Month: August 2024

BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair

Aug 30 – Sep 1, 2024 /Aug 30, 2024 | 2pm – 7pm /Aug 31 – Sep 1, 2024 | 12pm – 7pm / JC ContemporaryTai Kwun10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong taikwun.hk Tai Kwun Contemporary’s BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair is back for its sixth year. Held from August 30 to September 1, 2024, the latest edition hosts the largest number of exhibitors since its inception: over 110 local and international publishers, artists, booksellers and organisations will be featured across all floors of JC Contemporary at Tai Kwun. The three-day event will also feature a robust series of programmes (displays, performances, talks, workshops), together with Code.Xcess in the Artists’ Book Library. The special project explores how artists play with “codes”—using calendars, cartoons, dictionaries, digital programming language, guidebooks, karaoke, and more—to rethink how such structures form and affect our knowledge, understanding, and behaviour. This year’s BOOKED: promises to be another exciting edition, and features a range of new and returning exhibitors from Hong Kong and abroad, including: Printed Matter (New York), The Book Society / mediabus (Seoul), Lubok Verlag …

Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗

Published by Jessica Wan

Where does the water come from? Who is inside these empty aquariums? These questions linger in my mind as I enter the courtyard of a building in Venice’s historic Castello district, encountering Trevor Yeung’s site-specific installation Pond of Never Enough (2024). Created in response to the area’s aquatic identity and maritime characteristics, the work, part of the exhibition Courtyard of Attachments, consists of fishless tanks that extract water from the Grand Canal and filter it back to the Lagoon. Reminiscent of fish farm breeding pools or tanks in seafood restaurants, the aquariums symbolise the exertion of systemic control to produce commodities or desired outcomes. Highlighting how physical infrastructure impacts the ecosystems we inhabit, the water cycle hints at the deliberate support the system demands to maintain itself. From Hong Kong to Venice, the proximity of waterways and densely built urban spaces forms a connection that permeates our interactions with nature and social ecology. Often departing from his personal memory and experiences, Yeung offers a sensuous perspective on how we live with and relate to others. …

Bodies at Ping Pong Gintonería

Published by Artomity Magazine

Wilson Shieh, Ken Okiishi, John Coplans, Junko Oki, Wong Ping, Cary Kwok, Tala Madani, Cheung Yee, Annie Sprinkle, Carolee Schneemann, Konstantin Bessmertny, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Sarah Lucas Bodies Jul 12 – Oct 13, 2024 Ping Pong Gintonería 129 Second StreetL/G Nam Cheong House Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong +852 9035 6197 Tuesday – Sunday, 6pm – 10pm pingpong129art.com This is a summer show of all types of bodies. They all yearn for or revile different things: Ken Okiishi’s boys write postcards to their holiday crushes; Tala Madani disdains the men in her paintings, who look like halal butchers yearning for their lost youth and once active equipment; Konstantin Bessmertny’s weightlifter loves ‘ping pong because it cuts gender and age’ Wilson Shieh’s musical family are strangely androgynous and sexual at the same time; and Annie Sprinkle celebrates her breasts in a bosom ballet. The exhibition is part of Ping Pong’s 10th anniversary celebrations.

Lee Jin Woo 李鎮雨

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Inside the White Cube: Lee Jin Woo /White Cube /Hong Kong /Jun 1 – Sep 7, 2024 / Lee Jin Woo’s solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s White Cube Gallery, provides a rather distinctive, nearly spiritual experience, as we stare at his semi-sculptural, abstract paintings, created through the methodical, slow manipulation of paper and charcoal. Some of his works are in various shades of light blue, while others are in grey-black monochrome. They have been arranged at White Cube with the gallery’s signature spaciousness, leaving a whole wall for each work and fully drawing in the viewer. The paintings, with their monochrome stillness and the dynamic jagged surfaces, created by the way in which Lee manipulates paper and charcoal to create texture, seem to change constantly: if we look at the overall effect, we see an imaginary geological landscape, darker at the bottom, where the ground would be, gradually becoming more ethereal as we look at a dreamlike, sometimes ominous looking sky, pale blue or pale grey. Lee, born in Seoul in 1959, moved to Paris in …

A reminder of I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower, …

Published by John Batten

… steel scaffolding and tape, on the street, Shek Tong Tsui, Hong Kong, 27 May 2024 / The large retrospective exhibition devoted to the Chinese-American architect IM Pei (1917-2019) organised by Hong Kong’s M+ museum motivated me to look again at his Bank of China Tower in Central. Built on the site of Murray House, the former officers’ quarters of the British Army at Murray Barracks, its location, surrounded by major roads and on a sloping site, was described at the time of construction as “difficult”. If there were initial spatial restrictions, these are not obvious now. The tower has good ground-level pedestrian access and an imposing presence, with an architectural height of 315 metres; together with its two distinctive antenna masts, the building’s total height is 367 metres. The tower’s height impressively overwhelms the tight site and reaches upwards to overshadow lower adjacent buildings. Working with long-time structural engineering collaborator Leslie E Robertson (1928-2021), IM Pei developed the building’s form from four steel corner columns, onto which its weight transfers from its distinctive triangular/diamond framework. …