Ariadne auf Naxos / Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / Feb 22, 2024 / Ernest Wan /
This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival officially opened with the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera, in its 1916 version. There was concern that Hongkongers might not warm to the spareness of Robert Carsen’s 2008 production. However, judging from the enthusiastic audience response, such concern seems to have been unnecessary, so engaging was the bustle in the first part of the work and so riveting the steadily sustained momentum in the second.
Clay Hilley as Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos. Photo by Kurtachio. Courtesy the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
In the opera-within-an-opera of this second part, the desert island of Naxos on which the princess Ariadne has been deserted was an empty stage in utter darkness. As the young god Bacchus emerged and at the end ascended with her to the heavens, light emanated through an ever-widening upstage slit and eventually engulfed the entire stage. Few objects other than dance mirrors were used for the set of even the first part, which shows onstage the frantic backstage preparations for the drama of the second: the philistine backer of the evening’s event newly decrees that the mythological opera seria described above be performed simultaneously with a commedia dell’arte frivolity, and everyone involved now scrabbles to carry out the impossible task.
In the trouser role of the starry-eyed composer of the second part’s serious opera, mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught sounded aptly vulnerable as she expressed the character’s frustration at having to grapple with the realities of compromise. Soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen’s occasional insufficiency of volume was at first worrying, especially in her title role’s important solo, “Es gibt ein Reich”, but she later acquitted herself well enough to be an equal duet partner of tenor Clay Hilley. The latter, as Bacchus, sang with some godlike stateliness towards the end, but was more impressive in his portrayal earlier of a confused survivor of Circe’s sorcery. Zerbinetta, the coquette in the comedy troupe aiming to divert the forlorn Ariadne, was sung by soprano Brenda Rae – who, though not the last word in charm, amazed with the accuracy of her vocal acrobatics. There was no weak link in the remainder of the large cast, and Patrick Lange led the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in a fluent performance, even in the potentially stagnant music of the initially cheerless princess and god.
Brenda Rae as Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos. Photo by Kurtachio. Courtesy the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
But the performance was most memorable for the production itself. Usually, the composer disappears after the first part of the work, as do all the other characters who labour behind the scenes. Here, however, he handed his score (theatrical property, of course) to Lange, who thanked him, and then sat above the pit, staying there through the second part to see and react to “his” opera, shaking his head when the male troupers intruded on his island, yet clapping the coloratura display of Zerbinetta, with whom he was infatuated. At curtain call, he returned onstage to receive applause not just from the audience but from all the other cast members – a moving salute to all serious artists of lofty ideals.
Featured image: Tara Erraught as the composer in Ariadne auf Naxos. Photo by Kurtachio. Courtesy the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
女中音塔拉．愛朗反串飾演充滿幻想的作曲家，在後半部份的莊嚴歌劇中表現出恰到好處的脆弱，以及角色要向現實低頭的挣扎。女高音瑞秋．威利斯．索倫森的音量時有不足，一開始令人擔憂，特別是在演唱主角重要的獨唱曲《Es gibt ein Reich》時。不過後來她表現理想，與男高音克萊．希利平份秋色。後者飾演巴克斯，在結尾時以神聖莊嚴的唱腔演唱，但他在早段飾演被西西弗斯魔法迷惑的倖存者時表現更令人深刻。女高音布蘭達．蕾飾演喜劇劇團的輕佻女郎彩碧妮塔，將觀眾視線從憂鬱的亞莉安妮中轉移。雖然她未必是最魅力四射的演員，但她的聲樂技巧絕對令人驚嘆。其他大部份演員的表現都相當出色，柏德烈．蘭格的指揮令巴伐利亞國立管弦樂團得以流暢演奏，即使在開首公主和神之間單調的音樂中亦然。
Wifredo Lam, the modernist Cuban painter of Cantonese and African descent, has finally got his first ever retrospective in Hong Kong, a beautiful exhibition at the Asia Society by the name of Homecoming.
Faced with such an interesting, deeply original artist, it may seem slightly reductive to start from his biography – but his practice is so deeply rooted in it, and the cultural background he draws from is so unusual, that it is impossible to start from anywhere else. Lam’s complex personal history is given its rightful space in the Asia Society exhibition, with detailed descriptions of his parents and their heritage, supported by a vast archive of photographic material. His paintings and drawings are on view, from his early works of portraiture as a young art student to large oil or tempera canvases featuring his signature mythical figures, taken from African religious traditions and his own imagination, with a lingering, subtle Chinese aesthetic; along with his later works, dedicated to printing and etching, in which his distinctive vision is stripped down to its most essential elements.
