Author: Brady Ng

Slavs and Tatars 斯拉夫與韃靼

Published by Brady Ng

Most writing about Slavs and Tatars is hagiographic. Catalogue essays describe their research cycles in reverential terms, and magazine profiles home in on their geographical ruminations and visual puns. The collective and their collaborators make all of this easy precisely because they are articulate, having published more than a dozen books and much more ephemera. That has a cost. When a practice is primarily described through its own terms, some questions go unasked. What does it mean to aestheticise syncretism for a predominantly western audience? Does the collective’s strategic unlocatability – not here, not there – resolve anything, or does it simply make irresolution appear to be philosophy? And who exactly is the region “east of the former Berlin Wall, west of the Great Wall of China” being made legible for? There was a hint of an answer in a conversation hosted at the M+ Lounge featuring Payam Sharifi, one of the founders of the collective, in March. He described books as talismans, adding that the reason why Slavs and Tatars have pursued publishing as …

Samson Young 楊嘉輝

Published by Brady Ng

Pavilion /New Taipei City Art Museum /Taipei /Sep 9, 2025 – Jan 4, 2026 / György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, a piece for 16-part mixed choir, is notoriously difficult for musicians and vocalists to perform. Its rhythmic subdivisions and complexities melt away the performers’ sense of traditional bar lines. Entrances are subtle, so much so that listeners aren’t meant to consciously perceive them, which means members of the choir need to maintain perfect control over pitch at extremely soft levels, gradually finding their way into micropolyphonic composition. Each of the 16 singers has a unique part, so there’s no space for error in intonation, no room for someone else to pick up the slack. The result is a piece of music that feels alien to ears more accustomed to conventional tastes. It’s downright hallucinatory. Most people know Lux Aeterna through Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic treatment of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the track sculpts an air of mystery around a monolith – a rectangular black slab of non-human origin. That’s precisely what walking into …

GayBird 梁基爵

Published by Brady Ng

For most people who were at GayBird’s Fragile! Human Inside performance at Tai Kwun in April 2025, it was impossible to anticipate the many twists and turns that would take place. The 70-minute performance started at the Laundry Steps, with an animation projected next to an installation that resembled a human head, constructed using cardboard boxes as building blocks and screens for eyes, with a gap left for its mouth – altogether roughly five metres in height. An anthropomorphic avian creature rambled on in the animation, steeping the audience in its conspiratorial bent: “So these organisations aren’t aiming to take away any memory of importance, but just these minor details that are so inconspicuous,” it said. “Nobody even suspects them when something happens.” What followed was a relocation of the entire audience into JC Cube, the heritage and arts complex’s auditorium, where GayBird awaited on a podium above the seats. He views this migration as the audience’s journey into a virtual space, where he orchestrated a performance of light and sound while wearing an Apple …

Ha Bik Chuen 夏碧泉

Published by Brady Ng

Reframing Strangeness /Para Site /Hong Kong /May 10 – August 10, 2025 / Typhoon season in Hong Kong is brutal. Tree limbs snap and fall. Ships are damaged or even run aground. Roads flood or, worse yet, cave in. But the rain gave Ha Bik Chuen inspiration. Specifically, he saw how the shoes of pedestrians left imprints on newsprint that lay stuck to the ground after it dried, the paper moulded with new bumps and contours, traces left by the people who had walked through as they sought cover from the deluge. The artist decided to dedicate part of his practice to making paper artworks with pronounced bumps and grooves. Ha needed a way to shape the sheets, so he made more than 100 collagraph plates, which he called “motherboards”, between 1974 and 1995. The process surely drew upon the woodworking skills that he acquired as a teenage apprentice in a construction and decoration workshop in Jiangmen. With these print matrixes, Ha created an estimated 3,000 collagraphs, each with about six layers of paper and …

Wu Jiaru 吳佳儒

Published by Brady Ng

It’s no simple task to pin down Wu Jiaru’s practice. Blending mythical themes with personal experiences, contemporary cogitations with historical perspectives, her paintings, sculptures and other artworks are the results of constant discovery. Her artistic creations have been shown in New York, London and across Asia. On the occasion of her most recent exhibition, A Brief Digression, presented at HART Haus, Wu sat down with Artomity for a conversation about the way she makes art, the flow of people and goods, and the way information is lost and recovered through multiple stages of translation. Brady Ng: We’re visiting your studio. Tell me about it. Wu Jiaru: It’s like a storage unit! My studio is in HART Haus, which is basically a coworking space for artists. When I need to make larger pieces, I use the public spaces that are more open. My own studio space is mainly for storing artworks. I’ve been renting space here since I graduated from City University of Hong Kong in 2017. BN: Jeffrey Shaw, who is one of the pioneers …

