Now You See Me

April 17, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Liu Bolin, Supermarket Pyongyang

If you haven’t yet seen the remarkable Shandong-born artist Liu Bolin’s New Change show at the Over The Influence gallery in Hong Kong, the artist’s inaugural exhibition in the city, there’s still one week left. Featuring new sculptures, photographs derived from more than five years of shows, and a live performance at an off-site venue in Hong Kong, it continues Liu’s ongoing exploration of critical issues and political controversies from around the world. 

Known as the “Invisible Man”, Liu has become internationally recognised for developing a unique visual composition that examines the relationship between contemporary life and the urban environment. His work continues to push the transformative potential of the individual and collective expressions of resistance. 

On first glance, his works seem like simple photos of unique locations – a rack of Mexican wrestling masks for sale or a pile of municipal waste. On closer inspection, however, the outline of man appears, precisely painted in camouflage and hiding in the open. Seeing his works presents a sort of Where’s Wally challenge on a high-art level. 

The artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, New Change is anchored in Liu’s reflections on the abundance of capitalism and the destructiveness of consumerism, particularly in its impact on the environment. Included in the show is a new work immortalising a performance in a surprisingly abundant Pyongyang supermarket, with shelves fully stocked with ceremonial objects and groceries from North Korea. 

Over The Influence, 159 Hollywood Road, Central
(overtheinfluence.com)

Double Vision

April 3, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Joyce Ng, You Are My Lucky Baby Pear for Modern Weekly, 2017

Two of fashion’s most innovative photographers – South Korean-born Hanna Moon (founder of A Nice Magazine) and Hong Kong-raised Joyce Ng (a Central Saint Martins graduate), both based in London – are currently showing in English as a Second Language as part of the Charles Russell Speechlys Terrace Room Series at Somerset House in London until April 28. 

Though both women have risen to prominence via their work for leading fashion titles such as Dazed, i-D, Modern Weekly, Modern Matter and more, this free exhibition features two new bodies of photographs shot in and around Somerset House, which present a dramatic reimagining of the location’s neoclassical surroundings, telling two stories of darkness and intrigue that draw upon the heritage of Hong Kong and Seoul. 

Moon captures imagery of her two muses – Moffy, from London, and Heejing, her “single-mum best friend from South Korea” – in the dark of night, rebelliously invading the site to create a series of intimate works, featuring bespoke sets and objects that reflect her personal experiences living in the UK. 

Ng uses street-cast models, natural environments and props to create prosaic and surreal works. Drawing inspiration from the renowned 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, she has cast models solely from the vibrant community at Somerset House, inviting visitors and residents alike to become characters in a fragmented narrative through the hidden and public spaces of the building. 

Employing an otherworldly and playful approach, Moon and Ng incorporate cultural signifiers, set design and fashion to present their unique take on Western aesthetics and ideals. By so doing, they reflect upon the power that fashion photography holds in shaping our perceptions of beauty, style and taste in our interconnected world. 

The Art of Seeing

March 20, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

DAVID ZWIRNER 

Neo Rauch: Propaganda

One of the hot tickets of this fair is no stranger to the city. David Zwirner has invited German artist Neo Rauch to his H Queen’s gallery to stage the artist’s debut solo presentation in Asia, Propaganda, which features 15 new paintings; eight are large-scale canvases and seven are smaller, more intimately scaled works. The Leipzig-based artist, who Zwirner is bringing for the second time to Art Basel in Hong Kong, is rightly heralded for his ability to combine the traditions of figurative painting with surrealism in forging a new kind of dreamlike, ambiguous visual language in painting. As such, he has developed a strong collector base in China. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring a short story by novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann. (March 26–May 4) 

SPRÜTH MAGERS

Eau de Cologne 

In what’s a huge statement for women’s contributions to art, international gallery Sprüth Magers stages a new iteration of its exhibition Eau de Cologne in Hart Hall at H Queen’s, marking the first presentation in Asia of this celebrated project, which debuted in the 1980s. Eau de Cologne began as a series of exhibitions and publications, organised by Monika Sprüth between 1985 and 1993, which sought to create a new dialogue around contemporary art. The exhibitions introduced a select group of young female artists, representing powerful attitudes and practices, and established a discourse around art, feminism and power that continues to be profoundly relevant. Their work tackled questions of authority, messaging and influence in society in subtle and expansive ways. This chapter features prominent luminaries including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Astrid Klein, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel and Kara Walker. (March 27–April 12)