Damballah by Wifredo Lam, Oil on canvas, 1947. Collection of Daniel Boulakia. Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
The show is called Homecoming precisely because of Lam’s rare cultural background: born in Cuba on December 8, 1902, he owed his Cantonese family name to his father Yam Lam, a carpenter from Guangdong who had emigrated to Cuba. His African roots came from his mother, Ana Serafina Castilla, of Spanish and Congolese origins. They lived in Sagua La Grande, where Wifredo was born (his full name is Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla: he should have been Wilfredo but a transcription error meant he had a unique name). Sagua La Grande is on the north coast of Cuba, a sugar-producing province that hosted a lot of immigrant labourers, some from China.
As Yam Lam was one of the few literate people in the Chinese community, he used this skill to write letters for others, who could then send news of their lives back home to China. It is a detail that is not without consequence in Wifredo Lam’s aesthetics: his later work, in particular, when he started to dedicate a lot of time to prints and engravings, shows a strong awareness of the empty space, one of the pillars of Chinese paintings, and brushstrokes that hint at Chinese calligraphy and its strong emotional expressiveness.
Femme avec oiseau by Wifredo Lam, 1949. Collection of Cynthia Hang. Former collection of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
His African heritage side is also prominent, as he consistently explores images of figures inspired by traditional West-Central African religions, which were brought over to the Americas by enslaved people. This tradition is expressed in a wide range of beliefs and practices, linked by a common ancestry. They include the Brazilian cult of the orixas – divine spirits linked to the forces of nature, mostly from the Yoruba tradition in today’s Nigeria, which have merged with Catholic holy figures – in the Candomblé religion; the Haitian cult of Voodoo, or Vodun, which also unites the Catholic pantheon of saints with spiritual and magical practices from Benin, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria; and the Cuban Santería, again fusing Yoruba ancestry and Christian elements. They are also deeply informed by the animistic beliefs of the Bakongo people, from the pre-colonial Congo basin, who venerated Nzambi Mpungu, the creator of the universe, and his female counterpart, Nzambici, while practising an ancestor cult. The list of African beliefs that were transported to the Americas by those taken there by force is too long to list here, but it is one of the main components spurring a vast and pervasive spiritual creativity – an ancestral inspiration that influenced Lam in a profound way.
In 1916, he enrolled in the Escuela Professional de Pintura y Escultura (Professional School of Painting and Sculpture) in Havana, and his first paintings were shown in the Fine Arts Salon of Havana. Some of his early portraits were on display at the Asia Society, showing a very delicate pencil, capable of conveying his subjects’ personalities with great sensitivity, like in the sketch of his father Portrait of Yam Lam (1922) and his Autoportrait (1923 and 1944).
Apostroph Apocalypse, Plate XIV by Wifredo Lam, Etching and aquatint in colors. Private Collection. Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
In 1923, he was the beneficiary of a grant that took him to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where he was guided by Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, the director of the Prado Museum. Looking for a more modern approach to art, he also followed Julio Moisés at the Escuela Libre de Paisaje (Free School of Landscape). He stayed in Spain for more than 10 years, at a highly volatile political time, which made him choose to join the armed struggle on the Republican side, picking up arms against fascism in 1936. Poisoned by the chemicals he was handling as a fighter, he found himself recovering in a clinic near Barcelona, where his life changed: introduced by another artist to Picasso through a letter, Lam decided to leave for Paris upon recovering, where he became part of the circle of artists featuring Matisse, Braque, Miró and Picasso himself, together with poets such as Tristan Tzara and Paul Éluard. From statements from both Lam and Picasso, the connection was immediate and intense.
The African heritage that Picasso was exploring, not without a strong attraction for the exotic other, was also part of Lam’s aesthetic quest, but seeing photos of Lam surrounded by African masks and sculptures does indeed feel very different from similar photos of Picasso surrounded by the same objects. It was a personal trajectory in search of his own roots and influences for Lam, but an omnivorous curiosity for Picasso.
Untitled by Wifredo Lam, Oil on canvas, 1950. Collection of Daniel Boulakia Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
It was during his stay in Paris (1938-40) that Lam shifted his artistic production significantly, moving from a more realistic approach to his drawings and paintings to a full-blown modernist study of the human body – visible in paintings such as La Lettre III (1939), depicting a naked Black woman crying with a letter folded over one of her breasts, her face similar to an African mask, her arms contorted in a painful gesture. A pale azure background, with very visible brushstrokes, makes the naked figure’s pain even more eternal and immobile, like that of a statue. Or there’s Jeune Fille Sur Fond Vert Foncé (Young Woman on a Dark Green Background, 1940), in which a woman with an African mask-like face, painted in dark grey, is staring ahead, with square shoulders and small black breasts, a fixed expression that nearly melts into the dark background, forcing us to stare at her more intently, as if trying to rescue her from being absorbed into it.
