prize will be chosen from the largest submission ever,” says chair judge David Elliott, a previous director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. “As would be expected, the growing number of submissions ensures a high calibre and wide range of work by the finalists, and I have no doubt that this exhibition will present a stimulating and revealing picture of art in Asia today.”

The shortlisted artworks are being offered for sale through auction by Christie’s Hong Kong, with selected works available to purchase at the exhibition, which is scheduled to take place in June. As of now, the public can view the artworks, register interest and vote for their favourite online at sovereignartfoundation.com. Proceeds will be evenly split between the artists and SAF, where they will be used to fund charitable programmes for disadvantaged children in Hong Kong.

“We are surprised and a little outraged that in one of the richest cities in the world, one in every five people lives below the official government poverty line,” says Howard Bilton, the SAF’s founder and chairman. “There is a huge wealth disparity in Hong Kong and this gap needs to be answered.”

#Cashtag Art

April 29, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Despite the onset of COVID-19 and the art world’s efforts to establish digital galleries for the benefit of stuck-at-home aficionados and amateurs alike, auction house Sotheby’s Hong Kong continues to push the online envelope in a series of boutique digital auctions that adopt a pop-up shop concept and a fast-action format. “During this unprecedented time, Asian collectors have enthusiastically participated in our online sales programme, driving record results that demonstrate the resilience of the contemporary art market,” says Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art for Asia.

Hence, over the next 12 days, Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s Contemporary Showcase features two projects. The first is “Another World”, a tightly curated ensemble of six Western pieces, led by Russian-born painter Sanya Kantarovsky’s Contamination (estimated at HK$850,000–HK$1.2 million) and the 2018 work by British artist Tracey Emin for which the show is titled (HK$500,000–HK$700,000). This online auction runs until May 4. 

That’s followed by “Manga”, the largest assemblage of such Japanese work to be auctioned in Hong Kong (until May 11), featuring perennial favourites such as Pokémon, Gundam and Doraemon, alongside a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery in Hong Kong. Apart from the 60 works being digitally auctioned, an additional 95 pieces will be presented at S|2. The unique drawings and celluloid pictures (cel-ga or cels) were produced by Japan’s leading animation studios such as Ghibli and Toei Animation. All of this can be sampled in a virtual tour from the comfort of your own home.

During the first four months of 2020, Sotheby’s conducted more than 30 digital auctions worldwide, generating some HK$380 million in sales. The auction house’s recent Contemporary Art Online auction earlier this month was the largest staged by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, achieving more than HK$10 million in revenue. Notably, the sale comprised 30% of buyers who were new to Sotheby’s – and 50% of bidders were under the age of 40.

“We are extremely gratified by the support of our clients, as demonstrated by our Contemporary Art Online auction – the largest edition realised in Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s history,” says Terase. “Our new ‘Contemporary Showcase’ series responds to this success and we are confident that the new initiative will bring exciting opportunities for our audiences, both in Asia and worldwide.”

On-Site Insights

April 15, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Hauser & Wirth’s digital platform, Dispatches

Major art fairs including the Frieze New York, Art Dubai, Art Central and Art Basel in Hong Kong have replicated the actions of hundreds of local and global galleries, museums and art institutions, all of whom have closed their doors to real-life visitors in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. With numerous travel bans and lockdowns worldwide, in place of the physical realm, they’ve concurrently launched digital alternatives as a secondary form of “on-site” seduction.

Last month, Art Basel in Hong Kong launched a VIP preview of its digital-only Online Viewing Rooms to atone for the local fair it cancelled in February due to the growing spread of coronavirus. (The group also just postponed its Basel gathering in June as Switzerland shut its borders.) However, the lack of real-life exhibition space hasn’t affected digital sales at the high end, in which most buyers are seasoned collectors and existing clients.

