Angel Vergara / Acts & Paintings, Hong Kong / Nov 18, 2023 – Mar 16, 2024 / Opening: Saturday, Nov 18, 1pm – 7pm / Artist Performance with Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Nov 18, 3 pm – 3:30 pm /
Axel Vervoordt Gallery 21/F, Coda Designer Centre 62 Wong Chuk Hang Road Entrance via Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang +852 2503 2220 Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm
Painting is often considered a static art form. A completed canvas with dry paint departs an artist’s creative studio to be seen by the public. For Angel Vergara, the opposite is true. To paint is to act. It’s not a passive practice, it’s an active one. Throughout his long oeuvre, painting has been a form of constant interaction with visible and invisible forces. By bringing his canvases into the world—out of the studio’s confined, safe walls—he allows them to absorb the environment, continuously changing throughout. For this exhibition, Vergara worked in Hong Kong. As Straatman, he ventured into the city’s natural surroundings, and later, into the metropole’s lively core. These interventions are named “Acts & Paintings”, which gives the exhibition its title.
For art to merge with society and culture, the artist needs to plunge. Vergara does so adamantly, by defining the boundaries of his studio as non-existent. Covered in a white sheet, the artist takes on the alter-ego of Straatman (Dutch for “man of the street”), where the here and now becomes his nomadic studio. The senses are physically diminished, yet mentally heightened. Vergara takes up his environment by surrounding himself with it. Straatman made his first appearance in 1988 during the Venice Biennial. In front of the Belgian pavilion, Vergara set up camp in his nomadic studio formed by Straatman’s white sheet. The intervention was a spontaneous one, as he wasn’t officially invited, but this is a bold demonstration of the unconstrained nature of his practice. Above all, by performing as Straatman, he has a place to paint that allows the artist to relate to his environment. Paradoxically, while concealed beneath the white sheet, he can barely see anything outside of it, yet it allows him to uncover the invisible through the creative act.
As a first step of his stay in Hong Kong, Vergara discovered the nature around the city. He set up camp in places like Tai Tam Reservoir, Deep Water Bay Beach, Shek O Beach, Lamma Island or Mount Davis. The canvasses he brought were made in his Brussels studio, with a preconceived yet abstract idea of the Hong Kong landscape. Upon arriving in the actual atmosphere they were based upon, they underwent a metamorphosis: like the biological phenomenon of mimicry, they changed colour and form.
Afterward, Vergara moved from Hong Kong’s serene surroundings to the tumultuous inner city. Straatman appeared in Central District, on the shore of M+, Sheung Wan, Wanchai, Aberdeen, and Flower Market Road. Here, the Acts &Paintings tighten: the direct and oftentimes chaotic presence of the millions of inhabitants moving through the city requires an intense form of concentration. The resulting paintings are more action-driven and sketch-like, capturing fragments of the direct interaction between the artist hidden under his white sheet and the people passing by—looking, talking, or sometimes even stepping on the canvas. The works form an impossible-to-decipher mental map of a singular moment in time and space.
The aesthetic differences between the two bodies of work—one made in nature, the other in the city—reveal a contradiction. They show Hong Kong as a particle accelerator: calm and composed on the outside surrounded by its mountains, beaches, and water, yet charged and interactive on the inside. This is a paradox, however, as at the core of chaos is peace, yet at the core of peace is chaos. The city is composed of man-made structures. While the disorderly patterns are seemingly harder to contain than nature’s apparent serenity, reality shows that they are inherently connected. A social conflict shares the same disruptiveness as a natural disaster, yet society’s organised functionality shows parallels with nature’s homeostasis. Vergara plunges himself into the natural world as well as the human one in a similar fashion. While the aesthetic outcomes are vastly different, the core remains the same: capturing the ever-changing conditions through intuitive strokes of paint, where art moves with its surroundings.
Neo Rauch / Field Signs / Nov 16, 2023 – Feb 24, 2024 /
Opening Reception: Thursday, Nov 16, 5pm – 7pm Discusion led by Dr Shen Qilan: Friday, Nov 17, 5pm – 6pm The talk will be conducted in English. Please register at this link.