After the German invasion of France make him decide to move back to Cuba, his own unique style gradually emerged. In Cuba, his practice met head on the syncretic religion of those who, like his own mother, had to reconcile their own spirituality with the forced physical and psychological displacement caused by the brutality of enslavement. And it is here that the character of the Woman Horse started to appear, in paintings and engravings that combine a descriptive element, where we can identify some unusual creatures, mythological beings that meet on the canvas in mysterious and mesmerising dances, and a semi-abstract quality to the body shapes Lam chose to give his creatures.
Once back in his home country, immersed in both the lush, abundant tropical nature and the unjustifiable poverty in which so many of his countryfolk are shackled, his more political side once again came to the fore. The exhibition quotes him from this time, saying: “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”
The painting The Jungle (1942) depicts a host of tightly packed, elongated figures, hybrid beings half human and half supernatural, some with African masks, some with large breasts or protruding bottoms, in a green, dark yellow and orange palette. It is arguably his best-known work and the one from which all his successive esoteric figures are born. Some of the more striking examples from this time at the show are Femme avec Oiseau (Woman with Bird, 1949), an oil-on-canvas painting in which a seated woman painted in white and grey, with a head resembling that of a stylised horse mixed with a warrior helmet, long black hair floating over the back of the chair, holds a white bird with her open hand, long fingers spreading out, emphasising the lightness of her grip. Or Untitiled (1950), another oil-on-canvas in shades of grey, in which a surreal figure, made feminine by two perky breasts, is sitting majestically on a bench. Both images draw in the viewer with a slight sense of disquiet and incantation: these are clearly supernatural, probably divine women or mediums that have entered into contact with the other world, and that reflect back to us the all too limited possibility of us even getting close to understanding the world of the gods.
Jeune Fille Sur Fond Vert Foncé by Wifredo Lam, Oil on plywood, 1940, Private Collection. Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
From this time onward, Lam found his own artistic footing, one in which he pursued a close relationship with African divinities and poetry, engagement in local politics and solo shows through Latin America, the United States and, after the war, also Europe. In 1946, while holding a solo show in Port au Prince, Haiti, he also attended a Voodoo ceremony, together with the French surrealist poet André Breton and French writer and surgeon Pierre Mabille. Meanwhile, his collection of African art kept expanding and his understanding of African mystical traditions deepened. He moved back to Europe in 1952 and, while travelling frequently, spent the rest of his life based there.
Lam kept painting mythical creatures, like the bird in Coq Caraïbe (Caribbean Chicken, 1970), which is once more in his go-to grey palette, interrupted by details in red and just a hint of yellow. Here, what could be a rooster is represented with the characteristic stylised horse head. There is no tension in the painting showing any kind of movement. Seemingly a connecting presence between this world and the supernatural, it is indifferent to its surroundings and, most of all, the viewer. It’s like a strange totem whose gaze we cannot intercept, painted in that synthesis between abstraction and figurative representation that makes Lam’s works so recognisable.
In 1957, Lam established a connection to Italy, which was to last the rest of his life, by becoming attached to the small coastal town of Albissola, Liguria, where he bought a house and established a studio, collaborating with Giorgio Upiglio (1932-2013), an art printer and publisher with whom he published the book Apostroph’Apocalypse (1966), with poetic text by poet Gherasim Luca and etchings by Lam. Many examples of this collaboration are on show at the Asia Society, like the series Contre Une Maison Sèche (Against a Dry House, 1974), in which the mesmerising creatures, part human and part bird, horse, snake and other, unidentifiable animals, float against an empty background – dark grey, black and reddish figures traced with very sharp contours over pale-yellow paper. Sometimes the contrast is made just a little softer by a spray of colour around the mythological creatures, in red, yellow or orange, enhancing the feeling of a dreamlike vision.
Lam died in Paris in 1982, having held more than 100 personal exhibitions. This, his first in Hong Kong, places the Chinese diaspora and their descendants in a seductive loop of global interconnectedness and unexpected continuity.
Featured image: À trois centimètres de la terre by Wifredo Lam, Oil on canvas, 1962. Private Collection. Courtesy of Rosaline Wong and HomeArt. Courtesy Asia Society Hong Kong.