Indeed, they’re buying – and the cash is flying. As part of the Online Viewing Rooms, gallery Hauser & Wirth sold Jenny Holzer’s XX 8 for US$350,000, as well as works by Josef Albers for US$600,000 and Pipilotti Rist for US$140,000. The Gagosian sold a Georg Baselitz for €1.2 million and a Zeng Fanzhi for US$450,000, among other sales. David Zwirner sold a Marlene Dumas work for US$2.6 million, a Luc Tuymans for US$2 million and a Liu Ye for US$500,000.

“We’ve received very strong feedback from our exhibitors,” said Art Basel director Marc Spiegler in a statement. “Many small- and mid-sized galleries have been using our platform as an opportunity to explore the concept of an online viewing room and to connect with new potential buyers, while larger blue-chip galleries have benefitted by cross-promoting their own digital platforms.” While he acknowledged that nothing could replace the experience of visiting an art fair in person, he noted, “VIPs across the globe were also excited to view more than 2,000 exceptional artworks in one digital space.”

Beyond core collectors, not everyone was charmed by the shift to viewing art in a digital space. For the VIP event, the Art Basel in Hong Kong site crashed within the first 25 minutes of launch. And when it did get its digital game back on, the feeling of viewing was functional without being fun, more superficial than substantive and, at times, aimless. It felt much like what it was – a poor imitation of a real-world gallery. A nine-year-old child in the vicinity was asked how the digital interaction felt. “There’s no space for imagination,” the child bemoaned. “In galleries, you use your imagination.”

Meanwhile and near-simultaneously, K11’s Disruptive Matter and The New York Times: Carbon’s Casualties exhibition, concerning technologies that can drive us towards a more renewable and sustainable future, was being shown on an online viewing platform via a third-party website operated by Matterport Inc. While it made for expansive viewing and a certain novelty, the technology was far from leisurely; in short, it felt little different from navigating Google Street Maps. It’s hard to feel intimate with art when you’re looking through two separate screens, or frames, to get at it.

David Zwirner was one of the first blue-chip galleries to open a virtual viewing room three years ago, realising how much business the gallery did via pre-fair digital previews. Collectors were comfortable buying based on PDF images and auction houses have increasingly boosted sales by posting on Instagram.

This is particularly true in Asia, where the collecting demographic trends younger than its Western counterparts and has generally been exposed to more digital art and public art via collectives such as teamLab. Chinese entrepreneur Michael Xufu Huang, the co-founder of the M Woods Museum who resigned his role and just opened the X Museum in Beijing, is typical of this trend. He’s just turned 26. Increasingly it’s not just about having a digital presence to sell, but offerings over and above the artwork, to entice.

Mindful of such demand, Hauser & Wirth, which, like Zwirner, took a space in Hong Kong’s H Queen’s in 2018, launched its Dispatches digital content initiative on March 21 in tandem with its first online exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947–2007.

But here’s the thing: hard as a virtual exhibition may try, it’s not the real thing. What is real, though, in the virtual world, is curating a bunch of added-value content that wouldn’t come so easily in the real world.

“Dispatches connects people with our artists – and all of us with each other,” explains Iwan Wirth. “For many, this is an uncertain time; as a team, we needed to urgently adapt to this. With our exhibition spaces closed, we realised that necessity is the mother of invention and fast-tracked our existing digital strategies, working nimbly and creatively.”

For example, Dispatches will lure aficionados and amateurs alike with its series of personal at-home and in-studio videos with artists; the chance to cook recipes submitted by artists, partners, directors, team members and friends; and “Family Saturday at Home”, which allows parents and their children to engage and commune via Hauser & Wirth’s interactive learning and community experiences.

For Wirth, he thinks of the digital space as a new location for art. He says, “Our new global digital team – drawing upon talent from other fields where digital and virtual reality are very, very advanced – is developing a robust new approach to the web as its own space, as another global ‘location’ of Hauser & Wirth.”

