Author: John Batten

Moments in Time – Available for Immediate Purchase, exhibition and text at opening reception of watches and other items for sale, Sotheby’s Maison, Central, Hong Kong, 21 August 2025.

Published by John Batten

A few months ago, contributor Sam Knight’s article How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s was published in The New Yorker, following similar reports in art publications. Each discussed French-Israeli telecommunications billionaire Patrick Drahi’s ownership of auction house Sotheby’s, which he purchased in 2019. The article outlines Drahi’s propensity for cost-cutting, staff downsizing and extracting capital from the businesses he operates. Since his purchase, Sotheby’s debt has risen, nearly a quarter of its staff have left and US$1 billion of dividends have been paid to its holding company. Also, a disastrous recent attempt to introduce a new fixed set of fees for buyers and sellers at its auctions backfired. The fixed fees did not allow Sotheby’s art specialists any leeway to negotiate fees with potential consignors. Christie’s duly undercut its rival. Sotheby’s specialists consequently struggled to find stock for their auctions. Just seven months later, amid falling business, Sotheby’s reverted to its old fee structure. The above photograph could be illustrative of Sotheby’s recent approach to business. It also reflects the transactional …

Xu Bing’s Hong Kong Square Words 徐冰在香港：英文方塊字書法

Published by John Batten

After he was appointed as Hong Kong’s Ambassador for Cultural Promotion in 2024 for a term of five years, renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first commissioned art initiative, Xu Bing in Hong Kong: Square Word Calligraphy, can be seen at locations around Hong Kong. His exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), Eying East, Wondering West – Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, has converted the museum’s ground-floor annex into a classroom where the audience can learn about and practise Square Word Calligraphy, a unique form of writing he developed that transforms English into a visual style strongly resembling Chinese characters. Newly emblazoned on the museum’s exterior glass canopy using Xu’s Square Words are the museum name and the text: “Connect Art to People”. Expressing both the museum’s mission and Xu’s belief “in making art accessible to everyone”, this new display demonstrates the contrast between traditional Chinese calligraphic forms and the English alphabet to become an old-new, east-west, cross-cultural blend. Taking Xu’s art outside the museum to the public, his calligraphy is now exhibited to …

IM Pei 貝聿銘

Published by John Batten

The 1980s were volatile. Amid uncertainty over Hong Kong’s future before the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the FCC’s relocation in November 1982 to its current home, the Old Dairy Farm Building, offered some stability for a club with an itinerant history. A few months earlier, in August 1982, the city’s social climate had plummeted as the Hong Kong government announced the sale of a key piece of land to the Bank of China, triggering the Hong Kong dollar and the city’s stock market to tumble. The site was symbolically significant: Murray House, the officers’ quarters of the British Army at Murray Barracks at the bottom of Garden Road. The sale was a first step in the dismantling of British military facilities in Admiralty. The current big show at Hong Kong’s M+ museum is devoted to the work of Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei (known universally as IM Pei, 1917-2019), designer of Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower and other prestigious projects, including the Louvre  Pyramid in Paris. The exhibition avoids discussing the …

GOING, with aeroplane in distance, at end of day, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 19 July 2024.

Published by John Batten

“Final bids” on an auction item are called and then, with hammer raised and nothing more from bidders, the auctioneer’s “Going, going” brings it to an end: “Sold!”  This photograph hasn’t much to do with auctions, but it was taken as Sotheby’s and Christie’s were both preparing a radical reorientation of their businesses in Hong Kong. Taking over a space previously occupied by fashion house Armani, Sotheby’s new first-floor retail outlet in Central’s Chater House will sell a range of artwork, including designer furniture and antiquities, on consignment – and, no doubt, dabble in art’s primary market, artwork directly from an artist: always a point of chagrin for galleries, who believe auction houses should deal only in the secondary market. At ground level is another large viewing space that will host the auction floor. Meanwhile, Christie’s has taken space at The Henderson, Zaha Hadid Architects’ newly completed building in front of the Bank of China Tower and overlooking Chater Garden. The smart interior design, with movable panels and private client areas, is by Hong Kong-founded …

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. …

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 …

Mark Chung

Published by John Batten

The Next Level / Mark Chung’s exhibitions often feature opposites and duality. Objects are intentionally broken or deconstructed alongside ones that are carefully built. Claustrophobic installations are created in which settings, artwork and videos offer freedom and space, depicting or alluding to grids-as-cages set against free-floating-clouds. There are intense, blinding light and spots of darkness; technical skill and analogue craft-worship. Objects used for one purpose are skilfully reobjectified. At times, there are moments of anger and then great empathy, often sudden.  Everything in Mark’s exhibitions is considered and holistic, his efforts often a balance of raw individuality and boyish camaraderie with friends who have assisted. There is considerable thought and a striving-for-better anxiety: to remain genuine and true, and not to be a slacker. That motivation is familial, a matter of working as his paternal Hong Kong Chinese and maternal Austrian families would expect: striving for the next level. For a time, after his Wheezing exhibition in September 2020, and before he began studying in Amsterdam in late 2022, we would meet for lunch or …

Family having cake and coffee, overlooking a misty Victoria Harbour, from Rooftop Garden, M+, West Kowloon, Hong Kong, 12 February 2023.

Published by John Batten

After allowing free entry for the first year of its operation, M+ – Hong Kong’s new international museum – recently introduced admission charges. The museum has however maintained free access to the cinema and its outdoor areas, including the third floor rooftop garden. Positioned alongside the city’s West Kowloon harbourfront where this photograph was taken, the museum’s south elevation has uninterrupted views towards Hong Kong island and Lantau island. Recently installed moveable seating now allows visitors to flexibly find the best view and follow the sun in winter and shade in summer. The north section of the rooftop garden with views over the adjacent Palace Museum, the West Kowloon ship mooring area, Stonecutters Island and the Kowloon hills, has a wonderfully interactive installation of ‘Playscape’ sculpture by the American-Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi. Particularly loved by children and as a location for wedding photos, the sculpture can be touched and climbed on. This fundamental change in entry policy has never been openly debated. During its first year of free entry, the museum saw record numbers of visitors. Charging admission will undoubtedly impact visits made by …

Arthur Hacker’s Unique Hand 許敬雅的藝術之手

Published by John Batten

Arthur Hacker left London in 1967 for a job as an art director in the colonial Hong Kong Government’s Information Services Department. Among his luggage would have been the air of London’s cultural whirl, glimpsed in the ambience of movies of the time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup; revolutionary youth against the whole (damn) system in Lindsay Anderson’s If… ; and the violence and Stalinist social conditioning in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Hacker brought his tight modernist graphic skills with him, complemented by the era’s psychedelia and surreal humour. His artist’s eye was broadened by the satire and profanity of Oz magazine; the bright animation of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; the era’s counterculture and rock music; its fashion, book, magazine and record cover design; and the ground-breaking pop art of his British contemporaries Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. These progressive influences and an openness to depictions of life’s oddities would form a key source for Hacker’s curlicue graphical drawings.  Hacker came to Hong Kong with a liberal, individual outlook on life and over the years he …