Featuring more than 50 sculptural, photographic and filmic works by the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, Tai Kwun Contemporary’s immersive exhibitionHOPE taps into our hopes and fears about the impact of science on humanity. The artist’s hyperrealistic sculptures of human-animal hybrids, both endearing yet grotesque, explore the unexpected consequences of tampering with nature. Visitors will get to explore an engrossing, perplexing, and deeply touching world that is at once fantastical yet one with which we identify naturally and instinctively.
While her work concerns scientific progress and humankind’s destructive power over nature, a resilient optimism shines through. HOPE is Patricia Piccinini’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and encompasses all of the gallery spaces of JC Contemporary. Among the largest works in the show is Celestial Field (2021), a vast, immersive installation comprising 4,500 individual flower stems sprouting both upward from the floor and hanging downward from the ceiling, inviting visitors to contemplate on “progress”. Elsewhere, Piccinini responds to the signature spiral staircase of JC Contemporary with a 20-meter-high installation of multicolored wigs spun together and suspended down the void from the ceiling of the top floor.
Much of Patricia Piccinini’s work explores the notion of interdependence: the interdependence between humans and artificial objects—such as shoes, cradles, chairs—and the interdependence between humans and other creatures. The artist is fascinated by what she calls “artificial nature,” where humans are combined with other living creatures either in the imagination or in a laboratory. With humanity on the cusp of being able to design and create new forms of life, these “chimeras” pose fundamental questions about the new horizons that technological advances have opened. For the artist, this prospect triggers both hope and anxiety about the nature of progress. Piccinini imagines how living with such creatures demands the same love, care, and empathy as we are morally compelled to show to the living beings that we share the planet with. Visitors to HOPEwill therefore not only experience the artist’s spectacular vision but will also be invited to delve more deeply into broader questions about progress, science and technology, as well as the ethics of care.
Over the course of the exhibition, Tai Kwun Contemporary will host a wide range of public programming and educational events that dive into the deeper themes raised by Piccinini’s works, including her references to mythology and iconography, as well as broader ethical questions about science, progress, and ethics. These include Patricia Piccinini After Hours, a series of intimate conversations with special guests and speakers who will be discussing topics such as ethics and morality in biotech and genetics, the climate crisis and extinction, and human creations of life. Patricia Piccinini’s Choice meanwhile will screen a series of films as chosen by the artist, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frankenstein, and The Fly. Of particular interest to families with children will be the Family Day events held throughout the run of the exhibition. Finally, HOPE—Patricia Piccinini also includes a special series of guided tours presented in collaboration with art and curatorial researcher Mankit Lai, artist Michelle Lee Ho Wing, artist and curator Eunice Tsang, guest curator and writer Chris Wan Feng, artist Ice Wong Kei Suet, artist and educator Morgan Wong, and architectural designer Human Wu.
HOPE will also present a small number of artist editions and merchandise in the Tai Kwun Contemporary kiosk in the gallery reception area.
Tickets to the exhibition are available on Klook. HK$60 for general tickets and HK$50 for concession tickets (full-time students with ID, people with disabilities, and senior citizens over the age of 60). Tickets will also be available at the JC Contemporary reception: HK$70 (general) and HK$60 (concession). Children under the age of 5 can enjoy free admission. Meanwhile, Tai Kwun will offer limited qualities of buy-one get-one free admission tickets exclusive to TK Fan on a first come, first serve basis.
White Cube Hong Kong is pleased to present New Moroism, a group exhibition which brings together four artists who seek to expand the parameters and ideation of figuration in painting.
Part of an emerging generation of artists whose roots are in Asia, Michael Ho, Chris Huen Sin Kan, Timothy Lai and Su Yu-Xin reflect a new approach and sensibility, responsive to trans-regional shifts and migration. Embracing the concept of ambiguity within their paintings, the artists each explore Moroism, an aesthetic paradigm which is derived from the ‘mōrōtai’ style (mōrō literally translated as ‘vague’ or ‘indistinct’) that emerged in Japan of the late Meiji era (1868–1912), also found as a pictorial intention originating in traditional Chinese painting theory.
Determined by the artists’ shared East Asian heritage, the works in this exhibition are grounded in personal narrative.