PACE GALLERY

Mary Corse

Acclaimed American artist Mary Corse gets her first exhibition in Asia through Pace Gallery at H Queen’s, and will show eight newly painted works that play to her strengths – perception, properties of light and ideas of abstraction. Corse uses glass microspheres (like those embedded in paint on roads that make the white lines glow when struck by car headlights) in a limited palette of black, white and red acrylic paint to create simple geometric configurations that take on greater-than-conventional luminescence. As a result, Corse’s work doesn’t simply represent light; it embodies, refracts, shifts and tilts it, depending on the viewer’s position and movement. (March 25–May 11)

DOUBLE UP

Lee Bul

Korean artist Lee Bul continues to ride on the coattails of her hugely successful three-floor show at London’s Hayward Gallery last summer. At Art Basel in Hong Kong, she will bring her stunning zeppelin to Encounters and will show Perdu from her recent Untitled series in the Kabinett section through Lehmann Maupin. Her retrofuturistic imagery is rooted in biology, but she collages materials such as human hair with acrylic shards, crystals and dried flowers to broaden these concepts beyond the individual body. The resulting forms reveal the intrinsic tension that exists within fragmentation, and within utopian idealism and the reality of its resulting ruin. The unfinished state she alludes to in these pieces is a reference to the persistent human drive to find a sense of “completeness”. Both series are united in their exploration of structural systems, from the individual body to larger architectural frameworks, which
have become a hallmark of her oeuvre. (March 29–31)

SIMON LEE GALLERY

Heimo Zobernig

Considered one of Austria’s most significant contemporary artists, Vienna-based Heimo Zobernig stages his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong through Simon Lee. Chosen to represent his country at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, the 61-year-old is something of a cross-pollinator who draws, paints, performs, sculpts, videotapes, and enacts architectural interventions and installations. A critical engagement with the way in which art is framed, both physically and conceptually, is central to Zobernig’s approach, which means he simultaneously explores the potential and the limitations of painting in every canvas. In this intervisual series, he highlights how artists have freely appropriated work by invoking Picasso’s interpretation of Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe as a starting point, which in turn had been inspired by Titian’s Le Concert Champêtre. Zobernig covers Gustav Klimt and others along the way. (March 26–May 9)

LÉVY GORVY

Return to Nature

Start your art onslaught in Central with the newly opened Lévy Gorvy and the gallery’s inaugural Hong Kong exhibition, Return to Nature. A blend of East and West in which the conception of nature is not limited to the natural landscape, but celebrates the creative capacity of nature, the project includes a diverse range of works by Wu Dayu, Willem de Kooning, Song Dong, Wassily Kandinsky, Hao Liang, Agnes Martin, Pierre Soulages, Yan Wenliang, Zao Wou-ki and more. The balance is a foretaste of the gallery’s aim to “transcend the cognitive boundaries of geographical divisions, and to return to the love and exploration that are the very essence of art.” In conjunction with the opening, the gallery has sensibly given itself a Chinese name: Li Wei Ge, which implies connoisseurship and vision. (March 26–May 18)

PMQ

Kaws: Along the Way

Brian Donnelly, aka Kaws, brings his cartoony hybrid-human characters to PMQ through the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (HOCA) for Art Basel. No stranger to the city or Asia, Donnelly was the first artist to exhibit in Perrotin’s Hong Kong space in 2012. Along the Way will display a selection of 37 works, ranging from larger-than-life outdoor sculptures to his most recent paintings, as well as early pieces. The exhibition will take over both indoor and outdoor spaces of PMQ, with the 5.5-metre-tall sculpture Along the Way (2015) greeting visitors in the courtyard. The towering pair of Companion figures, with their arms around each other in a gentle embrace, are expected to bring contemporary art and design closer to the public as well; the exhibition marks the global debut of this sculpture. Other exhibition highlights include iconic pieces such as New Morning (2012), an eight-feet-tall pink Accomplice sculpture and two pieces from the artist’s You series. (March 23–April 17)

HAUSER & WIRTH 

Louise Bourgeois: My Own Voice Wakes Me Up

Dubbed “Spiderwoman” for the nine-metre-high arachnids she produced in the late 1990s (odes to her mother), the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois gets a first solo exhibition in Hong Kong through Hauser & Wirth, curated by Jerry Gorovoy, who worked closely with the artist from the early 1980s until her death in 2010. My Own Voice Wakes Me Up takes its title from one of Bourgeois’s writings and focuses on distinct bodies of work from the final two decades of her life, comprising fabric sculptures, hand poses, red gouaches, experimental large-format prints, topiary sculptures and rarely exhibited holograms. The exhibition coincides with Bourgeois’s first large-scale museum tour in China, The Eternal Thread, which will be presented at the Long Museum in Shanghai and the Song Art Museum in Beijing. (March 26–May 11)