David Zwirner 5-6/F, H Queen’s 80 Queen’s Road Central Central, Hong Kong Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm +852 21195900
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by German artist Neo Rauch at its Hong Kong location. Widely celebrated as one of the most influential figurative painters working today, Rauch is known for richly colored and elaborate paintings that contain a repertoire of invented characters, settings, objects, and motifs. At once realistic and familiar, enigmatic and inscrutable, his paintings often hint at broader narratives and histories—seemingly reconnecting with the artistic traditions of realism—yet they are dreamlike and frequently contain disparate and overlapping spaces and forms. Though his art is highly refined and executed with considerable technical skill, Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how he works. As the artist notes, “My process is far less a reflection than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in an almost trance-like state.”
Katie Graham’s paintings made of silk, ink, linen and thread, have a deep sense of layered and tactile artistry. Each fabric has a story and a sense of place. In a world of machines and mass production Katie’s work celebrates the beauty and value of human touch. With colour, form and texture she invites us to celebrate this deep sense and its significance in connecting with people and places. Light and dark patterns, inspired by nature, are revealed with layered markings on the silk surfaces. On top of each, a woven thread, sometimes in bold bright red, clearly defines a new line to draw the eyes’ attention. As an audience, we are stitched inside the bounds of each canvas and the only way to look is inward.
By combining the gestural movements of traditional calligraphy with the compositional structure of Western abstract painting, Katie is writing an indecipherable journey. The central trio of large works form a harmonious tapestry that engage our senses. She invites the audience to feel their way through the landscapes, letting their interconnectedness guide them.
Katie’s explanation of the silk’s deceptive strength stays with us as we leave her studio. The silk, supporting layers of ink brushstrokes, heavy reworkings, and grafted stitching, mirror the resilience of traditional art forms. Despite their delicate appearance and potential obscurity, as long as artists like Katie Graham continue to develop and build upon past foundations, the fabric of tradition remains unwavering.
Studio visit and essay extract by JJ McGrath Curator, Nock Art Foundation
Asia Art Archive (AAA)’s 2023 Annual Fundraiser features an auction of over 55 works, generously donated by artists, galleries, and individuals. Following the recent expansion of its library, Asia Art Archive continues to grow its Collections, research, and programmes with a renewed focus and broader reach. The fundraiser provides a vital source of funding to support free public access to these resources on the histories of contemporary art in Asia. The works are now available for bidding online at www.aaa2023auction.com until 10 November.
This year’s auction features work by artists including Rosamond Brown, Michele Chu, Kary Kwok, Shilpa Gupta, Maia Ruth Lee, Angel Otero, Pan Jian, Ellen Pau, Neo Rauch, Sudarshan Shetty, Wang Dongling, and more.
In 2023, Asia Art Archive develops new Collections and research projects in Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and more. With the Hong Kong Room established as a permanent space in AAA’s library, a series of projects focused on the city’s contemporary art history will commence in late 2023. One of the projects is “Recalling Disappearance: Hong Kong Contemporary Art,” supporting research, writing, and discussions on Hong Kong art history through a holistic approach.
In October 2023, AAA will launch the Tao Yongbai Archive, which documents the career of one of the few female art historians and critics of her generation in China. Through her writing, criticism, and involvement in academia since the late 1970s, Tao Yongbai pioneered the study of the history of oil painting and women artists in China.
AAA has also initiated a research project on independent art spaces in Taiwan. The project aims to collate primary sources and construct a documentary archive of these spaces from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century.
AAA continues work in archives in South Asia and beyond, including the Jyotsna Bhatt Archive and Zahoor ul Akhlaq Archive. Following the launch of the personal archive of prominent Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee in 2022, AAA presents a new exhibition that brings together Mukherjee’s monumental sculpture, Pari (1986), and materials from her archive. The exhibition opens from 20 September 2023 to 29 February 2024.
