Month: January 2023

Wing Sze Lam and Heiwa Wong

Published by Artomity Magazine

Dailyscape /1999 Art Space /Hong Kong /Oct 8 – 30, 2022 /Ophelia Lai / In Wing Sze Lam’s stars in the woods (2016) and stars in the water (2018), a pair of moving-image works, darkness descends gradually over dense foliage and docked boats until the only sources of illumination are streetlamps and passing vehicles. The camera never moves in either sequence, registering the day’s slow surrender to shadow. Screened near the entrance of 1999 Art Space on two wall-mounted smartphones, the works are an apt introduction to Lam and Heiwa Wong’s Dailyscape, a dual show about documentation and urban memory.  Wong’s photographs likewise carry a sense of duration despite their static medium, evoking long evenings spent under an artificial glow. Images of a laptop screen reflected in a bedroom window and bands of light cutting into a dark footbridge (both from the series stars in the city, 2022) capture the electric quiet of the nighttime.  Lam finds a hidden language of luminescence in “Turn on the light when you are back” (2017–18), comprising clips of …

Sharon Lee 李卓媛

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Sharon Lee’s practice explores and questions photography as a medium. Inspired by her family life and by the everyday, the Hong Kong artist experiments with various techniques, textures and materials to mould the blurry remains of memory, poetically capturing the slippery layers of time. Her work revolves around the notions of absence and disappearance as tangible and often constructed presences. Caroline Ha Thuc: From the start, you have explored photography in association with various modes of printing, including ceramics. Where does that come from? Sharon Lee: I use photography; meanwhile I do not conform to photography. I embrace alternative image-making as a form of negotiation, not necessarily with a single photograph but with the history, culture, art, science and technology that it carries.  I started photography when I found myself with no resources for art making – no studio, no art supplies but a 55-sq-ft shared bedroom. I find the medium a great tool to construct a visual reality. It frames and unframes, hides and reveals simultaneously. I was in Vienna for an academic exchange year …

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Six years after his first solo exhibition at Para Site, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has come back to Hong Kong to present his recent artworks at Kiang Malingue Gallery. The Thai artist and film director has played with the gallery’s unusual architecture, filling its high ceilings and empty spaces with haunting presences, widening hitherto invisible fault lines and holes from which the mind can easily flee away. Conceived as a calm, meditative exhibition, A Planet of Silence gathers an incredibly rich array of works from different series, reflecting the multiple experimental approaches of the artist’s practice.  It opens with A Minor History (2021), Apichatpong’s recent series of photographs taken in Isan, Thailand’s northeastern region and the artist’s homeland. He travelled there during Covid, along the Mekong River, staying in different hotel rooms that he photographed. The departure point of his journey was a piece of news about the murder of two political dissidents, whose bodies were found in the river. However, many more issues coalesce in this eerie series, which portraits the Mekong as a witness and …

Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Published by Artomity Magazine

Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III Dec 24, 2022 – Apr 10, 2023 JC Contemporary Tai Kwun 10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tue – Sun, 11am – 7pm taikwun.hk Tai Kwun Contemporary and Sunpride Foundation are proud to co-present Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, one of the first major survey exhibitions on LGBTQ+ perspectives in Hong Kong. Curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, Myth Makers draws inspiration from artists addressing “queer mythologies,” who highlight same-sex love / desire and gender fluidity as found in ancient belief systems and traditions in Asia. Expanding on the Spectrosynthesis exhibition series from Taipei and Bangkok, this iteration in Hong Kong features more than 100 artworks by over 60 artists in Asia and its diasporas, with one third of the works loaned from Sunpride’s collection. Myth Makers unfolds through three distinctive chapters and encompasses newly produced artworks and historical works from the 1940s to the 1990s. In bringing together such a plethora of artistic perspectives and vocabularies, the exhibition endeavours to present a multiplicity of conversations, representations, and anti-representations of stories, individuals and …