Chris Huen Sin Kan’s large-scale oil paintings feature a recurring cast of characters including his wife, son, daughter and dogs. Painted directly from memory, the artist places life’s fleeting moments at the core of his work.
Incorporating a palette of gradated skin tones and elongated, distorted brushstrokes, Timothy Lai examines the ambiguity and tension of his pan-Asian identity and considers the increasingly complex interplay between nationality and race within today’s global society.
Su Yu-Xin’sdynamic landscape paintings are a testament to her meticulous practice. Inspired by the traditional ‘boneless’ method of Chinese brush painting, the artist creates her own hand-made pigments from collected natural materials, which she applies to the surface in layered washesto constructnebulous,multi-perspective horizons.
Employing a similarly rigorous process, Michael Ho adopts a unique painting technique which involves pushing paint from the back of the canvas and superimposing images on the front. A second-generation Chinese immigrant, this method serves as a parallel to Ho’s quest for duality.
Read more on Inside the White Cube: New Moroism at White Cube
For decades, Leung Chi Wo has been exploring the history and historical sites of Hong Kong, mixing archival material with photographs, videos, texts and multimedia installations. While his research-based practice brings forth the contradictions and complexities of historiography, it also injects fantasies, intimacy and emotion into collective narratives. Time, and how to embody its multiple dimensions, is the artist’s main subject, reflected in the title of his new solo exhibition, Past-Future Tense, opening in May 2023 at Blindspot Gallery.
Caroline Ha Thuc: You have recently been to London to look for archives dealing with British plans for the future of Hong Kong after World War Two. What drove you to do so? Leung Chi Wo: I don’t really know why, but I always feel dragged to stories which read unreal but are true, or vice versa. And historical subjects are mostly such: they always claim to be real. They’re sort of far away and so close at the same time. And supposedly, I am part of a colonial history which has been erased and rewritten, and now denied as well. It is a contest and perhaps it is also a self-searching process.
CHT: For a long time, the history of Hong Kong tended to be neglected, but things have changed. Which erasure are you referring to? LCW: Since the 90s, Hong Kong studies have really developed a lot, but there is still plenty of room for historical exploration. However, I’m interested in it not simply because there is not enough work done, and neither can I make many contributions anyway. Rather, it is the subject being just around and so close to me that makes my engagement possible, sometimes even through physical experiences like visiting a site. From there, I can develop personal involvement, memory and projection.
Of course, I am sceptical about the official version of history. We may be more liberal with the premodern part, which feels more remote and less personal. More recent parts, particularly those that may be at variance with our own memory, will prompt more critical perspectives, sometimes emotional and sentimental, though. For example, the official views of the Hong Kong government on the 1967 riots before the handover now have shifted drastically.
CHT: It seems that now you are looking at history from a fresh perspective, choosing to focus on the British side. Why this shift? LCW: I don’t see it as a shift. It’s more of a pragmatic and convenient approach. I wish China and its Hong Kong government would have archives with similar transparency and accessibility. Anyway, I work with what is available to me. I’m not very determined and very often find something interesting totally by chance.
CHT: Archives can be dry and investigations burdensome. After so many years looking into archives, have you developed your own methodology of approaching and working with them? LCW: I find myself exploring, side-tracking and shifting my attention all the time during research. My artwork reflects this trajectory and, sometimes, people complain that it is evading any conclusion. Working with textual material, for me, is no different from dealing with ready-mades—my arbitrary transformation, perhaps, saves me from tedious research.
For my new exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, I have had several conversations with the new in-house curator Jims Lam. He introduced to me the term “seminaut”, coined by Nicolas Bourriaud for those artists who surf between times and signifiers. I didn’t know about that, but somehow I feel it is familiar.
ENEMY BOMBING by Leung Chi Wo, 12 marble sculptures, dimensions variable, each element approx. 30 x 30 x 30cm, 2011. Courtesy the artist.