If all the buzz on art’s digital platforms sounds familiar, well, that’s because we’ve been here before – in a new world called television. Galleries, conscious of the need to create more noise, are becoming more like TV channels, each competing for our viewing loyalty. One big irony of that approach is that it may not be the art that instils the loyalty, but the quality, variety and energy of the programming. And then the trickiest question: What type of programming gets a gallery over the digital gain line?

As such, galleries find themselves in a situation not unlike luxury brands a decade before them, most of which were late to a robust online presence and the e-feeding table, fearful that too much digital democratisation might scare off their core customers. Now, it’s the galleries’ turn; the greater irony being that fashion’s appropriation of art, especially in Asia, had been elevating the status of tiring luxury brands while simultaneously exposing gallery art to younger audiences with robust spending power.

Perhaps surprisingly, much like their luxury brand forebears, the galleries have played it relatively safe. There have, however, been some champagne moments courtesy of auction house Sotheby’s; to whit, Korean pop star T.O.P curated a so-called “pop-up” show for the auction house in Hong Kong in 2017 at the behest of super-curator Yuki Terase, and the Supreme digital auction last year at Hong Kong’s Hart Hall in the H Queen’s building was also instigated by Terase and Sotheby’s. In the context of culture and commerce, T.O.P’s curated show for Sotheby’s Hong Kong was the art world’s equivalent of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s collaboration with H&M in 2004.

Art galleries, conscious of the awe and intimidation they still invoke, must thus find ways to de-starch their high standing by adapting and adopting soft-power strategies akin to modern luxury and lifestyle brands. Chanel has an obvious advantage in this respect – customers who can’t afford the total “Coco/Karl/Virginie” head-to-toe HK$100,000 look can still find entry points to the brand via HK$300 lipstick. But try asking Hauser, Zwirner or Gagosian for HK$300 artworks – they’ll smile politely through their HK$300 Chanel lipstick and say, “No thank you.”

As this story was being written, an email appeared in the writer’s inbox bearing the subject line: “We are Live: Robin Rhode & Nari Ward – Online Viewing Room is Now Open”. It was Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, promoting its new show and flashing with more graphic-design tricks than Adobe. In a nutshell, you can whet your appetite online before seeing the show in person at the gallery until May 16. We took the “viewing room” route and while it was at least better than seeing no art at all, the “visit” and the technology felt abstract and, yet again, aimless.

Which is undoubtedly why Hong Kong galleries such as de Sarthe (showing Shifting Landscapes by Andrew Luk and Chu Teh-Chun) and Blindspot (with its Anonymous Society for Magick, curated by Hong Kong’s own “super-curator” Ying Kwok) are, as of the time of writing, pushing ahead with real-life openings on April 11 as part of South Island Art Day.

Both galleries issued recent warnings about the precarious nature of visiting in these times of the hottest new phrase,
social distancing: “To ensure the health and wellbeing of our staff and guests, we will take the following safety precautions: visitors will be asked to complete a health declaration and have their temperature checked on arrival; hand sanitiser will be provided at reception for visitors to use; and we kindly ask that those who have travelled within the last 14 days to refrain from joining the event.”

The First Encounter

April 14, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Part of Encounter at White Cube Hong Kong

It’s a first: The White Cube gallery and the K11 Art Foundation have launched their first collaboration, in which three major works by the gallery’s artists are on view at the enormous millennial-friendly art-retail space K11 Musea in Tsim Sha Tsui. K11 already has an abundance of high-quality artworks on display by a wide range of luminaries including Erwin Wurm, Carsten Höller, Carol Bove, Zhang Enli, Samson Young and Ron English.

For the collaboration, on view until May 31 and called Encounter, the three artworks comprise American installation artist Theaster Gates’s Rushmore (2016) and Afro-Ikebana (2019), as well as Ghanian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s Zizaach (2016). Together, these pieces explore the encounter between culture and the materials used in their creation.