這次展覽命名為「歸徒」是因為林飛龍罕見的文化背景：他在1902年12 月8日生於古巴，他的中文名字來自他的父親林顏。林顏是一名來自廣東的木匠，後來移民古巴。林飛龍的非洲血統則來自他西班牙與剛果混血的母親Ana Serafina Castilla。他們住在大薩瓜，這裡也是林飛龍出生的地方 (他的全名是Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla：他本來應叫Wilfredo但是轉錄錯誤讓他得了一個特別的名字)。大薩瓜位於古巴的北岸，是一個有很多移民勞工主要製糖的省，有些移民勞工來自中國。
在1916年，林飛龍註冊入讀夏灣拿的繪畫及雕塑專業學院，他的首批畫掛在夏灣拿的Fine Arts Salon。是次亞洲協會展覽展出其他部份早期的畫像，展現了他精細的筆觸，非常細膩地表現出主角的性格，就像他父親的畫像《Portrait of Yam Lam》（1922年） 和他的自畫像《Autoportrait》（1923 及1944年）。
在1923年，他獲補助金資助到馬德里的皇家美術學院學習。他在那裡得到普拉多博物館的總監Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor的指導。為了學習更現代的藝術技巧，他也有拜師景觀自由學院的Julio Moisés。他在西班牙政局非常動盪時在當地居住逾10年，因此他選擇加入共和軍的武裝鬥爭組織，在1936年對抗法西斯主義。在抗爭時他因為自己負責的化學物質而中毒，被送到巴塞隆納的一間診所醫治。他的人生從此改變：另一位藝術家寫信把他介紹給畢卡索，所以林飛龍決定康復後就決定到巴黎，成為了馬蒂斯、布拉克、米羅和畢卡索這群藝術家的一份子，還認識了一些詩人如Tristan Tzara 和Paul Éluard。從林飛龍和畢卡索的文件中可見他們的友誼建立得快速且緊密。
生活在巴黎時（1938-40年），林飛龍明顯地轉移了他的藝術創作重心，從比較現實的繪畫風格完全轉移到對人體的現代主義研究,。此轉變可見於《La Lettre III》（1939年），畫中一名裸體黑人女子在哭，胸前有一封摺疊起的信，她的臉恍似非洲面具，雙臂扭曲成疼痛的姿勢。背景是一片淺藍色，可以看到明顯的筆觸，令那裸體人物的痛楚顯得更綿長靜寂，就像一個雕像。在另一幅作品《Jeune Fille Sur Fond Vert Foncé》（深綠色背景中的年輕女子， 1940年）中，一個有著類似非洲面具面容的女子，滿臉塗成了深灰色，凝視著前方。她有方肩和細小的黑色乳房，幾乎要融入深色的背景之中，逼使我們盯著她看，就好像在嘗試拯救她不要被吸入背景之中。
畫作《The Jungle》（1942年）描繪了一群擠逼、拉長的人物，他們半是人半是超自然生物，有些戴著非洲面具，有些有大乳房或者突出的屁股，作品的色調是綠、深黃和橙色。這可以說是他最著名的作品和一系列奇特角色的起始。展覽上在這個時期創作的作品中更衝擊的例子有《Femme avec Oiseau》（女子與鳥，1949年）。這幅油畫中用白灰色畫了一名坐著的女子，非寫實的馬頭上戴著戰士的頭盔，黑色的長髮披在椅背上，她打開的手掌上有一隻白鳥，長指張開，顯示了她輕柔的握力。或是在另一幅灰色油畫《Untitiled》（1950年）中描繪了一名超現實的人物，兩個堅挺的乳房說明她是女性，她莊嚴地坐在一張長椅上。兩幅作品微微的不安和靈異感吸引著觀眾：這些明顯屬於超自然，也許是神聖的女子和媒介進入了另一個世界，然後反映出我們對神的世界的認識是多麼的有限。
1957年，林飛龍在意大利海邊小鎮利古里亞大區的阿爾比索拉馬里納落地，此後在當地生根。他在該處買房子和建立了一間工作室，與藝術印刷師及出版商Giorgio Upiglio （1932-2013年）合作發表了他的書《Apostroph’Apocalypse》（1966年）。書中的詩詞是詩人Gherasim Luca的作品，刻版畫則是林飛龍的作品。該次合作中多項作品都於亞洲協會的展覽上展出，例如《Contre Une Maison Sèche》（對抗一間乾房子， 1974年）系列，畫中迷人的生物一半是人，另一半是鳥、是馬、是蛇或其他不明生物，在空洞的背景中飄浮──深綠、黑和紅色的人物在淡黃色的紙上都有非常銳利的輪廓。有時候又會在神話生物的周圍噴灑上一點紅、黃或橙色讓對比顯得柔和一點，營造出夢幻的感覺。
Gaylord Chan / Never End: The Art and Life of Gaylord Chan / Jun 19 – Sep 29, 2024 /
Chantal Miller Gallery Asia Society Hong Kong Center 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, Hong Kong Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm Last Thursday of every month: 11am – 8pm Closed on Monday Free admission
Widely respected and beloved as one of Hong Kong’s most original painters, Gaylord Chan (1925-2020) had a dynamic career that traversed cultural epochs and broke the boundaries of medium. The exhibition will celebrate Gaylord Chan’s artistic legacy with over 100 artworks alongside never seen before historical footage from the different stages of his life. The exhibition will be presented in four sections which examine Chan’s unique practice and creativity.