Image: Fire Rainbow 13 by Pan Jian, Acrylic and sand on canvas, 90.5 × 150.5 cm, 2022. Courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.
Hair, both beautiful and abject, ornamental and beastly, is a semiotic system that holds a powerful attraction for French-born, Florida-based artist Julie Curtiss. Born and raised in Paris, Curtiss studied at l’École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden before making her way to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Arguably, the Chicago imagists of her alma mater, like Christina Ramberg – to whose work Curtiss’ is often compared – and her years working as a studio assistant to both Jeff Koons and Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) have informed Curtiss’ aesthetic, with its vibrant colours, cartoonish figuration and smooth, skilfully rendered lines. It’s a highly stylised visual language that helped her work get noticed on Instagram and reach stratospheric heights of success in the art world. But unlike Kaws’ Happy Meal cartoons and figurines, Curtiss’ work is personal, a deep dive into the female psyche and femininity through Jungian archetypes.
Bitter Apples, Curtiss’ first exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, brings together works across varied media, including acrylic and oil paintings on canvas, gouache on paper, video and sculpture, drawing from cinema, art history, symbolism and psychology. The artist circles back to themes that have become hallmarks of her work, playing with recurring motifs of femininity and domesticity – faceless portraits that emphasise hair, long, painted fingernails, high heels, cigarettes. “My work is all about domesticated nature and domesticated spaces,” she says, adding in her artist statement: “At the heart of my interest is how nature and culture relate, the balance between our wild side and our domesticated side. And the weirdness of it all.”
Hair, tame and wild – and the women it is attached to – has become a recognisable motif in her oeuvre, in the way it was for Italian surrealist pop art painter Domenico Gnoli. It is both seductive and abject, as well as rooted in the artist’s personal memory. “I remember that single moment when I got interested in hair was when I found my mother’s hair in an old suitcase – it was a long brown braid. I only knew my mother with grey hair. It’s death but it’s also very sensuous when you hold someone’s hair. It’s tactile and it’s part of their body; it’s dead yet it’s alive. It’s a remnant part of her.” Curlicues and rope-like coils of hair are rendered in paint in fetishistic, obsessive detail, flooding her canvases, such as in Nautilus (2023), where an elaborate coiled hairstyle mimics a seashell, and Parrots (2022), with its strands of blond hair framing an ear.
Elements of the sinister or macabre and the absurd creep into Curtiss’ works, creating tension when paired with the whimsical. Earlier works featured beastly, long-clawed hands reaching across the back of a head or holding a cigarette (Conversation, 2016), which call to mind surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers (1936); the top of a head presented on a plate with salad (Food for Thought, 2019); and a hirsute-looking roast fowl (Smoking Turkey, 2016). Khoi Soup (2023), one of two small sculptures in the exhibition, features the head of a red koi carp bobbing in a bowl of soup noodles, looking like it’s just popped up for air, yet likely dead (so one assumes) and served up as food.
In her portraits, it’s immediately striking that none of the subjects have eyes. Faces are hidden or undefined, like in a dream, creating feelings of unease. Nobody looks back at you from the canvas, inviting, challenging or accepting your gaze. “Because there is this blank face, it is not about one person. It is the idea of people,” the artist explains. In Side Glance (2023), a faceless woman is posed seated on an orange sofa with a green duck against a background of foliage – a juxtaposition of domestic space and nature. In other paintings like Red Umbrella (2023) and South of Eden (2023), all we can see is the backs of her subjects’ heads: their hair. “I don’t want to have characters in my paintings, but I want them to be templates for the viewer’s projection. All I want is to activate the viewer’s narrative,” she says.
The artist’s meticulous, hypnotic linework, painted strand by strand, at times creates the optical illusion of vibration or pulsing, giving rise to an unsettling feeling. Shading and colour blocks are painted with the same hirsute texture made of minute lines, giving the impression that everything is covered in a layer of fur or hair. Even a black umbrella in Under My Umbrella (2022) resembles a head of wet, glossy, raven-coloured hair. This technique alludes to the archetype of a woman with an animalistic drive, calling attention to the interrelation between nature and culture, domesticity and wildness, masculine and feminine, and anima and animus – the Jungian theory describing the unconscious masculine in the female psyche, and the feminine in the male psyche, which informs Curtiss’ work.