Gates’s work combines objects and ideas drawn from diverse cultures and human history, as well as political and social engagement. Rushmore is part of the Black Madonna series of sculptural works, and is inspired by the history of black women and their identity in gender politics; Afro-Ikebana is made up of Japanese tatami mats and a bronze sculpture of an African mask.

Meanwhile, Mahama uses materials from everyday life in Ghana, such as scrap metal and jute sacks used to transport cocoa beans, for Zizaach. All the objects Mahama employs are transformed to create installations that examine themes of globalisation, migration and commodity exchange.

Art and Artifice

March 18, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Cecil Beaton by Paul Tanqueray, 1937. National Portrait Gallery, London

Fans of the famed 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, which charts the relationship between Charles Ryder and the flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, may not have realised that the latter character was based on a real-life persona – Stephen Tennant, a flâneur in 1920s England whose sole aim in life was “to do as little as possible”. Tennant also inspired the character of Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s 1949 novel Love in a Cold Climate. 

This, among a host of other insights, is one of the discoveries made by exploring the extravagant world of the glamorous and stylish Bright Young Things of the 1920s and 30s, seen through the eyes of photographer Cecil Beaton, at London’s National Portrait Gallery until June 7.

Beaton was friends with many of those he shot, and his subjects run the gamut: famed costume designers (Oliver Messel), composers (William Walton), socialites (Edwina Mountbatten and Diana Mitford), actresses (Anna May Wong and Tallulah Bankhead) and ballet dancers (Tilly Losch). There’s even Dolly Wilde, writer Oscar’s Wilde’s niece, and the bejewelled Lady Alexander, whose husband produced Wilde’s comedies and became one of Beaton’s early patrons.

Beaton was such a social butterfly and magnet that he became a much-photographed figure and a celebrity in his own right. A middle-class suburban schoolboy, he used his artistic skills and ambition to become part of a world he wasn’t born into. Yet, throughout the ’20s and ’30s, his photographs place his friends and heroes under perceptive, colourful and sympathetic scrutiny. 

In the end, he outgrew the period and became a distinguished war photographer for the Ministry of Information. Post-war, he evolved into a photographer for Britain’s royal family, propelling them into the modern age. He was also a set and costume designer for theatre and film during the golden age of Hollywood (for which he won three Oscars), as well as a painter, illustrator and essayist. 

Beaton was knighted in 1972; by the time a stroke had curtailed his work, he had shot an inventory of the 20th century’s most luminous figures, from Greta Garbo to Picasso, from Queen Elizabeth II to Winston Churchill, from Coco Chanel to Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, and from David Hockney to Andy Warhol. Just days before he died in 1980, he had written to the Queen Mother asking to take her 80th-birthday portraits. 

Cao Wow

March 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Work-in-progress still from The Eternal Wave (2019, virtual reality)

Last year, she became the first Chinese artist to hold a solo exhibition at the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris. And today, Cao Fei, the megawatt star of contemporary Chinese art who also shot Chinese pop star Cai Xukun for Prada’s autumn/winter 2019 collection, unveils Blueprints, her first large-scale solo exhibition in the UK, at London’s Serpentine Galleries until May 17.

Famous for teetering between the physical and virtual worlds, and between the utopian and dystopian potentials of our modern-day cities, Cao highlights contemporary encounters – from the escapism of users on virtual platforms to the alienating effects of mechanised labour in China. She often addresses these far-reaching and serious issues through deadpan humour and surreal visions. Ultimately, her characters navigate these complex realities with vigour, harnessing the unique possibilities of technology to shape a collective future.

“For me, virtuality is a means to express myself, to understand reality, which is what I’m interested in,” says the artist, who first presented her video installation Whose Utopia? in the UK in 2006 and followed it with RMB City in 2008, which was constructed in the online virtual world of Second Life. “I use writing and film too, but we are living in an age of rapid technology. In this context, we need to know that virtuality has changed the way reality works. And to do this, we need to be part of it.”