(I) “The Grammar of Painting” explores Chan’s role as an artist and educator. Centered on his “fifteen-word truth” on painting, this section features a selection of works spanning the 1960s to 2000s that explore the essential elements of the artist’s visual language and offer the audience ways to decipher his inventive brand of abstraction.
(II) “Glyphs of Innocence and Experience” focuses on how Chan expressed emotions and ideas through symbolism. With artworks featuring the artist’s signature motifs, this section will explore Chan’s unique worldview and how he was inspired by folk and indigenous artifacts from different cultures.
(III) “Seeing Between the Colors” highlights Chan’s mature use of color and layering to explore different spatial compositions and visual perceptions. With a selection of works created after his painting residency at the New York School of Visual Arts in 1992, this section will also feature Chan’s little-known poetry alongside his imaginative and poetic canvases.
(IV) “From Canvas to Screen” exhibits a wealth of digital drawings by Chan including over 30 never-before-exhibited artworks. After suffering from a stroke and lung cancer, Chan transitioned to using Microsoft Paint to create art from the 2000s onwards. This section explores how Chan adapted his practice from the analogue to the digital in his later works.
Featuring valuable loans from the artist estate, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and nine local and overseas private collections, this exhibition is organized by guest curator Joyce Hei-ting Wong with the guidance of exhibition consultant Josephine Chow Suk Fan alongside Hain Yoon, Assistant Curator of Asia Society Hong Kong Center.
A bilingual exhibition catalogue is available to mark the exhibition. During the exhibition, ASHK is hosting multiple events and programmes to pay tribute to the late artist, which includes art workshops for children and elderly, monthly art salon programmes, art healing and AI interactive docent tours.
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 Shimane Prefecture, on the northwestern coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. Even now, that appreciation persists, and Kato has taken to collecting figure models made in the 1960s and 70s, placing bids for them in online auctions to grow his collection. These objects, along with a series of sculptures made by Kato for a 2023 exhibition at Perrotin Paris, framed his latest show in Hong Kong.
For the presentation at Perrotin’s gallery in K11 Atelier Victoria Dockside, the artist included the boxes of more than 30 vintage models that he has acquired over the years, including iconic items such as the Visible Woman and Visible Man, each with a see-through plastic body, a skeleton and vital organs that fit together in anatomically accurate ways, so that the models could once function as instruction tools.
Kato’s decades-long fascination seems to play a part in informing the trademark figures that are in all of his paintings and sculptures – the expressionless, spectral boy and girl whose forms have come to define his artistic practice.
It’s no wonder, then, that Kato has returned to these objects, blending them into recently made paintings and sculptures. The walls of one room in Perrotin’s gallery were lined with canvases depicting the artist’s figures seated, lying on the ground, standing, or seemingly in flight or swimming, each accompanied by an animal with translucent skin, showing the innards and skeletons of a horse, a fish, a cow, a dog, a bird.
Kato’s practice has been described as otherworldly and mysterious. No doubt he taps into veiled mysticism inspired by an upbringing in a location steeped in folklore and supernatural tales. At the same time, his works presented at Perrotin could be read as a playful look back at a pastime and collection that he loves, the artist revealing a bit more of himself, letting quiet vulnerability seep through.
The exhibition traced roots that inform Kato’s artmaking, connecting his recent paintings and sculptures with an old hobby. To drive the point home, model figures of birds, a rhinoceros and a Visible Man were incorporated into three sculptural works. Also, the artist made boxed kits of miniature stones—like those he casts for his painted “stone” sculptures—their forms chosen based on how he sees the crooks and contours of body parts in the rocks he encounters in nature.
Kato’s show glued his past to the present in a deeply personal way. Others often load complex notions onto his work, spanning post-Second World War expression, Shinto polytheism, apocalyptic undertones and other weighty themes. But the experience of viewing the artist’s work doesn’t need to be so dense and over-intellectualised. After all, Kato is merely showing his works’ viewers how much he appreciates the objects that expanded his world when he was a boy, where pieces of plastic seeded inspiration for decades to come.
Whitestone Gallery is thrilled to present Ay-O: Nijitsukai, a solo exhibition showcasing works by esteemed Japanese artist Ay-O. With a career spanning over six decades, Ay-O has established himself as a pioneering force in the art world, known for his dynamic and multi-sensory approach to art. The artist coined the term “Nijitsukai” (虹使い), which means “rainbow-charming” in Japanese, inspired by the term “snake-charming”(蛇使い). This exhibition invites viewers to step into Ay-O’s vibrant, energetic world and be captivated by his masterful command of color.