The exhibition is rife with tongue-in-cheek jokes and visual puns. Themes crop up of gender, sexuality, innocence and experience, some within a biblical framework: a large serpent swallows a couple in coitus in Serpent (2023) – an eaten apple, the source of temptation and downfall, appears on a night stand nearby. Employing cinematic language for the compositions of many of her paintings – drawing inspiration from films by experimental surrealist filmmakers like Maya Deren, David Lynch and the noir of Alfred Hitchcock – tight cropping and close-ups of manicured hands, styled hair and body parts encourage the viewer to imagine what is beyond the frame, allowing the unconscious to fill in the gaps and complete the narrative.
In Duel in Eden (2022), the tightly framed image shows the naked torsos of a man and woman, presumably Adam and Eve, facing one another in a fleshy stand-off. The exploration of gender, sex and power is continued in the humorous Duel (2022), in which a cartoonish pair of male and female torsos with genitalia exposed similarly stand before one another, a pistol holster arrayed against a lacey, black suspender belt and stockings, male against female in a battle of the sexes. Rude Clam juxtaposes food and libido, further exploring ideas of pleasure and indulgence. In Horse Chestnut (2023), a gouache-on-paper painting, a pair of woman’s hands hold open a spiky horse chestnut between her legs, while Bolet (2023) depicts a phallic-looking mushroom gripped in a sexually suggestive manner by a woman’s hand.
In the gallery’s upstairs exhibition space, we find a series of works in which nature motifs dominate, arranged in wider angled compositions. Lush, verdant palm trees and tropical birds are juxtaposed with artificial, kitsch domestic spaces. Two large acrylic on oil paintings, Tropical Dawn and Tree of Life (both 2023), feature staged tropical scenes populated with a menagerie of animals like flamingos, crocodiles, rabbits and ibises, invading living rooms. This body of work demonstrates a transition for the artist, reflecting her move to Florida – a paradise both artificial and natural – but also exhibiting more painterly influences, drawing on the history of figurative paintings like those of Henri Rousseau or Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510), an Edenic paradise of humans and animals.
Like the surrealists before her, Curtiss enjoys playing with binaries, the juxtaposition of humour and darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, the grotesque painted in vivid colours, and exploring the fine line between abject and the attractive, thanatos and eros. Bitter Apples brings this all together in a delightful, subversive, colour-saturated joyride. Ultimately, Curtiss says, her work is a reflection on chaos and order, “a consideration of systems and things that are misplaced. It’s about the throwing of a wrench into a perfect system.”
