Author: Brady Ng

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 …

Howie Tsui 徐浩恩

Published by Brady Ng

When Howie Tsui and his family settled in Canada’s Thunder Bay, a sparsely populated, blue-collar corner of northern Ontario, his connection to Hong Kong was getting stretched. It was 1984, after a few years in Lagos. But like many members of the Hong Kong diaspora who were born in the 1970s and 80s, one medium dropped him back into the city’s orbit: its pop culture and entertainment. It arrived on videocassettes, mailed from Hong Kong and flown across the Pacific Ocean before it landed in the city, situated by Lake Superior. For young Tsui, that connection had a particularly personal layer: to satisfy the requirements for being new immigrants, his father had started a videocassette manufacturing business in Canada. The tapes that his uncle used to record programmes in Hong Kong could have been products made by the family business. On these tapes were slapstick comedies, wuxia action flicks and other output from a golden age of Hong Kong cinema, starring the likes of Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Stephen Chow and Michael Hui. There were …

Kongkee 江康泉（江記）

Published by Brady Ng

Warring States Cyberpunk /Tai Kwun Contemporary /Hong Kong /Dec 9, 2023 – Mar 3, 2024 / Futuristic DIY attitudes, military-style uniforms, grimy tech gear and the “high tech, low life” motif—the aesthetics of cyberpunk saturate our visual media so much that its countercultural origins are drowned out in its neon glow. Maybe this is because fiction is spilling into real life, and our survival instincts are kicking in as the consumer technology presented to us becomes increasingly enmeshed with our daily activities, algorithms and capitalistic overdrive shaping new habits without us realising. Invoking cyberpunk in East Asian metropolises such as Hong Kong and Tokyo is a dicey proposition. It’s too easy to let the look of things overshadow the big ideas. But that didn’t stop animation director and visual artist Kongkee (aka Kong Khong-chang) from using the genre as one of his starting points in the show Warring States Cyberpunk, in which he layered imagined undertakings and musings of Qu Yuan, a poet whose suicide by drowning inspired the annual Dragon Boat Festival, over the …

Mrinalini Mukherjee

Published by Brady Ng

mould the wing to match the photograph / Asia Art Archive / Sep 20, 2023 – Feb 29, 2024 / Humans use knots to keep records, create decor, bind one another and fasten objects. Tying knots is an inherently violent process that strains the rope, bending and crushing its fibres until one day in the future, it snaps under the tension of uneven forces. Our knotting introduces weakness to a cord, slowly draining its strength to serve our goals. The late artist Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) formed her art practice around knotted, woven hemp fibre. Her sculptures are monumental, meant to evoke “the feeling of awe when you walk into the small sanctum of a temple and look up to be held by an iconic presence”, as the artist said. To present her work in Hong Kong, Asia Art Archive’s team installed one sculpture by Mukherjee, Pari (1986), at the entrance of its library. The rest of the showcase highlighted the modernist sculptor’s career and an archive created by indexing nearly 2,400 pieces of media, including …

Frank Walter

Published by Brady Ng

Pastorale / David Zwirner / Hong Kong / Sep 14 – Oct 28, 2023 / When Frank Walter was born in Antigua in 1926, the British had freed slaves on the island roughly 90 years before. Yet the wounds of humans owning humans had merely been scabbed over; the aches were persistent. Children and grandchildren of former slaves were part of a system of labour that still rhymed with the treatment of their forebears. Case in point: 22 years later, Walter was the first black man to become a manager at the Antiguan Sugar Syndicate. He wanted to improve the industry and give his fellow Antiguans fair pay and better working conditions. It was not a smooth path, but Walter did everything he could to make his homeland a better place, including tolerating the bigotry of racial prejudice in England, Scotland and Germany when he sought to learn new ways to farm. It’s easy to imagine that, upon returning to Antigua, Walter’s act of putting that knowledge into practice picked at those wounds. How do …

