Author: Artomity Magazine

Travel back in time to regain family love – “Papa” premieres in Hong Kong this September

Non-verbal masked theatre performance Papa by Théâtre de la Feuille, one of JOCKEY CLUB New Arts Power‘s ticketed showcase performances, makes its Hong Kong premiere after touring in Asia and Europe. A loving sketch of an old watchmaker who wants to recover the lost time after his child has moved away, it leads the audience to contemplate ageing, memory, changing family dynamics and the relationship between the past and the present. About Théâtre de la Feuille Physical theatre Théâtre de la Feuille, founded by Ata Wong Chun Tat in 2010 in Paris, combines western methodology from Jacques Lecoq with eastern artistic traditions. It is currently based in Hong Kong but tours globally. Join us at one of the eight performances at Black Box Theatre, Kwai Tsing Theatre. Date & Time September 19| 8pm September 22 – 23 |3pm September 23 | 11.30am $150 (Enjoy up to 80% package discount) Tickets are now available at URBTIX . Photo: Chuk Yin Man

M+ Matters: Art and Design in the Digital Realm

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31 August–1 September, 2018 Web Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / #MPlusMatters M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture, is pleased to announce ‘M+ Matters: Art and Design in the Digital Realm’, to be held at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts on Friday, 31 August and Saturday, 1 September, 2018. ‘Art and Design in the Digital Realm’ is a two-night, one-day event that brings together artists, designers, creative technologists, and curators from across Asia, Europe, and North America. Consisting of a performance, a panel discussion, a series of artist talks, and a data design hackathon, ‘Art and Design in the Digital Realm’ is M+’s most direct articulation of its commitment to fostering conversations and defining a perspective on digital visual culture today. As a museum dedicated to contemporary visual art, design and architecture, and the moving image, M+ is deeply engaged with current digital practices, with a particular focus on experiments, innovations, and critical voices from Asia. ‘Art and Design in the Digital Realm’ looks at the immense impact of digital technology …

Catherine Opie

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By Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand American photographer Catherine Opie once described herself as a “kind of twisted social documentary photographer”. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, the young Opie picked up a camera at age nine, inspired by the photographs of Lewis Hine, and immediately began photographing friends and her community. Over several decades she has gone from marginalised photographer of the marginalised to a member of the establishment: she had a 2009 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, is a tenured professor at UCLA and sits on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Like Walker Evans before her, and later Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus, Opie shares an interest in and affection for subcultures, and for individuals and communities overlooked by society. Her early series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993-97) mixed traditional portrait photography with less traditional subjects, depicting her friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles, transgender women and men, drag queens, and members of the tatted, …

Cheuk Wing Nam, Han Jinpeng

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Wander in Style Leo Gallery at Little Tai Hang Hong Kong May 20 – Jul 31 Christine Chan Chiu For Wander in Style, a collaboration with Leo Gallery, Little Tai Hang is displaying works by new-media artists Cheuk Wing Nam and Han Jinpeng in its gallery and outdoor public areas. The whimsical pop-up show explores social themes and challenges the conventions that have traditionally surrounded classical art. Cheuk’s sound sculpture Avaritia – Silent Greed consists of about 90 green glass bottles of various sizes, suspended from a large ceiling grid similar to those used for hanging ower pots. Dangling inside each of the bottomless containers is a shard of plastic that is connected to a power source and programmed to swivel around randomly. The result is a cacophony of sounds of varying frequencies as the plastic shards strike glass. Viewers are encouraged to visit at dusk, specifically at 7pm when it is most atmospheric: from this hour, it becomes clear in the darkened space that the bottles are also individually lit with warm fluorescent lights. The …

Chris Huen Sin Kan

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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 he was a small child, and earned a BA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Made with fluid and sometimes staccato brushstrokes, his paintings are characterised by their quotidian content and sketch-like quality; Huen achieves this aesthetic in part by thinning down his oils with turpentine until they appear almost like watercolours. The bare canvas shows through in many places on his paintings; the viewer is left to fill in the blanks of negative space like a word game. These gaps in perception are fundamental to Huen’s philosophy: rather than painting direct representations or his memories, he is concerned with exploring the fragmented experience of looking. With a …