柯蒂斯的作品中滲透著險惡、恐怖和荒誕的元素，與異想天開的作品結合營造張力。早期的作品描繪想伸過後腦或拿著香煙野蠻又細長的手（《Conversation》，2016年），讓人想起超現實主義藝術家梅雷特．奧本海姆的《木指毛皮手套》（1936年）。其他作品還有沙律盤上露出的半個頭頂（《Food for Thought》，2019年），以及毛聳聳的燒禽（《Smoking Turkey》，2016年）。《Khoi Soup》（2023年）是展覽兩件小雕塑的其中之一，紅色的錦鯉頭在湯的表面晃動，它看起來像是想彈出來呼吸，但更有可能的是已經死了然後被端上桌作為食物。
最令人意外的是在她肖像畫中，所有拍攝對象都沒有眼睛。臉要麼就直接隱藏，要麼就很模糊，如夢境一樣令人不安，畫布上沒有任何人會回看、邀請、挑戰或接受你的目光。藝術家解釋：「因為這張茫然的臉不是想描繪某個人，而是描繪人類這個概念。」在《In Side Glance》（2023年）中，一個無面女子在樹葉前的橙色沙發上坐著，旁邊有一隻綠色的鴨子，家庭空間與自然並置。在《Red Umbrella》（2023年）和《South of Eden》（2023年）等其他畫作中，我們都只能看到畫中人背面的頭髮。她說：「我不想畫中有任何人物，但我希望它們可以成為觀眾的投射對象，進入觀眾的故事。」
一絲不苟、催眠的線條由藝術家一根一根繪製，有時會產生振動或脈動的視覺錯覺，產生一種不安感。陰影和色塊都塗上由細線組成相同的毛茸紋理，讓人感覺所有事物都被毛皮或頭髮覆蓋，就連《Under My Umbrella》（2022年）的黑色雨傘也像一頭濕漉漉、有光澤的黑髮一樣。這種技巧間接提到了具有獸性衝動的女性原型，引起人們關注自然與文化、家庭與獸性、男性與女性、阿尼瑪與阿尼姆斯之間的相互關係。阿尼瑪與阿尼姆斯是榮格理論中女性無意中滲透的男性特質，以及男性的女性氣質，亦是柯蒂斯的作品中經常出現的元素。
在《Duel in Eden》（2022年）中，近鏡的圖像展示了可能是亞當和夏娃的裸體，男女的身體正面站著。對性別、性和權力的探索在幽默的《Duel》（2022年）亦有體現，卡通化的男女身體同樣站在彼此面前露出生殖器官，手槍皮套與蕾絲黑色吊襪帶和長襪對立，進行一場男女之間的性別之戰。《Rude Clam》將食物和性慾並排，深入探索歡愉和放縱的概念。在廣告彩紙本作品《Horse Chestnut》（2023年）中，女性用雙手在雙腿之間打開一顆帶刺的馬栗，而《Bolet》（2023年）則描繪女性用手以充滿性暗示的方式抓住一顆類似陽具的蘑菇。
畫廊上層的展覽空間中有一系列以大自然為題的作品，這些作品以較寬闊的角度構圖排列。鬱鬱蔥蔥的棕櫚樹和熱帶鳥類與人造且庸俗的家庭空間並列。兩幅大型塑膠彩油畫《Tropical Dawn》和《Tree of Life》（同為2023年）都描繪了熱帶場景，客廳被紅鶴、鱷魚、兔子和朱鷺等動物入侵。這些作品反映藝術家搬到佛羅里達州這個人工兼自然天堂的轉變，亦展現其他藝術家對她的影響，借鑒了亨利．盧梭等人的具象繪畫史和波希的人類與動物伊甸園天堂《人間樂園》（1490-1510年）。
The gallery is pleased to present an intimate photographic exhibition by Andrew Eldon titled Tribe. This thought-provoking series offers a rare glimpse into the world of the Suri, a semi-nomadic tribe inhabiting the remote Omo Valley of Ethiopia.
Through vivid portraits and cultural scenes, Eldon’s lens captures the grace and splendor of Suri life and traditions before they are irrevocably altered by modernisation. His images reveal the tribe’s distinctive practices of body modification and adornment. Women wear large clay lip plates and both men and women engage in ritual body scarring—testaments to the Suri’s unique concepts of beauty and identity. Eldon’s photographs also unveil the Suri’s elaborate floral headdresses and face painting, artful preparations usually reserved for special occasions.
Beyond aesthetics, the exhibition invites viewers to understand the daily rhythms and values of Suri life. Their semi-nomadic pastoral existence revolves around cattle herding and subsistence farming on ancestral lands. Family and community are central pillars for the Suri, with polygamy commonly practiced and major decisions made collectively by village elders. While life is difficult by modern standards, Eldon’s images radiate the Suri’s infectious joy and camaraderie.
Eldon’s photographs capture a culture on the cusp of transformation. The Ethiopian government has begun leasing Suri lands to international mining and agricultural companies, carving roads through once-isolated terrain. The exhibition becomes a meditation on the impermanence of indigenous cultures amidst the unstoppable tide of globalisation.