Szelit Cheung and Olga Grotova

Published by Brady Ng

Door to Door / The Shophouse / Hong Kong / Jul 15– Aug 13, 2023 / Doors open memories. Portals from our past are linked to significant locations or major milestones – the entrance to our childhood home or the gate leading into a campus where we embarked on intellectual explorations, for instance. When we think about important moments that we’ve experienced, those journeys can be traced through doors too, each entryway a marker for consequential junctures in our lives. For its summer show, Tai Hang’s The Shophouse organised a four-week artist residency and open studio programme that led up to a month-long exhibition, Door to Door. The two artists involved were Hong Kong painter Szelit Cheung and London-based Russian artist Olga Grotova, who created new artworks that drew from The Shophouse’s architectural heritage and, more broadly, the city in which the gallery is situated. In Cheung’s section of the presentation, Door I (all works 2023) showed four rotating panels opening up to let beams of natural light into a muted blue space, the rays …

Vaevae Chan

Published by Brady Ng

She Told Me to Head to the Sea @ Juen Juen Gung / Hong Kong / Ceramist Vaevae Chan has built a private cave. Located within a nondescript industrial building in Sun Po Kong, Kowloon, the space is where Chan retreated while contending with health problems, a parent’s death and upheaval in Hong Kong. Between 2018 and 2021, the artist toiled in private, turning it into a studio and exhibition space. This culminated in her inaugural project, She Told Me to Head to the Sea, which was a unique experience for visitors. For a time, Juen Juen Gung, as Chan calls her space, was shrouded in mystery. Posts on Instagram created some buzz, but none of the images delivered the feeling that Chan aimed to instil in visitors. While descriptions of the show spread by word of mouth, little information was available. The only way to find out more was to book a slot for a visit. She Told Me to Head to the Sea can be accessed via four locked doors, with three of …

Myth Makers — Spectrosynthesis III

Published by Brady Ng

Tai Kwun Contemporary / Hong Kong / Dec 24 – Apr 10, 2023 / There’s a quote that aspirational content creators like to share online: “Those who tell stories rule the world.” It’s often attributed to Plato or Aristotle, while some say it is wisdom passed down by the Hopi or Navajo Native Americans, but nobody can pin down its origins. Perhaps the line is a modern piece of prose attached to the distant past to feign legitimacy, or maybe thinkers from different eras and geographies landed on the same thought. In any case, it’s branded into the collective consciousness of 21st-century storytellers, giving a semblance of meaning to the words and images they generate. This is precisely how myths are seeded, their origins eventually lost but tales retold with embellishments and new interpretations injected in each iteration. Maybe those who make myths don’t rule the world, but they certainly shape it. The third edition of the Sunpride Foundation’s Spectrosynthesis exhibitions, presented at Tai Kwun and curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, involved artworks …

Wu Jiaru 吳佳儒

Published by Brady Ng

To the Naiad’s House / Flowers Gallery / Hong Kong / Sep 29 – Nov 12 / The story of Southeast China in the 1990s is one of breakneck transformation. Cranes worked in tufts of dust, new structures climbed steel frames to scrape the sky, and opportunity was in the air. For many millions of people in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and smaller townships, the proverbial first bucket of gold seemed less like a fantasy and more like a real possibility. As China’s economy opened up, Southeast China felt closer to Hong Kong than ever before. Media and information moved across the border. Even though a border and bureaucracy separated Guangdong province from Hong Kong, people couldn’t help but form impressions of the city through glimpses offered in films and portrayals on television. For her recent exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Wu Jiaru mined her upbringing in Guangzhou and feelings as a Hong Kong transplant, revisiting experiences as a child who spent time in her mother’s restaurant, watching the world change through a TV screen. The solo presentation …

Virtue Village

Published by Brady Ng

Even in the most diverse communities, clusters of people must share culture, space and experiences for bonds to form. As individuals mingle and interact with each other, their identities are sculpted by external forces. We may conform to norms established by others, or rebel to smash the status quo and shatter homogeneity. Village Porn, the first major solo presentation by the artist duo Virtue Village, formed by Joseph Chen and Cas Wong, deploys the visual grammar of BDSM, auto repair and shibari, layered with urban grime, queerness and anal sex, all dropped into PHD Group’s raw space in Wanchai. The show started with RUSH (all works 2022), a digital print that spans more than 5.5 metres to present an orgiastic mishmash of sparse references pointing in different conceptual directions, with a couple of visuals that thread through other works in the show – flames and hearts. More interesting was the physical presentation of RUSH at PHD. A shallow bed of dirt ran along the wall on which the print hung, with several green plants situated …