Wild in the Country

March 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: AMO’s selection of unique and highly specific conditions distributed across the globe serves as a framework for their research, and represents where the world is headed.

Dutch architect and Harvard professor Rem Koolhaas is not a man one typically associates with nature – but a new exhibition is set to change that. The Rotterdam-born head of OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which he founded 45 years ago) and its experimental research arm AMO has made a name for dazzling, dizzying urban projects that emblazon their respective cities like exclamation marks: the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Seattle Central Library.

Despite Koolhaas’s innovative, avant-garde totems, he has somehow avoided the somewhat disparaging “starchitect” moniker directed at many of his contemporaries. His latest project, Countryside, The Future, is showing at the Guggenheim in New York until August 14. The exhibition sees him explore the radical changes happening in rural areas. Despite increasingly large numbers of the global population living and working in cities, these locations only account for two per cent of the world’s surface.

“In the past decades, I have noticed that while much of our energies and intelligence have been focused on the urban areas of the world – under the influence of global warming, the market economy, American tech companies, African and European initiatives, Chinese politics and other forces – the countryside has changed almost beyond recognition,” says Koolhaas.

When the term “smart city” was coined in 2012, Koolhaas had noticed his interests moving in the opposite direction: “Through regular visits to a Swiss village – it was the sudden disappearance of cows that alerted me – I had begun to realise that, through an accumulation of discrete individual changes, the countryside was actually transforming more drastically than the city. The story of this transformation is largely untold – and it is particularly meaningful for AMO to present it in one of the world’s great museums, in one of the world’s densest cities.”

Koolhaas has long called for greater rural awareness, and has even claimed that the obsession with cities has blinded people to what has been happening in the countryside, becoming a factor in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. To further his rural cause, the architect has enlisted students from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Kenya’s University of Nairobi, the Netherlands’ Wageningen University and the US’s Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The Guggenheim, for its part, says the exhibition “will mark a shift from a focus on the urban to the rural, remote, deserted, and wild territories collectively investigated here as ‘countryside’”. It aims to shed light on the urgent environmental, political and socio-economic changes facing the countryside in places such as China, California and South America.

Afrocentric, Afrochic

February 19, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Nigerian-born, London-based designer Duro Olowu is globally known for his womenswear label that he launched in 2004 (which chiefly mixes prints and textures) and his penchant for dressing women in the art world.  

Characterised by evocative patterns, unique fabrics, impeccable construction and a saturated palette, his garments are informed by his international background and curator’s eye. His Duro dress – a stunning knee-length skirt featuring a ’70s silhouette with wide sleeves and patchwork materials – was named Dress of the Year by both British and American Vogue in 2004, and he was named New Designer of the Year in 2005 at the British Fashion Awards. Former US First Lady Michelle Obama wore his designs and had him decorate part of the White House. 

Olowu’s spring/summer 2020 collection is inspired by sketches by Françoise Gilot (who, among other notable achievements, was Pablo Picasso’s romantic partner) and Beth Lesser’s photographs of Jamaica in the early 1980s. His multinational, multicultural viewpoint has translated into hugely popular platforms and projects, from his dynamic Instagram account (@duroolowu) to his revelatory curatorial projects in London and New York. 

On the back of last year’s inaugural Virgil Abloh fashion exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), it seems only fitting that Olowu turns his curatorial cosmopolitan eye towards the Windy City this month. Drawing from Chicago’s public and private art collections, Olowu’s Seeing Chicago (which opens on February 29) reimagines the relationships between artists and objects across time, media and geography. 

In his inimitable style, Olowu combines photographs, paintings, sculptures and films in dense, textural scenes that incorporate his own fashion work and the art of Chi-Town locals including Kerry James Marshall, Ed Paschke and Karl Wirsum, along with Jae Jarrell and Gerald Williams, members of the city’s Africobra artists’ collective. 