CHT: You work from different types of archives, images and texts. You especially like scrutinising texts and questioning their consistency. In We must construct as well as destroy (2010-12), for instance, you played with the ambiguities of the word “enemy” used in monuments, and verbal communication has always occupied an important part of your work. LCW: I like to draw an analogy with cooking. You have the ingredients but no less important – actually, the most important for art – is the approach. It is both technical and creative, rational and emotional. I am that kind of cook who prepares his own meals: “enemy bombing” [the work originates in repaired bullet holes in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Building, which are said to have been created by an unknown enemy] is the egg, and I wanted to transform the egg so it no longer looks like an egg but remains an egg by nature or taste and smell. It becomes “MMONEY BBEING”, “BIG B MONEY MEN,” “BINGO BE MY MEN,” or anything you can turn to. It is a letter arrangement game, down to earth and banal while made of marble. I played on the paradox. It is actually a very formal approach—my artistic articulation can be fed back into the concept; perhaps that is surfing between ideas and realisations too.
CHT: On the other hand, photographic archives led you to develop many series and works about the anonymous people who make history without ever being recognised. Do you treat these sources differently? LCW: I think they are similar. It is a radical thought, but possible. The unknown passer-by in a photo remains unknown for a very long time until one day we recognise we are actually the unknown person in the background in each other’s photos. Once in a while, you hear this kind of true story. And [the fact that people believe something to be true] is a very important element of storytelling. This is why I like to see and employ photos and relics in my work. We all have goodwill to believe and we like to explore anonymity. That keeps the myth rolling and triggers our imagination: this can be me, you or anyone. Keeping the text away – only for a while; those who want to read will read – is just a trick to allow different interpretations.
Frater by Leung Chi Wo, Sewing machine, black & white negative film, 1967 Hong Kong 50-cent coins, low speed-motor and steel frame, 55 x 65 x 146.5cm, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
CHT: In parallel to your research on archives, you keep looking for old, mundane objects that embody the past, such as the sewing machine that you used for Frater (2015). How do you identify the right ambassadors for your time travel? LCW: So much is by chance. I allow the objects to find me, but I do spend time exploring the interpretations of an object. Of course, there are hints too. In Frater, I had some parameters, such as the 1967 riots and my family story. Sufficient time is also a crucial factor: you can leave an object for some time and see how more research can give it a chance [at being used].
CHT: How much do aesthetics matter in this process? LCW: A lot, as in the surfing experience I mentioned before. But aesthetics are not only about looking good. They are about the judgement that you feel right: something makes you happy after you made that decision.
Shenzhen Mine 1973 by Leung Chi Wo, Video projection, photographs, sound, found objects, electric fan, press button switch, dimensions variable, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
CHT: More generally, how do you look at objects, beyond the historical narratives they carry? LCW: I work on the narratives with some arguments and ideas. That brings me a whole bunch of materials – text, objects, photos – but it doesn’t guarantee to make any sense. That’s the moment when I must work as an artist. Indeed, sometimes, I get stuck as I find it does not work, even when I try. Then, I have to go back to look for additional materials. In Shenzhen Mine 1973 (2015), a vintage domestic fan blows a magazine cover out of the way of a projector, allowing video to be projected onto a wall when the audience presses the button. In the beginning, it didn’t work. The wind didn’t go in the right direction. A simple act would have been to add a card to channel the wind in the right direction. But I felt: no, it’s so ugly to have this only for this reason. It’s too practical and rough. So I looked for a small book published in the same year [depicted in the piece]. And I was lucky and happy to find a little primary school art textbook that did the work.
A Countess From Hong Kong by Leung Chi Wo, Belilios Public School uniform, cloth hanger, 1967 Hong Kong 50-cent coins, vinyl record This Is My Song by Petula Clark (1967), motor system, 19 x 68 x 134cm (still), 2016. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
CHT: I remember being confused when I saw the installation A Countess from Hong Kong (2016), consisting of a vinyl disc spinning so that a schoolgirl’s uniform that hangs from it is swung from side to side. It linked the theme song of Charlie Chaplin’s last film A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), featuring Sophia Loren, with a student leaving Hong Kong, arguing that both had to escape the city: one for immigration purposes, the other because of her involvement in the 1967 riots. How much do you wish to make these connections visible? LCW: I think I like to build layers of reading and the structure grows along with the search for materials and stories. I was just looking for anything that happened in Hong Kong in 1967 apart from the riots, which were regarded as the main narrative of the time. I wanted to seek parallel worlds between politics and everyday life. And that Chaplin movie popped up. After all, the connection is interpretative, not assigned. I work on things available to me. That schoolgirl is actually the sister of one of the most powerful pro-China political figures in Hong Kong. I just made a pun from the title of the movie and created a piece of sculpture that connects everything by means of physical transformation.