The Night / Pearl Lam Galleries / Hong Kong / Mar 26 – May 20, 2024 /
Maggi Hambling is an expert at painting the night sky. After all, she has been portraying its many faces since she was a 14-year-old art student. The Night is her first solo presentation in Asia since 2019, and highlights new series of paintings that focus on the night sky and water, showcasing a unique confluence of western and eastern influences that draw inspiration from Chinese ink. In addition, the exhibition features another provocative new series, Sexy, an exploration of the female orgasm. Bold and unapologetic, the presentation, in true Hambling style, is an affirmation of the way art is supposed to break barriers.
Night Clouds IX by Maggi Hambling, Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 78.7 cm, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.
For many years, the artist has started off her day drawing in ink, a practice that has become second nature to her. But Hambling has come a long way since her student days, when she would study ink drawings at the British Museum. Her Night Clouds (2021) series of paintings is testament not only to her profound appreciation of this particular genre but also her affinity with the night – a time of day that has shaped her practice. Influenced by Rilke’s poem The Night, her paintings encapsulate the romance and lyricism of the text, capturing the enchantment of the night and the hold that it has over them both. With the use of impasto and swirling brushstrokes, the paintings exalt the mysteries of the universe and are even reminiscent of the lyrical abstraction movement.
Wall of Water XIX by Maggi Hambling, Oil on canvas, 182.9 x 213.4 cm, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.
Furthermore, the artist has fully embraced the Chinese philosophical approach in her treatment of negative space, evident in her Wall of Water (2022) paintings. The shanshui-style works are executed with oil on canvas but have the effect of ink. Never mind that Hambling is not Chinese and has never received formal training in Chinese ink; the paintings are not to be judged by Chinese classical standards but instead with an open mind that celebrates their creativity and unconventionality.
However, the scene-stealers are undoubtedly the Sexy paintings – small, impactful works filled with sexual references that are bound to start conversations. Rendered in the artist’s signature style of frenzied wavy strokes, a single flaming ball in varying hues of crimson is ablaze with desire. Raw and visceral, the electricity and eroticism are undeniable. Hambling has rightly captured the surge of sexual energy that culminates in a single moment of epiphany, epitomising her philosophy that there must be a climax in the act of painting.
Sexy Dream I by Maggi Hambling, Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 121.9 cm 2023. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.
Throughout her 60-year career, Hambling has embodied the spirit of unconventionality, and her art has always attracted controversy, both for its subject matter and its approach. She does not paint to please others, and The Night is a candid metaphorical reflection of her own personal experiences and connections with the world. It is a declaration not only of how rules are meant to be broken but also of how she has earned the right to do so.
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.
Courtesy Current Plans.
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 the battery, treating the sculpture like an otherworldly object in the yellowish glow that filled the space. The feel was a blend of science fiction, particularly films that feature unidentified aerial phenomena, and the askew sensation of B-movie humour.
Sensors in the sculpture help it avoid obstacles – walls, viewers, the artist himself – and forge the synthesised sound that we hear. In other words, the sound server’s tonal output is a means for the sculpture to communicate, a reflection of how its underlying program interprets the sculpture’s spatial position and awareness. As flight controller data is mapped to sound waves, we know that the sculpture is indeed thinking.
Swope strives to find harmony between his hardware and audio synthesis. For him, sound is a multisensory interface, an extension of our ocular-centric experiences. His practice consistently uses air – and transitively, flight – as a medium for art. The artist has built upon that by considering the physics of sound waves and how sound is reliant on air. This encapsulates not only the noise created by the whirring of propellers but also how a drone-based sculpture’s movement can be translated into sound.
Courtesy Current Plans.
Another sculpture in Nervous Thrasher bore a hyperrealistic resemblance to a car tyre. It was engineered to be light enough that it could become airborne, but had enough heft to rip through air like a muscle car – a nod to American Midwestern garage culture, where gearheads rebuild engines and modify automobiles to craft customised high-performance vehicles, as well as the “Mongkok culture” that is “alien” to the artist.
Within Spring Workshop’s space, Swope rolled the tyre around with deliberation, at times steering it into areas where viewers were seated on the floor. Within the wheel, embedded beneath its hub and spokes, were drone propellers. After downing a few gulps of beer, Swope activated the blades and the wheel took flight, seemingly defying gravity. It tore through the air, much like how drag racers rev their engines before shooting down a straight track.
It was an unexpectedly powerful display – noise from the propellers echoed in the enclosed room, their turbulence blowing into viewers in all directions, while deep bass tones synthesised using data from the flight controller bled from a subwoofer. The viewers’ bodies felt all of this.
Courtesy Current Plans.