Olowu has been called a “master of mixed-media dressing” – and this appetite for combining various aesthetics drives his increasing influence as a stylemaker. His 2014 “Afro Deco” collection epitomises this approach; he was inspired by the 1920s artist and furniture designer Eyre de Lanux, as well as the colour palette of his artist friend Chris Ofili’s 2007 painting The Raising of Lazarus. The SS16 collection was inspired by Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil and the Montego Bay style of Caribbean women who migrated to England in the ’50s. 

Olowu’s curatorial prowess was much in evidence at London’s Camden Arts Centre in 2016 for Making and Unmaking, a group show in which he assembled artists as diverse as Isaac Julien, Grace Wales Bonner and Irving Penn to examine the notion of “art-making” – and in particular, the difficulties for black artists. 

That keen awareness has boosted the popularity of his Instagram account, which functions like a digital moodboard or sketchbook of anyone and everyone in the black visual culture of art, music and performance, thereby bringing them greater attention and a wider audience in Olowu’s bid to reconsider how we perceive notions of race and beauty. 

Algorithmic Author

February 19, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

If you’re going to stage an exhibition dealing with the expansive subject of how humanity will live tomorrow, you’d better come up with something innovative. Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum (MAM), in an attempt to make a show extend far beyond the domain of art, landed upon the notion of inviting an artificial-intelligence (AI) suite to define the show’s title.

Thus, MAM collaborated with Watson, computer giant IBM Corporation’s enterprise AI service, application and tool. With three layers of AI models and IBM’s extensive specialist knowledge, Watson is capable of efficient learning without starting from scratch. 

“Creativity isn’t generated from nothing, but from the unexpected connections of things and ideas,” says MAM director Nanjo Fumio. “Watson proposed all sorts of thinkable words, but from there, it had been a collaborative work between us and Watson. I imagine this may be how humans and AI will interact in the future.” It’s certainly something viewers can consider as they stroll around Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life – How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow, on until March 29. 

To arrive at the show’s title, Watson was fed a range of text data – including planning documents for the show, titles of MAM’s exhibitions over the last 15 years and interviews with Nanjo (also the exhibition’s curator). Watson then analysed the data, extracted keywords such as “future”, “arts” and “human”, and conjured more than 15,000 AI-generated options. From there, Watson reduced the selections to 150, from which the project team chose.

Okada Akira, senior managing consultant for GBS iX at IBM Japan, notes: “Applying AI to creativity like this is challenging work – analysing the backgrounds of large amounts of phenomena and contexts to identify or pinpoint patterns of inspirations and imaginations. It would be pleasing if AI technology could spread to the public in the domains of ideas and expressions to expand human creative activities.” 

While we wait, humans are increasingly entrusting many of their decisions to AI, which might supplant our own intelligence; the advent of the singularity will bring changes to our society and lifestyles. Simultaneously, blockchain technology will build new levels of value into our social systems, while advances in biotechnology will have major impacts on food, medicine and the environment. And last but by no means least, we may even turn back the clock and extend our lifespans. 

Once Upon a teamLab

February 5, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: teamLab, Expanding Three-Dimensional Existence in Transforming Space – Flattening 3 Colors and 9 Blurred Colors, Free Floating​, 2018, interactive installation, endless, sound: Hideaki Takahashi

As art has gradually become synonymous with the worlds of entertainment, technology, design and science, one of the world’s leading “multiverse” practitioners, Tokyo’s art collective teamLab, debuts SuperNature at The Venetian Macao. In terms of interaction with art, the stakes are raised even higher by becoming more immersive across the Cotai Expo Hall’s enormous 54,000-square-foot space. 

SuperNature, which just opened on January 21 and runs until the end of March, is a single, massive world comprised of works of art that aim to explore new perceptions of the world and ideas of continuity between humans and nature. The art collective transforms the space into a 3D world with varying elevations, as it becomes a “body immersive” museum focused on a group of works that blur boundaries between people’s bodies and art. 