One of the leading figures of live art, the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi (b. Cyprus) has long pioneered live installations which explore the relations that the human figure has with the still image and the sculptural object, while disrupting our sense of time. Her works bring the performing body into museums, theatres, and public spaces, shifting the boundaries between visitors and performers, subjects and objects.
I’ll Be Your Mirror is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia, bringing together her practice of choreography, sound, sculpture, photography and painting, in two connected live installations.
In this exhibition, Hassabi uses her signature choreographic style, defined by sculptural physicality, stillness, and quietness, to confront the notion of one’s own image through a gold scheme of reflections. Proposing an alternative to the way we perceive ourselves and those around us, she invites viewers to question the fluidity of an image, one that is similar to the fleeting nature of a dance—ungraspable unless documented, which in turn subtracts from its liveness and thus realness. The tensions between the live body and the still image, the spectacular and the everyday, the subject and object, are all in play, challenging our experience as viewers within the museum space.
The artist will be present in the exhibition for the first three weeks.
Curated by Xue Tan with Louiza Ho
Dancers: Marah Arcilla, Elena Antoniou, Sylvie Cox, Li De, Maria Hassabi, Adam Russell Jones, Mickey Mahar, Tasos Nikas, Yuma Sylla, Sara Tan, Solong Zhang
Architectural Study: Maria Maneta, Maria Hassabi Sound design: Stavros Gasparatos, Maria Hassabi Clothing design: Victoria Bartlett, Venia Polyhronaki
I’ll Be Your Mirror is the latest exhibition of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s unique live art programme. This series of exhibitions commissions and features artists who work at the intersection of visual art, performance, moving image, music, and sound.
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 you love the one place you call home when every acre is loaded with agony from the past, the promise of a better future always slightly out of reach?
For Walter, one solution was to create – painting, writing and composing music. He lived alone in the bush, brushing oils onto any scrap surface within reach, like cardboard repurposed from mosquito coil or Polaroid film boxes, as well as sketchpad covers and photographs.
David Zwirner’s presentation of Walter’s paintings, Pastorale, featured more than 90 works by the polymath, many palm-sized or smaller. Walter painted Antigua’s natural landscape like he was writing love letters. He didn’t capture the majesty of green fields or the pristine blues of the sea, but instead shared the feeling of being there, on the hills or by the sea.
In these small scenes, we see the artist depicting himself floating off the coast, the sky tinged red as a hurricane approached. Or we see terracotta roof tiles in the distance, indicating just how far Walter was from the more bustling parts of Antigua. He occasionally took inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints, showing flowers blossoming on branches, leaves draping and transforming as seasons changed, dry to wet to dry again.
These oils don’t leave a strong visual impact. Their mark is more visceral, making the viewer imagine the caress of an ocean breeze or the fragrance of blooming hibiscuses, frangipanis and other wildflowers. A few scenes from European locales are interjected, with grazing sheep and lavender hills in Scotland peppered into the presentation.
Most of the artworks in Pastorale weren’t dated. The paintings are visual snippets of Walter’s observation from different corners of the island he called home. But beneath the brushstrokes was still a creeping discomfort. One work in the presentation was different from the rest: Introducing the New Breed (undated) consists of stencilled text on card stock that spells out the words of its title. When he was in Europe, racial discrimination made him feel alienated, while being at home in Antigua was a little too limiting, so Walter channelled his creativity into painting, poetry, music and other media. Perhaps the “new breed” was himself, or maybe the words referred to a next generation of young men and women who didn’t have to bear the same adversities as him.
Today, Antigua is vastly different from the island that Walter knew. Sugarcane is still cultivated and harvested, but more to produce ethanol than refine sugar. Tourism is now the main industry, with the island describing itself as “sun sea safe” as the Covid-19 pandemic tapered off, the line eventually replaced with the more evocative “the beach is just the beginning”.
But many of the scenes in Walter’s paintings can still be identified. Parts of Bailey Hill, located in the southeastern part of the island where he built his home and studio in the early 1990s, are relatively unchanged. Pastorale was as much an exhibition with pretty landscapes as it was a commentary on what it means to be home, through the lens of a man who never seemed fully satisfied with how far he was able to go.
