Month: October 2016

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Visual Arts, Exhibitions; installation views.
Lee Kit - Hold your breath, dance slowly
May 12 - October 9, 2016, Burnet Gallery.
Installation views with people.
The first US solo museum exhibition of artist Lee Kit (b. 1978) features work from the past five years, including an ambitious 13-channel video installation acquired by the Walker—I can’t help falling in love (2012)—alongside a newly commissioned site-specific installation.

Lee creates poetic object-based installations fashioned from everyday materials and household items such as soap, towels, cardboard boxes, and plastic containers, which he transforms through subtle gestures of painting, drawing, and placement. Originally from Hong Kong and based in Taiwan, Lee frequently imparts political commentary in his work through an embedded use of foreign products and English words that reference the omnipresence of market capitalism surrounding Hong Kong’s history as a global city living under the principle of one country, two systems. The artist received shortlist nomination for the 2013 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and represented Hong Kong in the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Curator: Misa Jeffereis

Lee Kit

Hold your breath, dance slowly at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis. May 12 – Oct 9, 2016 By Sheila Dickinson A saccharine, instrumental version of the song Can’t Help Falling in Love greets the viewer on entering the dimly lit rooms built into the Walker Art Center’s large gallery that house Lee Kit’s Hold your breath, dance slowly. Hints of intimate, private spaces occupy each room: a floor lamp, carpet fragments, folding chairs and plastic storage bins with a few household objects in them. The small paintings that dot the walls, looking decorative, reveal a barely visible word, usually a brand name like Johnson or Nivea, or an isolated image such as a hand. Hold your breath, dance slowly coaxes the viewer with comforting, familiar objects and brands, but these are a ruse, because the exhibition intentionally pushes and pulls the viewer around the space in an uncertain swirl. Floating on the walls of the gallery’s small rooms are projections of colours, shapes and occasional images. The projectors sit low on stacked plastic bins or waist-high podiums, causing the viewer’s body …

From the exhibition nothing at M+ Pavilion.
Video projections, sound, wood, stainless steel, soil, and 
text installations, dimensions variable, 2016.
©Tsang Kin Wah Courtesy the artist and M+ West Kowloon Cultural District Authority.

Tsang Kin Wah

nothing By Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand For someone who has built an art career out of them, Tsang Kin-wah is a man of very few words. Bookish, with thick glasses, the softly-spoken artist measures his words carefully, and it’s hard to hear him over the sounds of drilling and hammering in the newly opened M+ Pavilion. His exhibition, nothing, the pavilion’s inaugural show since it officially opened in July, is less than two weeks away. The space, situated on the Hong Kong harbour with a view of the vertical concrete-and-glass skyline, is still a construction site, with cranes encircling the building. Electrical cables snake their way across the exhibition space inside, and new metal-veneered columns have sprung up like towers in a futuristic city for the site-specific show. Soon the inside of the pavilion will be awash with glowing words and sound as the artist turns it into a walk-in installation. Thrust into the spotlight when he won the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2005, Tsang’s immersive text installations have since wound their way across the …

We are standing in the spiral under a hammer by Angela Su, Hair embroidery on silk, 86 x 122 cm, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.

Angela Su

Hong Kong artist Angela Su shares the thinking behind her work with Caroline Ha Thuc You are well known for your ink drawings featuring strange creatures that combine human and animal elements. Do these creatures reflect your vision of contemporary humanity? Angela Su: Probably. I contemplate how human beings can exist alternatively. With contemporary science the imaginations of human beings are often reduced to numbers and scientific data, whereas in ancient times the understanding of the body was abstract, allegorical and instinctive; the spiritual was intertwined with the physical. Of course there was a lot of superstition and it was highly inaccurate from the perspective of contemporary western medicine, but I am attracted to the kind of imagination brought about by destabilising the accepted understanding of the body. Is there a philosophical idea behind this approach, such as perceiving the world as a whole? There is no particular philosophical idea behind this approach. It was just based on my consciousness and empathy as a human being. We lost our connections to nature and all creatures …

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Alan Lau

Alan Lau started collecting Hong Kong art about 10 years ago. He talks about three of his favourite works from his collection. Tozer Pak’s Love Letter (2011) was allegedly dedicated to the artist’s wife when he proposed to her. It is a conceptual, poetic work consisting of four books and the receipt from the bookshop where the artist bought them. Pak plays a game with the Chinese titles of the books so that reading every second character spells out a sentence. In the version in Alan Lau’s collection, it says “I am thinking about you”. The collector likes the idea of finding poetry in a commercial transaction. It also reminds him of traditional Chinese poetry, in which scholars subtly hid messages. The piece itself contains a secret and has its own story: when the work was displayed at Para Site’s annual fundraising auction, a thief entered the gallery and stole the books – and nothing else. Both Pak and Lau found this hilarious, and Lau wanted to buy the piece, or at least a representation …

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Hong Kong in the 1970s

By John Batten I remember the 1970s as a smoky-hazy, evolving time, with a generation gap opening up between World War II/Depression-era parents, and teenagers experiencing the overhang from the previous decade, the dreamy 60s. Hong Kong in the 1970s was caught in some of the overhang. In the early years of the decade the Vietnam War’s destruction continued, and its aftermath would continue for decades, with boatloads of refugees arriving in Hong Kong; and China’s Cultural Revolution and its “struggle sessions” murderously justified retribution between the classes and China’s competing political factions – until it ended with Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Meanwhile, Hong Kong was an active and important interface for Cold War posturing. It was a highly militarised place, with countless docks,barracks, airfields and spy-listening facilities scattered around the “territory” – all now,ironically, occupied by the People’s Liberation Army. Naval cruisers, destroyers and aircraft carriers of the western powers regularly pulled into Victoria Harbour for refuelling or a wild period of R&R. Only vestiges of that time survive: Tsim Sha Tsui’s Red …