CHT: For that exhibition, Something There and Never There (2018), you did not add any wall label, avoiding a contextual reading of your work. You were also the curator, just like for this new solo show. Is this the best possible way to display your research? LCW: I am not always sure that people really know what I intend to do in my art; most know what I do, though. Besides, I came from a time when a curator was a rare species in Hong Kong. I have to self-curate very often: that’s the reality and spirit of artist-run space—the origin of Para Site. I always say I know how to switch to energy-saving mode when resources are very limited. After all, I’m not a researcher in the conventional sense of the term, and I know the audience will spend less time perceiving my work when the source text is beside them. That said, the text is reincarnated in different materials like wall labels for the Museum of the Lost.
CHT: Overall, would you say that your work aims at generating knowledge, in that case knowledge about the 1967 context of the riots? LCW: I think I am more conscious and hope to raise questions about the available knowledge.
CHT: Sound is important in your practice. In your series This is My Song (2016), the song of the same name by Petula Clark seems to embody a specific period. Is this a way to trigger collective memory? LCW: I always compare sound recording to photography. It brings the absent back to the present. I am unsure if I want to hit on the collective memory, but I like to see it as a piece of time. Actually, I didn’t know this song before I worked on it. I have no memory of it. I think music and vinyl records are very common [ways of measuring time] today.
CHT: These installations are often dynamic, built on repetitive mechanics. It seems that the action is trapped in the past, in never-ending, sometimes violent movement. What are you suggesting with these repetitions? LCW: I think I began to consider the relationship between destruction and construction from the project. We must construct as well as destroy. The notion of violence has gained a place in my artistic agenda. It took a couple of years for me to elaborate on it in the work, and it was Untitled (Love for Sale) (2014) that allowed me to deal with the complexity, both technically and conceptually. In this piece, the audience would press a button to hear but not see a pile of newspaper fall, as their view of it was blocked, and I really enjoyed that. Mechanical repetition, at a certain point, puts you into a state of contemplation. It can feel very creepy, yet sometimes therapeutic too.
CHT: At the same time, by displaying these repetitive actions today, you create a bridge between the past and the present. What is your conception of time? LCW: I used to think it was linear, but now it is getting more circular—things can repeat, return or reincarnate. Maybe it’s an age issue.
CHT: Would you say that we are stuck in this repetitive process? LCW: It looks like history really repeats itself. Most humans don’t learn any lessons, and recent events such as the war in Ukraine have impacted me a lot as they keep rolling in. I am not sure if we are stuck, but the sense of helplessness is unprecedented.
Opening of the Kam Ngan (Gold and Silver) Stock Exchange, March 15, 1971 by Leung Chi Wo, Archival inkjet print, 52 x 82cm, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
CHT: I am thinking of your ongoing series of photographs of clouds, which also features in your new exhibition. Is it time that you’re looking to capture, as a metaphor for purity?LCW: The Date Series (2017-) are photos taken at the sites of violence. It represents a dilemma. What you see seems nothing but actually it is everything if you consider what is under it.
I began photographing the sky more than 25 years ago. It was a time when I looked at the urban skyline and found myself greatly alienated. I didn’t realise the city had changed so much high up there while I had mostly spent my time with my eyes on the street level. Further development happened when we [Leung and his partner Sara Wong] lived in New York in 1999 and 2000: the famous landmarks didn’t impress me but their negative space did. I started to transform such spaces. Now the world has changed drastically, and maybe only the sky remains the same. It is this sense of purity that creates the dilemma. We hope nothing happens when we look at the sky. It looks beautiful, but I feel sorrow looking around, especially when we are pushed to forget things that happened a few years ago.
CHT: This series is a good example of the issue of contextualising a conceptual work: how much do you say about the story behind it? LCW: This series draws on two extreme aspects: very abstract beautiful images on the one hand, and a random collection of violence in the city on the other hand. The only connection is me physically visiting sites of violence half a century later on the same day, capturing these beautiful skies. For me, it’s a very strong framework, almost self-justifying. What I need to do is to search for violence, match the date and visit the site. It’s like a ritual.