LEHMANN MAUPIN

Erwin Wurm

Lehmann Maupin brings Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, who has redefined the categories of sculpture and performance art, to premiere recent sculpture and photography from his most iconic series at its Pedder Street gallery. Each week, visitors will be invited to activate one of Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures by mimicking a unique pose with a typical household item, with the durational sculpture captured in a Polaroid photo that may be taken home. This exhibition represents the artist’s first appearance in the region in nearly a decade, following his 2010 solo exhibition at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing. (March 25–May 11)

LISSON GALLERY 

Asia Debut at Art Basel

It’s all systems go in Asia for London-based Lisson Gallery, which launches a space in Shanghai (its Asian debut) on March 22 and brings a roster of artistic riches to Art Basel in Hong Kong; there has been talk of opening a gallery space next year. Two large-scale works by prominent female artists Laure Prouvost and Joyce Pensato will greet visitors in the Lisson booth at the fair this year. Prouvost’s enigmatic tapestry This Means Tableau (2018) will take over one wall, exploding with dreamlike imagery and language familiar from her practice, while across the adjacent wall, the exuberant painting of Mickey Mouse by Pensato, titled I Must Be Dreamin’ (2007), will offer a darkly humorous interpretation of this cartoon character. Additionally, a life-size group portrait painting by Julian Opie will be presented. Capturing gatherings of people in an abstract, refined form, Opie bestows each individual with their own unique characteristics, rendered through a singular pose, object or movement. A highlight in the booth will be a vibrant yellow Estructura by Carmen Herrera. Based on paintings “really crying out to become sculpture”, Estructuras represent a rare break in the artist’s insistent planarity and two-dimensionality of her paintings to present her long-standing method of working; her forms and distinctive meticulous sharp edges are physically manifested, first in drawing, then painting and finally in sculpture. To top off Lisson’s inventory, the artistic director of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Tim Marlow, will interview celebrated British painter Christopher Le Brun. (March 29–31)

That’s the Spirit

March 20, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Miwa Komatsu at Whitestone Gallery

Nagano-born Miwa Komatsu had quite a 2018 indeed. The 34-year-old Japanese artist came to Hong Kong with Whitestone Gallery and performed one of her live-painting showcases at Hart Hall in H Queen’s. She’s since had sold-out exhibitions in Tokyo, Taipei and Singapore, and became an ambassador for Christian Dior along the way. Now she’s back with a month-long exhibition at Whitestone, along with another live work being performed at Pacific Place, for which she’ll be drawing vibrant energy from the city. 

Komatsu paints divine creatures and guardian lion dogs – inspiration she has taken from different religions, beliefs and mythological texts, among which Shinto has the most powerful influence on her creations. Komatsu believes that spirits and guardian deities exist around us, and she has the ability to mix and unify various elements, making her work like a link between the people and those spirits. Thus, as much as she’s a painter and artist, she believes her work has the power to reach a state of harmony and even heal others. 

Art Central: the best of

March 6, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Miwa Komatsu Live Painting

One of the most anticipated art events on the local calendar, Art Central returns to Hong Kong this month for its fifth edition. Widely recognised for discovering and presenting young talent, the satellite fair (which coincides with Art Basel) showcases original artworks across a variety of genres and styles by emerging artists as well as more familiar names. “Art Central has established itself as one of the region’s leading events for international collectors, art enthusiasts and the art-loving public,” says Charles Ross, the event’s managing director.  

This year, Art Central has partnered with United Overseas Bank (UOB) to present a dynamic five-day programme of exceptional galleries, interactive installations, experimental film and performances, engaging panel discussions and much more. The event will be staged in a sprawling architect-designed structure, set against the backdrop of the dazzling Victoria Harbour. There are more than 100 international galleries, with 32 of them debuting at the fair this year. Art Central aims to help further develop Hong Kong’s art ecology and encourages cultural inclusion across the wider community.  

Social Media Kingdom

February 20, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Ye Funa, Beauty + Save the World

Consider these remarkable figures: China has 802 million internet users, 431 million micro-bloggers, 788 million digital smartphone users and four of the ten largest global internet companies. This colossal user base – combined with a handful of ubiquitous online platforms and e-commerce giants including WeChat, Tencent and Alibaba – results in cultural currents that flow at a blinding pace, spreading and evolving far more rapidly than on the rest of the web and creating a distinct internet culture that some have dubbed the “Chinternet”. 

Utilising this space as a site for cultural negotiation, critique and play, the artists presented in the group exhibition Chinternet Ugly at Manchester, England’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art probe how the sheer volume of digital users in China ensure that the country is becoming its own digital centre of gravity, with the power to create its own sphere of influence over network norms.