And that’s where teamLab really gets interesting – and what puts the experience of being in one of its “arenas” a more alternative adventure than even the dotty thrill of walking around in the “cosmos” of Yayoi Kusama’s ubiquitous Infinity Mirror Rooms. The people in SuperNature influence and become a part of the artworks themselves. As such, people become one with the art, and make creative choices about how they see and what they see, blurring perceptions between appearance and reality, and of the self and the world. 

The show is comprised of various different teamLab ecosystems, almost as though moving through the cosmos on separate planets. Through The Infinite Crystal Universe, people can use their smartphones to select elements that make up the universe by dragging and releasing them. Each element of the universe sent into the work then influences the other elements and is constantly changing depending upon the presence of people in the space. It is thus an evolving but never finite work. 

In Mountain of Flowers and People, the seasons change gradually across the installation space. The cycle of growth and decay repeats itself in perpetuity. If a person stays still, the flowers surrounding them grow and bloom abundantly. If viewers touch or step on the flowers, plants shed their petals, wither and die all at once. One key aspect to teamLab’s offering is that the film is not a prerecorded animation, nor on loop, but rendered in real time by a computer program. Again, interaction and immersion on the part of the viewer causes continuous change in the cycle of the artwork; previous visual states can never be replicated and will never reoccur in the same way. Art doesn’t just replicate nature; it becomes second nature. 

And then there’s the impressive Expanding Three-Dimensional Existence in Transforming Space, in which the arena is filled with orbs of free-floating light. The space’s shape is determined by the collection of floating spheres, and changes according to people’s actions (pushing or colliding). Depending on the degree of entanglement of the orbs, and wind and pressure changes, the shape of the space itself will change, with empty spaces becoming high density and spheres rising to the ceiling all at once. All of it is in 11 different colours based on Japanese silk and the effects of light on nature. 

Disney’s Chinese Dreamer

February 5, 2020 / by China Daily lifestyle Premium

Under the crystal-blue dome, beneath a cherry tree, stands the lonely figure of a young deer looking into the distance. Leaving an indelible mark on the history of US animated film, this image of Bambi was created by renowned artist Tyrus Wong, whose legacy today, 110 years after his birth in 1910, seems more pioneering and pertinent than ever. 

Bidding farewell to his mother and sister at the age of nine, Wong, born in Taishan in China’s Guangdong Province, sailed with his father to a distant land.

Encouraged by his father to practice calligraphy at night in lieu of art school, the young Wong eventually dropped out of junior high school in California to attend Otis College of Art and Design on a full scholarship. He received formal Western art training while studying the art of the Song Dynasty at Los Angeles Central Library in his free time.

Wong’s Chinese roots and American upbringing allowed his work to flourish in the heartland of the world’s film industry, Hollywood, at a time when Asian faces were a rarity.

He was working as an “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios at the age of 28, filling out the movements between key drawings, when he learned that the studio was in pre-production for the 1942 feature film Bambi.

Wong went home and painted several pictures of a deer in a forest, influenced by the rich landscapes of the Song Dynasty. These evocative sketches immediately captured the attention of Walt Disney himself – the lush pastel strokes shot through with a sense of unbounded fantasy, magnificent pairs of antlers blurring into red-orange flame, flickering in the mist of green woods. They were illustrations that allowed you to almost smell the forest.

To eke out a living, Wong set up a restaurant in Chinatown, Dragon’s Den, where he and his fellow artists created giant murals and hand-painted menus. He was later hired as a production illustrator and sketch artist, creating concept art for hundreds of live-action films for Warner Brothers. During his 26 years at the company before his retirement in 1968, he worked on productions including Rebel Without a Cause, Calamity Jane, The Wild Bunch, Sands of Iwo Jima and Auntie Mame.