CHT: Are you here influenced by conceptual artists like On Kawara? LCW: I hated his work when I was young; it’s so boring. But I found many years later that it is such an amazing thing to be able to focus on something simple. Obviously, it is also an age issue.
CHT: Are there any artists who deeply influenced your practice? LCW: Not many, but I always think artists from the Arte Povera movement informed my aesthetics.
CHT: Humour is important in your practice. Why? LCW: I always thought that the political cartoon is one of the most powerful art forms. When the most horrible thing happens, the artist can still resort to humour. When the reader really laughs, it’s the saddest moment. It’s the absurdity. It’s almost like an explosion.
Berlin by Leung Chi Wo, Boiler, book, crystal, coin, postcard, stuffed toy, steel frame, 138.5 x 64 x 56cm, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
CHT: For Past-Future Tense, you have said you want to “project the future in the present past”. What do you mean? LCW: I have been thinking about the past future lately. How did people in the past think about today, which was their future? There are so many what-ifs. It’s fascinating or unbelievable to think: what if my father had empathy with the leftists at the beginning of the riots on the same street where he went to work? My father was born in South America; what if he didn’t return to China? These are all tales now.
This exhibition covers different subject matter, from personal recollection and the history of violence to the coincidences of politics, but all relate to my subjective perception of my immediate surroundings—the city of Hong Kong and its people in the past looking at their future, sometimes passively. I have tried to focus on tangible objects and to exhibit sculptures and collages on the future in the past tense. There are also extended Date Series and My Random Diary. The latter is very much about anxiety: sometimes you try to live your life as normally as possible, but you know it’s no longer the same.
Featured image: Gather The Tears (detail) by Leung Chi Wo, Aluminum alloy, glass, craft knives, book, music stand, 137 x 62 x 62 cm, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Caroline Ha Thuc: 你最近曾到倫敦搜集關於第二次世界大戰後英國對香港未來發展規劃的料。是甚麼驅使你這麼做？Leung Chi Wo: 我也不知道自己為什麼會這樣做，但是我常常受到這種看似虛構的真實故事吸引，反之亦然。人們常聲稱歷史故事都是真實的，而歷史距離我們既遠又近。事實上，在那段被抹去及重寫，現在甚至被否定的殖民歷史裡，我自己都是其中的一部分。這不但是一場爭議，亦是我自我探索的過程。
CHT: 你研究各式檔案、影像和文本，尤其喜歡細閱文本和質疑它們的合理性。例如在展覽「我們必須構建以及毀滅」（2010-12年）中，你利用了石碑上「敵軍」一詞的曖昧性，而且語言溝通在你的作品中佔有重要的地位。LCW: 我喜歡用烹飪來作比喻。你有了食材，但同樣重要──甚至可以說更重要的──是做法。烹飪既需要技術又需要創意，需要理性又需要感性。我是那種會為自己做飯的廚師：《敵軍轟炸》（作品源自立法會大廈上已修補的彈孔，彈孔據說是由不知名的敵軍造成）是一顆雞蛋，而我想將雞蛋轉化令其外型不再像雞蛋，但本質上、味道上和氣味上仍是一顆雞蛋。作品可以拼湊成「MMONEY BBEING」 ，「BIG B MONEY MEN」，「BINGO BE MY MEN」，或任何你想要的詞語。這是一個字母排列遊戲，樸實簡單，但作品是用大理石製成。我利用了這種矛盾感。這其實是一個非 常認真的設計──我的藝術表達方式與作品概念互相呼應，這也許亦是思想和實現的展現。
CHT: 聲音在你的作品中非常重要。你的《This is My Song》（2016年）系列中，由Petula Clark 演唱的同名歌曲似乎代表了一段特定的時光。這是不是你引發集體記憶的方法？LCW: 我常常比較錄音和照片。錄音可以把我們不曾參與的過去帶到現在。我不確定自己是否想觸發集體記憶，但是我認為聲音代表了一節時間。其實在創作這系列的作品前我並不認識這首歌，我與它沒有建立過任何回憶。我覺得今時今日，音樂同黑膠唱片都很常見〔於量度時間〕。
CHT: 你的部分裝置是動態的，會重複動作，彷彿代表了被困在過去，不斷重複有時激烈的動作。你想通過這些重複的動作表達甚麼？LCW: 我想我是從這次的項目開始思考破壞和建設的關係。我們在建設的同時也在破壞。暴力在我的藝術計劃中佔有一席位。我花了幾年時間在作品中敘述暴力的概念，直到《Untitled (Love for Sale) 》（2014年）我終於可以在技術和概念上處理暴力這個課題。這件作品讓觀者可以按下按鈕，然後在看不到的情況下聆聽一疊報紙倒下的聲音，他們的視線會被阻擋，我真的很喜歡這件作品的設計。機械性重複在某一刻會把你帶進的冥想的狀態。這感覺有時很詭異，但有時又很治癒。
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Katherine Bernhardt (b. 1975) that will take place at the gallery’s location in Hong Kong. The works in this presentation continue to expand Bernhardt’s unique visual lexicon, which culls from an irreverent pop vernacular as well as her own life and the broader culture. With her signature, lively brushwork, and vibrant color palette, the artist here will focus on characters from the Japanese media franchise and global game sensation Pokémon. This will be Bernhardt’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and her second with David Zwirner.