Navigating this messy vitality of China’s digital realm are six of the country’s leading new-media artists – and among the first to have grown up with mass digital technology. There’s Xu Wenkai (Aaajiao) and Lin Ke’s manipulations of found digital materials and standard software programs; the augmented reality of Lu Yang; the celebratory pop aesthetics of Ye Funa; the dark side of internet freedom in the works of Liu Xin; and the veneration of the ugly and artless evident in the works of Miao Ying. 

Shots of Elegance

January 30, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Irving Penn, Black & White Fashion with Handbag (Jean Patchett) (C), New York, 1950

Oh Rose, Thou Art Artifice

November 21, 2018 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

When is a rose not a rose? When it’s an artfully crafted illusion conjured by local artist Trevor Yeung, that’s when. The opportunity to enjoy art outdoors is always a pleasing one, and all the more so when it’s the verdant, landscaped zen of the Asia Society Hong Kong Center in Admiralty. 

This show, Liminal Encounters: An Augmented Reality Exhibition, takes viewers on an art journey around the historic heritage complex as they admire works that mixes the physical and virtual worlds. On display are five contemporary pieces from the BNY Mellon art collection – by Kikuji Kawada, Bharti Kher, Lee Bul, Toshio Shibata and Sarah Sze – along with three site-specific works that were commissioned from Hong Kong artists Yeung, Carla Chan and Peter Nelson. Each artwork is viewed at different locations and has an augmented-reality component experienced by scanning a BNY Mellon app on a handheld device. 

Copy Icon

November 21, 2018 / by Michael Liu

Two weeks ago, US pop artist Jeff Koons was found guilty of plagiarism in Paris and was ordered to pay US$168,000 to the creator of a 1980s advertising campaign for French clothing brand Naf Naf, which he was accused of copying, featuring a pig (the label’s mascot) and a freezing model. Koons even had the effrontery to give his work the same title, Fait d’Hiver. (One of the three editions of the work the artist sold went to the Prada Foundation for US$4.3 million). This was actually the second time Koons had lost out in Paris, after French photographer Jean-François Bauret insisted that a photograph he took of two children had formed the basis for Koons’s sculpture Naked. Koons had to pay damages, as did the Centre Pompidou, which had shown the work. 

Art and the notion of originality, or lack thereof, along with the notions of copying and appropriation, have always been complex bedfellows. Long before Andy Warhol was painting Campbell’s Soup tins and cow wallpaper – the latter of which Kusama: Infinity, a recent documentary by American writer-director Heather Lenz, suggests were inspired by and appropriated from the world’s now top-selling female artist, Yayoi Kusama – Marcel Duchamp was proclaiming a men’s urinal a work of art. 

Some 500 years prior to that, it was the same story. Renaissance Italy was duplicating endless copies of Greek and Roman artworks, and painters such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci told their underlings to directly copy works of art as a means of learning the trade – a practise that continues in art to this day. The Romans and Greeks created endless replicas of their idols, such as Discobolus, using almost a production-line approach. 

All of this was brought to the fore when Gucci’s art walls in New York were repainted with visuals for an exhibit called The Artist is Present, which had been lifted from Serbian artist Marina Abramović’s landmark 2010 work of the same name, and which is on show at the Yuz Museum Shanghai until December 16. The non-profit museum in the West Bund Xuhui district, owned by Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur, art philanthropist and collector Budi Tek, formerly housed the hangar for the city’s Longhua Airport. 

Behind The Artist is Present is the show’s curator, Italian satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan, who was commissioned by Gucci’s creative director and cultural wunderkind Alessandro Michele with an intriguingly brief two-word directive: “Shanghai” and “copy”. 

The Artist is Present features more than 30 artists, showcasing site-specific and existing works that question the most hallowed principles of art in the modern era: originality, intention, expression. In an era where everything is endlessly reproduced, nothing really keeps the aura of originality.

In the words of Michele: “The only belief remains the conviction that originality is definitely overrated.” To expound on his point, the show’s logic contends that originality can be reached through the act of repetition and, furthermore, that originals can be preserved through copies. 

Can the “fake” surpass the importance of the original artwork? “It consists in a physical immersion in the reign of imitation, a land where the core values that used to identify with an artwork in the Western world, such as originality, intention, expression and authorship, are dismantled,” says Michele. 

The cynic would argue that it’s also, subliminally, a very clever commercial angle to take for Gucci. Michele is, after all, the man who rebranded a recent Gucci collection with the moniker “Guccy” emblazoned across it as a way of illustrating the point. And his co-conspirator in the exhibition, Cattelan, has never been the shy and retiring type in matters of appropriation, either. 