Tai Kwun

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By Elliat Albrecht Hong Kong has a soft spot for crime and police stories. Films about gangs, double agents and bloody conflicts have long been a mainstay of local cinema. There is an underlying psychological reason: a surge of public interest in the genre occurred in the 1980s, coinciding with the UK and China’s negotiations over the 1997 handover. Amid anxiety about the political future, the movies often depicted the goings-on of crime syndicates and their clashes with authority to explore themes of loyalty, heroism and chaos. This blue-coat fascination laid the foundation for some of the most significant pop culture of the 1980s – and continues to provide inspiration today, in the form of the city’s newest cultural institution. While Hong Kong awaits the opening of M+, its much-anticipated major museum of visual culture, the recently opened Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts is poised to tick the mid-size museum box. Built on a historical site, the 19th-century Central Police Station compound on Hollywood Road, Tai Kwun has an unusual cross-disciplinary remit. The …

David Zwirner presents Brilliant City

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6 July – 4 August 2018 Opening reception: Friday, 6 July, 6 – 8pm David Zwirner is pleased to present Brilliant City, a group exhibition organized by Leo Xu at the gallery’s Hong Kong location featuring work by Francis Alÿs, Chen Wei, Stan Douglas, Li Qing, Michael Lin, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Ming Wong. The exhibition borrows its title from the lyrics of the 1987 Cantopop classic song “Starry Night,” in which the Hong Kong–based electro duo Tat Ming Pair illustrate the perplexing brilliance of the city’s landscape at night, and the feeling of loss and doubt that it harbors amongst its youth. Drawing inspiration from Hong Kong, an archetypal dystopian metropolis characterized by its unparalleled density and lofty high rises, this exhibition explores how artists across generations and locations have engaged with the complexity of urban space. 5-6/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road, Central T (852) 2119 5900 Email Tu-Sa 11am – 7pm Image: Iron Sheet by Chen Wei, Archival inkjet print, framed, 150 × 187.5 cm print, 154 × 191.5 cm framed, 2015.

M+ Matters: Post-1949 Visual and Material Culture in China

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July 5, 2018, 6.30pm Miller Theater, Asia Society Hong Kong Center 9 Justice Dr Admiralty Hong Kong M+ Matters: Post-1949 Visual and Material Culture in China is a public talk on July 5, 2018, that considers critical issues in the first decades of the socialist state in China through a multidisciplinary lens, examining design and visual art. Bringing together three international scholars and curators, it aims to propose new ways of appraising the highly complex narratives of socialist cultural production in China, which have often been overlooked by historians. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese state devised visual and material strategies to achieve its particular conception of socialist modernity. The talk builds on pioneering studies that contextualise and re-examine the manifestations of this modernity—often positioned as alternative or oppositional—across geographies, time, and disciplines within China’s shifting socio-economic and political frameworks. The talk consists of three presentations: Everyday Desirables: What Wristwatches, Sewing Machines, and Bicycles Can Tell Us about Mao-Era China Karl Gerth (Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Endowed Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of …

Jane Lee

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Red States Hong Kong Arts Centre Hong Kong May 11 – Jun 10 Christine Chan Chiu The aptly named Red States showcased 17 new works and smaller existing pieces and studies by Singaporean artist Jane Lee, revolving around the boldest of all colours. Alluring and provocative, the exhibition invited its audience to contemplate the emotions and connotations that the colour red conjures. More importantly, it provided an insight into Lee’s innovative practice and artistic virtuosity for the past 15 years, highlighting her vastly tactile signature techniques, including coiling, layering, mixing and stacking. At the entrance, visitors were greeted by a large heap of tangled red canvas threads, a prelude of what was to come. The rectangular piece The Story of Canvas #2, hanging in the main gallery, is made of more layers of canvas threads, giving it an organic, fibrous texture. The Story of Canvas #1 and The Story of Canvas #1a followed – compositions of roundels of varying sizes made from coils of red canvas strips, strategically arranged and spanning 500cm along the wall. These works prompt the viewer to abandon all preconceived …

Sarah Morris

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By Nooshfar Afnan The Importance of Conversation Conversations and research form the bedrock of Sarah Morris’s artistic practice. The artist conceives most of her creative ideas through conversations, followed by research to give shape to those thoughts, and then even more conversations to realise a work. These conversations involve fellow artists, curators and potential film subjects. But the spark for new ideas for artistic projects most regularly comes from conversations with the group of culturally diverse young professional studio assistants from a variety of disciplines that she surrounds herself with. The New York-based artist was in Beijing in March for the opening of her solo show at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Sarah Morris: Odysseus Factor. Resembling a mid-career retrospective, it is one of her biggest shows to date. It also marks a decade since Morris came to China to shoot her film Beijing (2008) about the Olympics. Ten years is also the amount of time it took Odysseus to sail home to Ithaca and the duration of the Trojan war, hence the show’s title. Morris is busy …