Founded in 1996, Liste Art Fair Basel is the international fair for discoveries in contemporary art. Every year in Basel, a younger generation of galleries shows artists who are outstanding representatives of the latest developments and trends in contemporary art. Many of today’s most significant galleries for contemporary art laid their foundations at Liste.
This year, 88 galleries from 35 countries will welcome visitors from 12–18 June in Hall 1.1 at Messe Basel. With artworks by over 100 artists, 66 solo and 18 group presentations, and two joint stands, the galleries will present the latest voices in contemporary art.
Since 2021, Liste has consisted of three formats: Liste Art Fair Basel, Liste Showtime Online and Liste Expedition Online. Liste Showtime, the digital edition of the fair, launches this year with a preview from 7–11 June and runs until 25 June. With media-rich presentations, our gal- leries not only offer works for sale on the platform but also provide deeper insights into the practices of one artist who they are presenting at the fair.
Tromarama / Contraflow / May 23 – Jun 30, 2023 / Opening: Saturday, May 20, 3pm – 6pm / Tin Wan Studio /
Lai Chih-Sheng / It’s a quiet thing / May 27 – Jul 8, 2023 / Opening: Thursday, May 25, 6pm – 8pm / Wan Chai Gallery /
Kiang Malingue 10 Sik On Street, Wan Chai, Hong Kong Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm 12 & 13/F Blue Box Factory Building 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen, Hong Kong Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm +852 2810 0317
Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Tin Wan studio spaces Contraflow, showcasing recent paintings, lenticular prints, performative sculptures, installations and videos by Tromarama. The artist collective continues exploring the significance of the digital economy, the intersection of play and labour, retrieving traces of the personal and the intimate amidst data and statistics, as they reveal the infrastructures of social media, the production of happiness and simulated joy.
At it’s Sik On street space is It’s a quiet thing, Lai Chih-Sheng’s exhibition that directly negotiates with the architecture of the space. By presenting a series of site-specific installations and interventions, the exhibition in its totality examines Kiang Malingue’s headquarters opened in the second half of 2022, configuring an environment that is ephemeral and poetic. It emphasises the confrontational relationship between the actor, the observer and the architecture, while reflecting upon the physical and ideological limitations and potentials of an exhibition. Lai freely applies a singular perception of space that he has developed over the last three decades, expressing by staging seemingly barren scenes conceptual generosity, in relation to urban, architectural and human conditions today.
Images: Contraflow by Tromarama, Himalayan salt lamp, custom computer program, dimensions variable, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue. Daze by Lai Chih-Sheng, Still, single channel video, 7 min 15 sec, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Kiang Malingue.
Eating One’s Tail / Rossi & Rossi / Hong Kong / Mar 18 – May 13, 2023 /
Eating One’s Tail, the title of Shubigi Rao exhibition at Rossi & Rossi, conjures up an image of a self-ingesting creature. As a metaphor, it questions human beings’ tendency to destroy, transform and reappropriate their own creations – and, more generally, it suggests the limits of self-reference. Rao’s artistic practice, in contrast, is an invitation to discover and experiment with multiple ways to inhabit and connect to the world. More subtly, perhaps, the title humorously evokes the artist’s attempt to reflect on her own practice and her claim to subjectivity. As this is her first exhibition in Hong Kong, the whole scope of her practice is presented, with selected artworks from different series. This eclecticism appropriately reflects Rao’s multidisciplinary, encyclopedic working process, which aims to resist any kind of linear, authoritarian mode of thinking.