Featured image: Installation view, Frank Walter : Pastorale, David Zwirner, Hong Kong, September 14—October 28, 2023. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Frank Walter 田園牧歌 卓納畫廊 香港 2023年9月14日至10月28日
Frank Walter在1926年出生於安提瓜，當時英國廢除了當地的奴隸制大約90年。然而人類把其他人類視為財產的創傷才剛剛結痂，傷痛仍在。前奴隸的孩子和孫子工作的處境與他們的長輩仍有不少相同之處。
「田園牧歌」的大部分作品都沒有日期。Walter只是畫下了他在這個他稱之為家的小島上觀察到的各種畫面，但是他的筆觸下卻藏著一種不適感。其中一件作品《Introducing the New Breed 》(《引入新品種》) (未標註創作時間) 尤其不同，Walter在卡片紙上用鏤空的字體拼出作品的標題。當他在歐洲時，種族歧視令他感覺自己格格不入；當他在家鄉安提瓜時又覺得有點受束縛，所以他透過繪畫、詩詞、音樂和其他媒體釋放自己的創造力。也許「新品種」所指的就是他自己，又或許是指不用面對他曾經歷過的困境的下一代年輕人。
Antonio Casadei, Brian Brake, Cheung Yee, Douglas Bland, Arthur Hacker, King of Kowloon (Tsang Tsou Choi), Luis Chan, Antonio Mak Hin-yeung, Yau Leung /
Oct 13, 2023 – Jan 28, 2024 /
Ping Pong Gintonería 129 Second Street L/G Nam Cheong House Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong +852 9035 6197 Tuesday – Sunday, 6pm – 10pm
Hong Kong’s Forgotten Masters focuses on the critical contributions of departed artists who had a significant influence on Hong Kong’s art scene from the 1960s to 90s, featuring an enriching collection of over 20 paintings and sculptures. Additionally, it will provide a thoughtful compilation of archival material, casting a retrospective lens on an era of Hong Kong’s art history that was more subdued, in contrast to the vibrant, bustling scene of the present day.
Amid Hong Kong’s once dormant art ecology, these largely overlooked artists thrived in a time of minimal cultural infrastructure and scarce patronage. Their struggle took place in a markedly different Hong Kong, devoid of the rich private and public support we see for artists today. Their work bears testament to their resilience in the face of such adversity.
The exhibition features artists, all now deceased, who each had their own personal experiences of life in Hong Kong as creative practitioners. They often balanced a secondary occupation alongside their artistic endeavours.
Various artists / Tomorrow Maybe at Eaton / Hong Kong / Aug 13 – Sept 3, 2023 / Ilaria Maria Sala /
As you enter the exhibition space on the fourth floor of the Eaton Hotel, you are greeted by a small print of an image macro, a digital picture with text superimposed, hanging from the roof, attached with string and clips. It features an image of a manga girl sitting on a messy bed with her legs bent against her chest, provocatively showing the back of her upper thighs, left uncovered by her pink miniskirt – coordinating with her pink baby shoes – her mouth hiding behind a mobile phone. The floor is strewn with all sorts of items: shopping bags and takeaway containers, bits of paper and other undecipherable debris. On top is the sentence that gives the show part of its title: “Welcome >_< take a seat wherever” (not that there is anywhere to sit in this rubbish-piled room). Internet neologisms, and neologisms from internet neologisms – like the cringevibing of the show’s title – add a further layer of fun and stimulation, and a potential feeling of FOMO from being out of the over-productive internet meme loop.
.nomedia-doll (datadollyeschalon.exe) by Miri & Jen. Courtesy the artists and Tomorrow Maybe at Eaton.