Nervous Thrasher was a lengthy performance in two takes, a choice that Swope made to cultivate abrasive, climactic moments as his sculptures took flight and moved through the air, convulsing, gliding or swerving before viewers. The activity of sculptures created by Swope whipped up different forms of energy – wide arcs of motion exhibiting a confident display of power, fidgety displacements emanating frenetic bursts of intensity.
Hyperreal fabrication and mechanical engineering aside, Swope’s set-up involved a sound server and artificial neural network. It was easy to focus on the technical intricacies of the artist’s creations and lose sight of his artistry. He brought these elements together in Nervous Thrasher seamlessly, his own body a part of the performative installation, presenting a situation where viewers were compelled to experience his airborne sculptures in more than one way, basked in an otherworldly glow.
White Cube Hong Kong is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Korean artist Lee Jin Woo, featuring new paintings and works on paper.
Born in Korea in 1959, this Paris-based artist creates work in which the method of its making is integral to its comprehension. The process commences with the burning of wood to create charcoal and ash, which is then overlaid with hanji – a handmade Korean paper from mulberry tree bark. The surface is then pounded and scraped repeatedly with wire brushes to create abstract compositions of undulating light and shadow.
Referencing the legacy of Korean Dansaekhwa painting, Lee’s paintings share with the movement the emphasis on materiality and ‘repeatability’, whilst also defining a new visual language. His deep respect for traditional Korean materials, as well as the space this opens up for a new wave of Korean art, unites him with the leading father of Dansaekhwa painting, Park Seo-Bo.
This exhibition is part of the gallery’s ‘Inside the White Cube’ programme, which profiles work by artists who have not previously shown at the gallery. The series provides a stimulating platform for exploring developments in contemporary practice by artists from across the globe.
“The point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry or art occurs.” — Bruce Nauman
Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present a major survey of the US-born artist Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential artists working in the present day. Known for his broad range of works made in a variety of media from sculpture, photography, and video, to neon, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Nauman is widely recognised and admired as an “Artist’s Artist”. Part of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s series of major exhibitions spotlighting pioneering artists of our time, Bruce Nauman will be on view to the public from 15 May to 18 August 2024.
Bruce Nauman at Tai Kwun Contemporary is the first major exhibition of Nauman’s in Hong Kong and features 35 works that traverse six decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition revisits fundamental elements ever-present in the artist’s oeuvre, and provides a unique opportunity to explore a group of key artworks by this legendary figure in contemporary art. The exhibition at Tai Kwun is organised with the support of Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection, and is inspired by the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, curated by Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois in 2021–2022 at Punta della Dogana in Venice.
Nauman’s art intersects and dialogues with many art movements from the second half of the 20th century onwards. Attempts to categorise his works into any specific movement may prove a futile endeavour. It can be posited that Nauman’s work eased the transition from post-minimalism to performance and conceptual art, blazing a path for artists since the 1960s and leaving a profound and enduring impact that can still be felt to this day. Throughout his career, Nauman has inspired artists, curators, dancers, musicians, and writers around the world. Indeed, in 2009 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale; this presentation was curated by Carlos Basualdo.
Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Bruce Nauman, curated by Carlos Basualdo (Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), Caroline Bourgeois (Chief Curator at the Pinault Collection), and Dr Pi Li (Head of Art at Tai Kwun), draws on elements from Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, initially presented at Palazzo Grassi — Punta Della Dogana in Venice in 2021.
The Tai Kwun Contemporary exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Bruce Nauman Studio, highlights the artist’s wide-ranging practice and is based primarily on works from the Pinault Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as loans from Tate, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Dia Art Foundation, The Sonnabend Collection Foundation, Sperone Westwater, New York, as well as other lenders. Situated in the unique architectural space of Tai Kwun Contemporary in the heart of Hong Kong, the exhibition features an extensive body of work from the artist, with the aim of highlighting the significance of Bruce Nauman’s work and its potential dialogue with the regional context of Asia.
At Tai Kwun, Bruce Nauman’s first solo institutional survey in Hong Kong encompasses all of the gallery spaces of JC Contemporary and F Hall Gallery. Echoing the spiral upward structure of the space, the exhibition revisits fundamental elements in the artist’s portfolio, from the artist’s early neons to the recent Contrapposto series, along with drawings, large-scale sculptural and sound installations spanning more than six decades of the artist’s practice. The curators of the exhibition emphasise the diversity of media that characterise Bruce Nauman’s practice, as well as the subjects to which he has constantly returned over his career, such as the studio, the body, language, and sound.
