Author: Christie Lee

Jakkai Siributr 賈凱·斯里布特

Published by Christie Lee

Everybody Wanna Be Happy /CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) /Hong Kong /Nov 11, 2023 – Feb 13, 2024 / The title of Thai artist Jakkai Siributr’s recent show at CHAT sounds slightly forced. While the “wanna” conveys playfulness, “Everyone wanna be happy” – a definitive statement, not a question – borders on aggression.  That uneasy dichotomy sets the tone for exhibition itself, where vibrantly hued textile pieces belie bleaker histories – of dispossessed individuals and stripped-away identities.  On a weekend afternoon, there was a stark contrast between grim, violent narratives in Siributr’s art and the lighthearted atmosphere of The Mills.  Siributr’s first retrospective outside Thailand, Everyone Wanna be Happy provides a good overview of the artist’s ouerve, ranging from textile art to installations to wearable art, but some of the exhibits could perhaps use more explanatory notes, including the socio-historical events that inspired them.  The artist, born in Bangkok in 1969, is known for textile art that questions official narratives.  Exposed to the artform from an early age, Siributr comes from a family …

Neo Rauch 尼奧·勞赫

Published by Christie Lee

Field Signs / David Zwirner / Hong Kong / Nov 16, 2023 – Feb 24, 2024 / Throughout history, human beings have always sought signs: from zodiac signs that give meaning to what they believe in or do to literal signs that provide instructions during an election or protest. The pursuit of signs often reaches a climax at the end or beginning of the year, when we want to peer into a crystal ball and figure out what the new year has in store.  Field Signs, Neo Rauch’s latest exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, also features plenty of signs. While anyone hoping to find easy meaning in Rauch’s art will be sorely disappointed, the exhibition feels as contemporary and relevant as the artist’s work always does.  The exhibition title has a double meaning, referring not only to signs farmers use to mark a crop variety but also to signs used by warring states or parties in the past. The exhibition trots out Rauch’s usual bevy of people at work or play, following socialist realist …

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Published by Christie Lee

The Shop / David Zwirner / Hong Kong / Mar 20 – May 6 / Stepping out of the elevator at David Zwirner Hong Kong, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in the wrong location. What lies before you is an old-fashioned umbrella shop – the kind more commonly seen at street level in Hong Kong. The shop is stuffed to the gills with brollies, Chinese lanterns, manuals, books, a replica of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It’s a delight to peruse. All items are for sale.  Is the installation a commentary on the idea of art? An attempt to elevate the umbrella from a banal, everyday object to art by situating it in a different setting? Its creator, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, has said that Duchamp’s Fountain is his favourite art piece.  Tiravanija is a master at using everyday experiences such as eating and playing to shed light on how the personal is also the political, and how art is a part of the everyday. He is perhaps best known for exhibitions involving …

signals… at Para Site

Published by Christie Lee

In 1996, on the eve of Hong Kong handover to China, a bunch of Hong Kong artists founded one of the city’s longest-running independent art spaces in Kennedy Town. Some 27 years later, it has moved to North Point, with the city it is in also facing uncertain times, not least because it has just emerged after three years of pandemic restrictions.  Executive director Billy Tang is looking back to Para Site’s artist-run beginnings, where it was, above all, a platform for artists and ideas to come together. The idea is to have longer exhibitions, where ideas are allowed to gestate over a period of time. This shift in curatorial thinking takes solid form in Para Site’s latest exhibition, signals…, which features three chapters and is curated by Tang and Para Site curator Celia Ho.  While the first chapter, signals…storms and patterns, was about hums beneath the calm, signals…folds and splits, which opened on June 9, explores liminal spaces. The third exhibition, signals…here and there, centres on the idea of dispersal.  Installation view of ‘signals…folds …

Vvzela Kook

Published by Christie Lee

Phantom Island / Oi! / Hong Kong / Sep 5 – Jan 2, 2023 / In 1851, the government used rubble left by a giant fire in Sheung Wan to extend the shoreline by 15 metres. Since then, many more reclamation projects have taken place in Hong Kong, and 20 or so islands have disappeared from the city’s map.  The extension of our city and the disappearance of our islands find playful expression in Vvzela Kook’s Phantom Island exhibition, at Oi! until January 2.  The idea for a show on Hong Kong’s disappearing islands emerged from the artist’s research into the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club (RHKYC). She’d come across a photo of the former clubhouse of the RHKYC, which used to sit on the current site of Oi! before it was relocated to Kellett Island. Kook noticed that Kellett Island itself stopped being an island after reclamation work in the area. After the discovery, the artist started researching Hong Kong’s disappearing islands. “Wikipedia says 19 islands have disappeared, but I actually found more than …

John Currin

Published by Christie Lee

Gagosian /Hong Kong /Nov 26 – Feb 29, 2020 / “There is a kind of distortion that happens with adoration,” says John Currin. I’m not sure that’s true at the artist’s first show at Gagosian Hong Kong. Despite the blooming cheeks, perfect brows, rosy lips and impeccable curls, the artist’s portraits are more kooky than sweet. For one thing, the women are smiling with teeth. Showing the teeth used to be a breach of etiquette for the upper class—usually the only class who could afford the time to sit for formal portraits before the modern era. Whereas classical portraits usually feature solemn sitters, the women in Currin’s portraits have either delirious or vacant expressions. One would never expect a half-naked woman who is looking sideways out the frame to pull a sort of semi-insane smile. Nor would one expect a woman decked in a red robe in the style of a saint to be grinning stupidly. In The Philosopher, a woman decked in a brownish-grey trench coat and a bandana holds a wine bottle in one hand while …

Oscar Chan Yik Long

Published by Christie Lee

Hong Kong artist Oscar Chan Yik Long talks demons, horror films and his big move to the City of Lights  Chatting with Oscar Chan Yik Long at a coffee shop on D’Aguilar Street, Central, it’s hard to imagine that the sunny artist, decked out in one of his trademark vibrantly patterned shirts, lives his life haunted by demons.  Born in Hong Kong in 1988, Chan studied at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts but it was an “abstract” fear of demons, planted in the artist’s mind when he was still a young boy, that weighs most heavily on his paintings. As much as he fears and is repelled by fear, he is also drawn to it. In his art, screaming skeletons, amorphous beasts and ghoulish, tear- or blood-shedding creatures fill walls and life-sized canvases. “I need to give fear a form,” he says.  Chaotic and unabashedly confessional, they’re the portraits of a tangled mind that vacillates between fearing and repelling these creatures, and being drawn towards them. We sat down with Chan on the eve …