Copy, ape, or no – and the targets here run the gamut, from Michelangelo to Donald Judd – the art is by turns retro, futuristic and always provocative, ranging from Xu Zhen’s Tang Dynasty Torso of a Seated Buddha from Tianlonshan to Kapwani Kiwanga’s futuristic neon pink-blue room, and from Cattelan’s own miniature version of the Sistine Chapel and its iconic roof to the non-operational toilets by Danish art collective Superflex, which are replicas of the toilets in the Council of the European Union in Brussels.

Pride of Place

October 24, 2018 / by Michael Liu

Image above: Untitled (Fantasy Landscape with Undersea Mountains) (1977), Luis Chan, ink and colour on paper

Hong Kong may be basking in the klieg light of its global art moment, with the opening of Tai Kwun, the long-delayed M+ museum, the currently under-renovation Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, and the arrival of David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth for the recent openings of their respective inaugural galleries in Asia at the H Queen’s art tower in Central. But
the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC) in Wan Chai, which opened in 1977, shines like the proverbial jewel in the crown on the city’s artistic and cultural landscape. Where else in the 1980s in this tall, small and rapaciously commercial city could any budding aesthete have seen L’Avventura by Italian avant-garde cinematic maestro Michelangelo Antonioni, Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais or Dekalog by Krzysztof Kieslowski? And what other venue was staging contemporary conceptual artwork by Hong Kong artists – there was only a small theatre in Wong Tai Sin for the performing arts – at a time when few people knew what the term meant or represented? 

Wan Chai Grammatica: Past, Present, Future Tense is the flagship exhibition of the HKAC’s 40th anniversary, and it wears its intensity, intimacy and intent like a love letter to the place, grounded in the local community who were (and still are) its lifeblood. “The history of the HKAC is so seminal to the Hong Kong art scene,” says curator, writer, translator and Chinese art expert Valerie Doran. “A lot of the artists that were in the HKAC 1985 show, like conceptual artist Choi Yan-chi [whose work can be seen at the exhibition], have actually mentored a lot of the local artists in Wan Chai Grammatica.”

The exhibition, which runs until November 4, is a celebration of the city’s identity as seen through one of Hong Kong’s most iconic districts: Wan Chai. Doran has assembled artists from different generations, backgrounds, and national origins across diverse genres and mediums, including some newly commissioned works. “One thing we’ve really achieved in the show is that the different voices of the artists come together, reflecting the grammar and a sense of place,” she says. 

The work is substantial – and often challenging. There’s the “always exuberant bon vivant” Luis Chan, though his work does have a dark side, cautions Doran. Asked to single out other exciting works on show, she names Jaffa Lam, Phoebe Hui and Mark Chan, whose creations are “playful, but with a deeper dimension as well”. 

Poignancy is much in evidence and “none of the works are simplistic at all,” says Doran. She calls Chu Hing-wah’s The Old Lady’s Great Love “touching – it is caring and loving, and what most people see as pitiful, he sees as devotion. His work is uplifting, but not exuberant.” And there’s Xyza Cruz Bacani, the Filipina street photographer and daughter of a helper who grew up with a camera, taking shots of her Wan Chai neighbourhood. Bacani is one of the Magnum Foundation’s Human Rights fellows, and has claimed a spot on the lists of the BBC’s 100 Women of the World and Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia. “She’s very authentic in the reality; she doesn’t try to make it pretty, but you sense her engagement very strongly in her photographs,” says Doran. “There is a compassion to her gaze.”

Doran draws interesting parallels between the work of Yeung Tong-lung and Firenze Lai. “Yeung’s painting installation is based on the view from his workshop, from which he brings this whole world,” she says. “But it’s a microcosm because he’s so attentive to all the little people, only in that moment. Lai’s work is emotional in a more direct way. She wants to illuminate difficulty, a sense of displacement, the challenge of life. And in many ways, the artists’ works represent two sides of the same coin.” 

Interestingly, Choi Yan-chi channels Antonioni, having read an essay by the filmmaker. “She found his writing pertinent to her and her art,” explains Doran. “He framed the experience of how artists take everything in, all of their surroundings, as inspiration in their work – much like Choi.” 

Lastly, Doran singles out Ho Sin-tung’s work, based on the Sisters of St Paul de Chartres, who settled in Wan Chai and founded an orphanage in the mid-19th century. “The name of the artwork, One Thousand and One Moons, is so meaningful,” she says. “It references the round shape of the silver coins paid for 1,000 of the girls rescued from the streets by the sisters and the one extra moon represents the artist herself, bearing witness to their story. It’s so beautiful.”