Artist: Bruce Nauman
Curators: Carlos Basualdo (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Caroline Bourgeois (Pinault Collection), and Pi Li (Tai Kwun Contemporary)
Based on works from the Pinault Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions and collectors, and realised in collaboration with the Bruce Nauman Studio; special thanks to Angela Westwater and Sperone Westwater Gallery New York
Tickets to the exhibition are now available on Klook and at the JC Contemporary reception: HK$120 for general tickets and HK$60 for concession tickets (Full-time students with ID, people with disabilities, and senior citizens over the age of 60).
Silent Sojourns / WMA Space / Hong Kong / Apr 19 – Jun 30, 2024 / John Batten /
Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and artist Chan Hau Chun’s Silent Sojourns is the second project commissioned under WMA’s 2023/24 theme of “Home”. Chan has reconstructed-as-installation a Hong Kong residential unit divided into separate, black-panelled rooms inside WMA Space, its gallery in a nondescript office building. In these small-roomed exhibition spaces, Chan attempts to recreate the interior atmosphere of what she describes as an “ordinary-looking (residential) building” housing many subdivided flats in an undisclosed location in Hong Kong, possibly Sham Shui Po, where many such flats are located.
Chan initially visited “a homeless acquaintance” in this building in late 2018. Over the following five years, she visited regularly and lived in the building, meeting residents from different floors. She began filming, including talking to residents, in 2019. In an excellent, zine-like booklet, containing photography, drawings, one- or two-line aphorisms, a formal explanatory essay and four pieces of poetry, Chan outlines her own observations, emotions and the reflections of residents. This exhibition is intriguing as it mixes a political message about substandard housing with an overtly artistic presentation of the lives of residents in such poor accommodation.
Housing is Hong Kong’s most enduring social issue because – to keep it simple – the government relies on high-priced land sales and land premiums from private property development for revenue; residential property is then sold at high prices to private owners who consider it both home and investment. Public rental housing is sought-after, even by the middle class, as it offers ultra-cheap, albeit small accommodation compared to the high costs of private rental housing. Often caught in this private rental trap are the city’s elderly poor, recent immigrants and families from the mainland ineligible for public housing, and those with mental, health and addiction issues whose itinerant lives reduce their accommodation options to very small, cheaper rooms in subdivided flats.
Chan’s exhibition is sensitive and articulate, and portrays systemic poverty completely differently from the organisation most active in poverty-alleviation reform, the Society of Community Organization (SoCO), whose many exhibitions and published books in collaboration with experienced photojournalists explicitly push for social and housing policy changes. These books, and an excellent video about West Kowloon, show the poor living conditions of cage homes and subdivided flats, accompanied by graphic stories by individual residents.
In Chan’s videos, the residents are similar; in the exhibition, we meet and learn a little about their lives through videoed interviews inside the small homes in which they live. Another, shorter video filmed on the street gives, I suppose, a context of abstracted alienation. Inside the completely black-walled, labyrinth-like, partitioned rooms, the exhibition also includes photographs, text, hanging dimmed lights, an illuminated kitchen pot and various publications to read (including the “transcript” of a dream), and a Chinese chess game in progress on the ground amid graffiti/scribblings on the floor. At the exhibition entrance is a large hand-written “reminder notice” written on a small table top:
To me Remember, all your hard work means nothing. Remind yourself that your ultimate dream is to die freely.
These words set the exhibition’s personal, sometimes poignant, existential approach. Chan states, “Weary figures are eclipsed by the visible and invisible rooms, as they traverse different times and spaces. Here, solitude is perhaps a peculiar common tongue, shared among strangers living under the same roof.”
This feeling is highlighted throughout the exhibition, but revealed to visitors is the struggle of how best to present the exhibition – the layout, the location of videos, the darkness of the spaces and so on – and, by extension, the residents themselves. Available to read is an extraordinary three-page discussion “on space” between Chan and the exhibition curator Chloe Chow, giving an unusual glimpse behind the scenes of exhibition-making, something never usually discussed in public.
The voice of the artist is inevitable in an exhibition, but is an uneasy position for Chan. Possibly, as a filmmaker, it is the film that contains her entire message, but a physical exhibition requires added objects, and these are loaded with other, nuanced meanings. Chan and Chow both discuss how to approach the exhibition, as its physical appearance influences everything so much. In one exchange, Chan says: “Perhaps the reason I don’t want to show the agony of the partitioned rooms is that there is also beauty. There’s warmth and sweetness in it.” However, she is explicit about the exhibition’s social role: “The reason I started this project is that I believe society’s structures and procedures have dehumanised [the residents] for too long. So I don’t want to invade their lives with a specific objective, but rather to envision the complexities of their existence.”
This exhibition requires the viewer to read much material provided by the artist, watch videos and sit in uncomfortable, dark, tightly partitioned spaces, and consider the wise words about life and their circumstances by the residents, all honestly spoken. It can be taken, as the artist says at one point, as “a salute to the beauty and cunning of life”.
