Month: May 2024

Bruce Nauman at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Bruce Nauman /May 15, 2023 – Aug 18, 2024 / JC ContemporaryTai Kwun10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong KongTue – Sun, 11am – 7pm taikwun.hk “The point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry or art occurs.” — Bruce Nauman Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present a major survey of the US-born artist Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential artists working in the present day. Known for his broad range of works made in a variety of media from sculpture, photography, and video, to neon, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Nauman is widely recognised and admired as an “Artist’s Artist”. Part of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s series of major exhibitions spotlighting pioneering artists of our time, Bruce Nauman will be on view to the public from 15 May to 18 August 2024. Bruce Nauman at Tai Kwun Contemporary is the first major exhibition of Nauman’s in Hong Kong and features 35 works that traverse six decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition revisits fundamental elements ever-present in the …

Chan Hau Chun 陳巧真

Published by Artomity Magazine

Silent Sojourns /WMA Space / Hong Kong /Apr 19 – Jun 30, 2024 /John Batten / Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and artist Chan Hau Chun’s Silent Sojourns is the second project commissioned under WMA’s 2023/24 theme of “Home”. Chan has reconstructed-as-installation a Hong Kong residential unit divided into separate, black-panelled rooms inside WMA Space, its gallery in a nondescript office building. In these small-roomed exhibition spaces, Chan attempts to recreate the interior atmosphere of what she describes as an “ordinary-looking (residential) building” housing many subdivided flats in an undisclosed location in Hong Kong, possibly Sham Shui Po, where many such flats are located. Chan initially visited “a homeless acquaintance” in this building in late 2018. Over the following five years, she visited regularly and lived in the building, meeting residents from different floors. She began filming, including talking to residents, in 2019. In an excellent, zine-like booklet, containing photography, drawings, one- or two-line aphorisms, a formal explanatory essay and four pieces of poetry, Chan outlines her own observations, emotions and the reflections of residents. This …

Jakkai Siributr 賈凱·斯里布特

Published by Christie Lee

Everybody Wanna Be Happy /CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) /Hong Kong /Nov 11, 2023 – Feb 13, 2024 / The title of Thai artist Jakkai Siributr’s recent show at CHAT sounds slightly forced. While the “wanna” conveys playfulness, “Everyone wanna be happy” – a definitive statement, not a question – borders on aggression. That uneasy dichotomy sets the tone for exhibition itself, where vibrantly hued textile pieces belie bleaker histories – of dispossessed individuals and stripped-away identities. On a weekend afternoon, there was a stark contrast between grim, violent narratives in Siributr’s art and the lighthearted atmosphere of The Mills. Siributr’s first retrospective outside Thailand, Everyone Wanna be Happy provides a good overview of the artist’s ouerve, ranging from textile art to installations to wearable art, but some of the exhibits could perhaps use more explanatory notes, including the socio-historical events that inspired them. The artist, born in Bangkok in 1969, is known for textile art that questions official narratives. Exposed to the artform from an early age, Siributr comes from a family …

Preparing to pour concrete, Central waterfront reclamation, Central, Hong Kong, 7 February 2024

Published by John Batten

A pile foundation is given its final preparation while a group of construction workers on the ground wait for the all-clear to lift a large concrete pourer (on the ground, middle of photograph), to begin the pour. The anticipation of the moment is captured, to be repeated again-and-again as a waiting line of concrete-mixers deliver more concrete. This is the site of the ‘Central Reclamation Phase III’, which officially began in 2003 and became controversial when the old ‘Star’ Ferry building in 2006, and a little later, amidst public protests, the former Queen’s Pier were both demolished. Twenty years later, after the completion of the Central to Wan Chai underground by-pass road as ‘necessary’ infrastructure to justify this reclamation, ground-level construction is only now beginning. The entire Central waterfront will be altered from its late-1950s holistically planned historic City Hall precinct to provide a linked harbourfront pedestrian walkway from Kennedy Town to Causeway Bay and a large area on which commercial and retail buildings will be constructed. However, the final design of the Central reclamation …

Wong Yankwai 黃仁逵

Published by John Batten

Wong Yankwai: Half(s) & Halves of…Translated by Mak Suyin (in English & Chinese, 261pp)Published by Mount Zero Books, 2023 Published to coincide with a comprehensive exhibition of his paintings at HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity in late 2023, Wong Yankwai’s book of 25 loosely connected short stories is part memoir and part simple observation. Uppermost, it is contemplative: the writer musing, often cigarette in hand on a street corner, or on his walks to and then back from buying a packet of cigarettes or food at the market, featuring his wry surveillance of the changing streetscape and conversations with fellow street-habitués. Each story is complemented by two accompanying landscape-format photographs placed vertically underneath each other, a format that is also regularly seen on his personal Facebook page. They are not quite a diptych and not quite a sequence. But they are matched, sometimes perfectly, like a mirror image, often quietly dissimilarly – but usually the two photographs bounce together with a similar playfulness. For example, on page 67, two scenes look directly along …

Mak2 at DE SARTHE

Published by Artomity Magazine

Mak2Art SurvivorsMay 4 – Jun 22, 2024 DE SARTHE26/F, M Place54 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Hong Kong+852 2167 8896Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm desarthe.com Do you experience art world fatigue? Are you looking to reignite that spark? A little over one month following a harrowing art week, Mak2 presents solo exhibition Art Survivors at DE SARTHE, featuring a first-person zombie shooting game set in an imaginary art fair as well as a new body of works on canvas titled Home From Home. The exhibition hints facetiously at the undercurrents of the art world system, offering a chance for escape, where players of the art world may decompress via a detachment from tangible reality and a self-deprecating laugh. Beyond a humorous critique of the art market, the exhibition is also a congratulatory nod toward those who have been able to survive thus far. Art Survivors is on view until June 22. All visitors are invited to play the game.