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Making History

By Catherine Shaw The Herzog & de Meuron-designed M+ museum of visual culture might still be a construction site, scheduled to open in 2019, but that hasn’t stopped its curators from staging a host of mobile exhibitions, including its most recent and ambitious show, M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art. Featuring 80 contemporary Chinese works by 50 artists, including painting, sculpture, installation and photography, it was drawn from a collection of 1,510 works donated by the Swiss collector Uli Sigg. The exhibition, shown at ArtisTree in Taikoo Place, and previously at the Bildmuseet at Umeå University, Sweden in 2014 and at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 2015, offered a new perspective on one of the country’s most transformative periods, from the end of the Cultural Revolution until 2012. Divided into three periods approximating decades – 1974-89, 1990-99 and 2000-12 – it also demonstrated the benefits of working on the space with creative designers. M+ senior curator Pi Li and the founders of Beau Architects Gilles Vanderstocken and Charlotte Lafont-Hugo talk to …

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Sound and Space

By John Batten The growing maturity and diversity of Hong Kong’s art scene can be seen in the crossover of visual art and music. Hong Kong is surprisingly well served with international western and Chinese classical-music programming and visiting artists. Itinerant, traditional Chinese opera and music ensembles perform during the city’s festivals, while the city’s western orchestras and music-festival initiatives, by both the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and other musical organisations, offer varied, year-round programmes. One particularly successful example is Premiere Performances, with its annual February chamber-music festival and stimulating programming throughout the year. Similarly, the New Music Ensemble promotes modern and contemporary music through its own festival and performances. In early 2015 the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra faced criticism for its conservative repertoire that season. Audiences have shown plenty of support for contemporary music and ambitious musical presentations, reflected in the more adventurous repertoire of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and although the Philharmonic came up with a more adventurous programme for 2016, it could still find its claims for residency at the new …

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Switched On

By Margot Mottaz Cities buzz. Like giant batteries, they store energy and release it; their air is electric. They are fuelled by the intangible networks, both human and digital, that run tirelessly through their tall skyscrapers and narrow back alleys. In an attempt to reveal these imperceptible forces that make up urban environments, Human Vibrations, Hong Kong’s fifth Large-Scale Public Media Arts Exhibition, explores the relationship between technology and city dwellers. Through site-specific public works by eight new-media artists, both local and international, the exhibition looks on notions of time, transience and ephemerality, as well as how people relate to each other and to their environment. Taking centre stage in the exhibition is Fly High – Time Flies (2016) by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer, in which swarms of flies smother the ICC’s facades as they would cattle on a hot summer day. The randomly generated mass aggregates, crowds the building on all sides and dissipates again. The tower, suddenly filled with life, becomes akin to the city it looks over, bustling with millions of …

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João Vasco Paiva

Green Island Sep 22 – Oct 22 Green Island is an immersive solo exhibition that takes land cityscapes as a starting point to deconstruct various states of ambivalence: framed ideals of the urbanised versus the natural, the push and pull between construction and eventual dereliction. Edouard Malingue Gallery Sixth Floor, 33 Des Voeux Road Central, Hong Kong T (852) 2810 0317 Email Web Mo-Sa 10am to 7pm Edouard Malingue Gallery was founded to show 
emerging and established contemporary artists. As well as holding solo exhibitions with internationally renowned artists such as Laurent Grasso, Callum Innes and Los Carpinteros, the gallery is dedicated to presenting curated projects with emerging artists and organising large-scale off-site projects in Hong Kong. The programme, which has included the solo exhibitions of Fabien Mérelle, Nuri Kuzucan, Yuan Yuan, Wang Zhibo, Charwei Tsai and Wu Chi-Tsung, is carefully organised to bring a rich artistic and curatorial dialogue to the public. Represented artists: Cui Xinming Jeremy Everett Laurent Grasso Callum Innes Nuri Kuzucan Los Carpinteros Fabien Mérelle Song Hyun-Sook Sun Xun Charwei Tsai …

Object No. 4, 2016. Silica gel frame with implanted hair, charcoal on paper. 160x110x12 cm

Wang Du

Post-Fetishism Oct 1 – 29 A solo exhibition  featuring all-new installation work by the Paris-based Chinese artist. In Wang’s view, contemporary society has become increasingly beholden to material goods, confusing basic values between people, between objects, and between people, society, and education. This materialism has come to infect its very nerves, sending the vehicle for the evolution of human qualities into the pit of instant gratification and material consumption. Based on his keen observations of society, Wang Du produced a series of “post-fetishist” artworks. The mildewed objects in the exhibition seem to signify absurd phenomena related to the intersection and alienation of humans and objects. Tang Contemporary Art 19/F of 18 On Lan Street, Central (852) 2682 8289 Email Web Tu-Sa 11am to 7pm Tang Contemporary Art is a Hong Kong, Beijing and Bangkok-based art gallery, representing some leading key figures in Contemporary Chinese art. As one of the most critically driven exhibition spaces in Asia, Tang Contemporary Art is fully committed to promote local and international art, and encourage the dynamic exchange between artists …