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Wesley Tongson
The Journey / By DeWitt Cheng / The idea that life is a spiritual journey was once common in European and American religious culture: Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegorical adventure of a Christian soul, used to be required reading. Spirituality has largely fallen by the wayside, however, replaced by modern materialism. In developed countries now we focus on scientific and economic progress, and largely...
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Oscar Chan Yik Long
By Christie Lee Hong Kong artist Oscar Chan Yik Long talks demons, horror films and his big move to the City of Lights Chatting with Oscar Chan Yik Long at a coffee shop on D’Aguilar Street, Central, it’s hard to imagine that the sunny artist, decked out in one of his trademark vibrantly patterned shirts, lives his life haunted by demons. Born in Hong Kong...
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Kader Attia
Heroes Heridos / Lehmann Maupin / Hong Kong / Nov 1 – Dec 22 / By Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand / It is perhaps fitting that French-born Algerian artist Kader Attia is based in Berlin, a city of scars. A city where the ruins of a wall that once divided it are still visible; a city in which the atrocities committed during wars and by two repressive regimes...
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GayBird
By Sarah Karacs Electronic composer turned multimedia artist Leung Kei-Chuek, aka GayBird, is in possession of two racks of vintage synthesisers, each as curious and complex as the next, and each containing its own unique functionality, its own language and a poetry of its own. His favourite is the EMS Synthi AKS, a vintage machine with colourful dials that was made in the UK...
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Gordon Cheung
By Remo Notarianni It is hard to think of Gordon Cheung’s worlds as homes. But his landscapes, often mountainous, vast and empty, yet shimmering and abundant with flowers, might begin to look eerily familiar as technology blurs our reality and modernity transforms or even erases our living spaces. Home at Galerie Huit is a body of mixed-media paintings and sculptures that raises questions about...
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Fictioning as Method: Constructing Mythologies and The Other Story
By Christie Lee As Simon O’Sullivan says in Myth-Science and the Fictioning of Reality, the power and function of contemporary art have always been in summoning forth the thing that has “yet-to-come”. In an era of post-truth and alternative facts, when it appears increasingly difficult to sift through deluge of materials on social media and arrive at the truth, and when reality has become stranger than...
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Robert Rauschenberg
Vydocks Pace Gallery Hong Kong Sep 19 – Nov 2 Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand The “enfant terrible of the New York school”, as poet Frank O’Hara dubbed Robert Rauschenberg, reshaped 20th-century American art and left behind a boundary-breaking body of work characterised by experimentation and unorthodox use of different media. His early works, made in the 1950s and 60s, featured composites of found objects – bottles, a taxidermy...
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Sara Tse
Re Visit Tai Kwun Hong Kong Jun 8 – Jul 8 Christine Chan Chiu Touch Ceramics, in Hong Kong’s newest centre for heritage and arts, Tai Kwun, kicked off with an inaugural show of Sara Tse’s newest works. An artist long fascinated by the transience of time and the impermanence of life, Tse is known as much for her tactile abilities in modelling and...
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Backstage
By Ernest Wan All eyes in Hong Kong’s performing-arts world are currently on the Xiqu Centre in the West Kowloon Cultural District, which is slated to open at the end of this year. The building is officially described as “a centre for the production, education and research” of xiqu, the Putonghua word for what has conventionally and conveniently been known as “Chinese opera”. Accordingly,...
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Chris Huen Sin Kan
By Elliat Albrecht As a painter and in person, Chris Huen Sin Kan is far beyond his years. His intuitive paintings look less like those of a 27-year-old and more like those of an artist who’s had several decades to hone his visual language, arriving at a mature and idiosyncratic style of painting. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Huen has been drawing since...