Reina Sugihara 杉原玲那

Published by Brady Ng

Respirare /Empty Gallery /Hong Kong /Dec 8, 2024 – Mar 1, 2025 / Everyone experienced the Covid pandemic on different terms. There were forced lockdowns for some and productive isolation for others, social pods and cautious public encounters, with a constant reminder of strained medical systems and an immense loss of life. For Tokyo-based painter Reina Sugihara, that era provided an opportunity to slow down and start a new hobby. Like many millennials around the world, she picked up bird watching. That was one of the kernels for Respirare, an exhibition of paintings by Sugihara at Empty Gallery. After a bout of sickness that affected her breathing, the artist came across an article about a bar-tailed godwit that set a world record by flying nonstop for 11 days, covering 13,559 kilometres between Alaska and Tasmania. Sugihara began to consider how birds breathe. Unlike human lungs, which move air in and out through the same pathway, avian respiration enables a one-way air flow, making it an efficient system that enhances oxygen uptake. This is crucial for …

Christopher K Ho 何恩懷

Published by Brady Ng

I Am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor /PHD Group /Sep 14 – Nov 30, 2024 / Christopher K Ho isn’t a septuagenarian; he’s a couple of decades years younger than that. Ho isn’t British either; he was born in Hong Kong, and his upbringing and education were primarily in the United States. He’s an artist who splits his time between Hong Kong and the US, and an arts administrator who is the executive director of Asia Art Archive. For his show at PHD Group, I Am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor, Ho made 30 brass and aluminium sculptures forming one series, Return to Order, over the past three years. The full set was shown alongside 10 new drawings, each of which corresponds to one of the hefty three-dimensional works. Ho’s creative process behind the artworks was anchored by an architectural exercise that starts with nine squares in a grid. By beginning with an arrangement of three rows or columns of three squares, architects make adjustments to introduce complexity to a space. The squares can be resized, reshaped …

Liao Jiaming 廖家明

Published by Brady Ng

Melting Suns on the Screen /DE SARTHE Gallery /Hong Kong /Aug 31 – Sept 28, 2024 / As a preamble to his exhibition Melting Suns on the Screen, Liao Jiaming set up The Arcana Intelligent (2023), an interactive installation meant to simulate interactions with a sacred digital entity. Participants visiting de Sarthe Gallery sat or knelt on a cushion placed on the gallery’s floor, looking up at a nude, seemingly genderless avatar. Its barrel chest and awkwardly outstretched arms gave it an inhuman quality. Behind it was a vast vista of urban towers – blocky, dense, unclear whether they were part of an idealised, futuristic cityscape or a place at the end of civilisation. The avatar and participant spoke to one another, their brief interactions culminating in a question posed by the visitor, the bigger the better. Silicon and software cogitations would yield an oracular response in the form of a dynamically generated tarot card. Do this on the right day and someone, such as artist Amy Tong, was present to decipher the image and …

Izumi Kato 加藤泉

Published by Brady Ng

Perrotin /Hong Kong /Mar 24 – May 18, 2024 / Model figures offer a surprisingly satisfying unboxing experience. First, images on the cardboard box spark the imagination – how could the model within fit into one’s collection? Then there’s the sense of anticipation during the ride home, followed by care when the box is finally opened. Loose pieces of plastic might be found in sealed, see-through bags, or the parts might need to be snipped from sprues, a “new toy smell” released after being sealed in at the factory. The figure will require assembly and there could be no instructions. Some models need to be painted, a process that could take days or weeks. Finally, decals add a touch of realism or personalisation. The model joins an army or fleet or menagerie, and then the collector starts the process all over again. Izumi Kato loves vintage toys. As a youngster, he particularly liked models of fauna from around the world, perhaps using them to connect with creatures that he couldn’t encounter in his hometown in …

Samuel Swope

Published by Brady Ng

Nervous Thrasher / Current Plans / Hong Kong / Feb 3, 2024 The way drones glide through the sky looks effortless, even elegant. But the mechanics behind it are anything but. Propellers turn the rotary motion of blades into linear thrust, creating a disruptive wake. A raw display of power aside, the noise is raucous. All of that comes together in Samuel Swope’s art practice, which he demonstrated for an audience in February at Current Plans, hosted at Spring Workshop in Wong Chuk Hang, as the inaugural project of UnderCurrents, a “year-long series of experimental happenings”. The event was called Nervous Thrasher and, in Swope’s words, was a performative installation involving acts of real-time sonification of airborne sculptures, in which data is collected and mapped into audio form. One sculpture was a column of six black balloon-like vessels filled with helium, with a drone as its base in a visual nod to Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, which was launched by the USSR in October 1957. During his performance, Swope approached it to plug in …