This collective show, by and about Gen Z artists and curated by Angela Liu, claims to “take memetic irony as its point of departure”, and while this is plain to see, some of the posters(with pictures of large-eyed manga girls and the superimposed writing “i’m not an artist i’m just a vessel”; “Yes. We are prayer.” by Miri & Jenn, constituting a “hypercitational room of exe file” for the work .nomedia-doll(datadollyeschalon.exe) (2023), are more disquieting than ironic. That description is intentionally confusing, as the stated intention is to peek into a mostly online, occasionally offline universe which is filled with internet citations, images on which memes and only half comprehensible sentences are superimposed (described here as “executable files, or exe files”) and a pervasive soft screen-glow.
Or take Deus ex machina, a massive pink foam installation by Janice Kei, which leaves behind the ironic, humorous approach quite quickly, as the playful intention is absorbed and annihilated by a profusion of objects and references and a sort of everything everywhere feeling, which effectively brings to the forefront the extreme demands on Gen Z’s attention in a world of constant online production, reproduction and uncontrollable expansion of images, trends, memes, viral videos and trends. Works such as Miri & Jenn’s nonsense slogans written in an awkward font over manga-like girl doll faces – huge eyes and shut mouths, in an ever-spreading eroticised Hello Kitty aesthetic – add to the sense of disorientation and déjà vu. Internet trends, at first short-lived, are suddenly proposed again, added back into the Gen Z mix in a rapid and unexpected revival, that only reinforces the sense of overwhelming intensity.
Janice Kei.
From the very first glance, which promises all the multilayered, mixed visuals that await the visitor, we move into a profusion of pink, the main colour of the show. It appears not just in its cutesy, kawaii declination, but also in a more haunting version that pulsates teen confusion and an insomniac exhaustion brought about by a desire to be constantly online. This is exemplified by the representation of various childhood games derived from manga characters or online games that morph into stylised erotic fantasies, portrayed in a series of oil-on-canvas paintings of semi-naked, non-binary characters. These works by E8mkboy are a series of four variations on a theme, depicting a sexually ambiguous, naked figure in various states of S&M bondage. The images are brushed on the canvas at first in a rather realistic style, which fades into a softer semi-abstraction. Memes abound, as do cute images wrapped in the paraphernalia of war and weaponry, such as those in the work by Noura Tafeche, Annihilation Core, Inherited Lore, where a small, play mat-style carpet replete with square pictures of sexy female soldiers from the Israeli army form a series from “Kalashnikitty”, a made-up brand, constituting a short-circuit-inducing representation of military cuteness. These include pictures taken from real Twitter (now X) accounts of Israeli women soldiers that cutify themselves with sweet or sexy facial expressions and a lot of pink, in spite of the rifles they hold in their hands, mixed with Sanrio characters with superimposed writings, like “We Committed tax fraud/Wholesome economy”. On top of the play mat sit a bunch of dakimakuras (large, Japanese-style pillows) with printed images of porn mangas and sweet animals.
VeryVeryVeryVeryVery (Evening Gown and Things) by Ringo Lo
The self-affirmed playfulness, again, shifts in and out of this challenging and stimulating show: it is evident and amusing in works such as VeryVeryVeryVeryVery (Evening Gown and Things) by Ringo Lo, where a wall of text and hypertext has chat-like conversations looping back onto themselves; or in Brandon Bandy and Rachel Jackson’s Political Compass Chair_devirtualized and Platform Artifacts, where formerly functional or semi-functional objects are turned into purely visual products. In Cas Wong’s work Who’s That Girl, we are faced with a “young adult girlie bound in a swamp salon”, like a precog from the film Minority Report, with wings, strange objects in her hand and hair hanging from a helmet: a dark, disquieting composition sitting behind a niche-forming half-wall. A video essay by curator Angela Liu, Adderall Nation Ketamine Please, again reaffirms this dichotomy: a cute, playful life phase entangled in commercialisation and its own exhausted search for meaning, tottering incessantly between laughter and anxiety, arrogance and insecurity, where irony and hypersexualisation seem to act as protective shields against potential pain.
Featured image: E8mkboy. Courtesy the artist and Tomorrow Maybe.
群展 / 逸東酒店Tomorrow Maybe / 2023年8月13日至9月3日 / Ilaria Maria Sala