Dead Duck (2013) is the first artwork that attracts the attention when entering the gallery. The large ink drawing features a hanging piece of red meat, which immediately evokes Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox. Here, Rao represents a duck whose inner, open spine is made from a series of clothes hangers. For her, it portrays the figure of women. Its blood spills over the paper and over the handwritten caption which says, among other things, “Everyone loves a good barbecue”. It announces, from the start, the tonality of the artist’s practice, loaded with contained violence but always witty and deliberately ambiguous.
Dead Duck by Shubigi Rao, Ink on Tiepolo paper, 100 x 70 cm, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Rossi & Rossi.
This work stands out against the backdrop of the setting of the main gallery room, which is arranged like a cosy library with plants, a table and chairs, and shelves loaded with books. On the surface, everything looks quiet and studious – also a characteristic of books, which remain innocent until you open them. Rao is a passionate reader and writer. One of her research topics is the history of libraries, our relationship with books and access to and the preservation of knowledge. In 2013, she started a long-term project, Pulp: A short biography of the banished book, which includes the publication of a book every two years. So far, there are four volumes of Pulp, each one unique and impossible to categorise. Their contents, which include multiple forms of essay, fictional or pseudoscientific texts, drawings and autobiographical elements, could be seen as a call to treasure, share and preserve all kinds of knowledge.
Rao’s investigation of banned books and library destruction works only as an entry point to this encyclopedic compilation. The whole enterprise expresses the need to resist isolation, embrace differences and sustain kinship. Books embody a form of resistance, yet she does not display fetishism with regard to them as objects. She is too aware of their power, which can be hijacked to justify violence or despotic ideologies. To restrain herself from any temptation to regard them as sacred, she displayed alongside the books tiny elements from her series The Study of Leftovers (2013), which are in fact pieces of rubbish that she collected when she first arrived from India to settle in Singapore.
Pulp, the generic title of the project, refers to the cyclical process of producing books – from the pulping of tree to printed paper, then back to ashes and into trees again. The tree is a recurring figure in her work. Here, a series of three ink drawings feature her typical phylogenetic tree, similar to the large one that she created for the Singapore pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. These fanciful modes of mapping human beings’ characteristics and cultures mimic the old tradition of representing knowledge as a tree. On the multiple branches of the Tree of Life in the Anthropocene (2016), for instance, are such stereotyped captions as “Roots as history,” “Forest as clearable,” “Trees as useful”. It is not surprising that Rao’s first tree was called the Tree of Lies (2013), as she relentlessly revolts against fixed taxonomies, pseudo-objectivity and all forms of -ism that tend to paralyse knowledge, which must remain dynamic and non-dogmatic.
Tree of Life in the Anthropocene by Shubigi Rao, Ink on Fabriano Rosaspina fine art paper, 109 x 79 cm, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Rossi & Rossi.
Most of her drawings include displays of the artist’s own delicate handwriting: she draws and writes simultaneously, often so quickly that she says she sometimes cannot decipher her own words. Her creative process is well exemplified in The Mirror of Ink, Or, a Guide to the Four Pillars (2016), a series of five ink drawings on paper that evoke ancient cosmological diagrams. We can follow how she builds her own system of knowledge according to her personal, intuitive logic, linking for instance the tower of Babel, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and German polymath Athanasius Kircher. There is something of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas here.
“Every language is a library” writes Rao in Pulp Volume I, and her investigation does not limit itself to human modes of communication. The name “Shubigi” was invented by her mother and mimics a bird’s song. A Small Study of Silence (2021) relates how the members of her family, scattered across the world, record the chirping of birds to communicate via WhatsApp, unable as they are to verbalise their emotions. From quarantine confinement to the extinction of species and manicured parks, the video proposes a puzzling vision of our contradictory relationships with nature. Above all, knowledge and languages are our ways to interact with others and with our environment.
Nature, its beauty, destruction, instrumentalisation and multiple representations are pervasive in Rao’s practice. Her recent series of dual photographs, juxtaposing close-ups of plants with photographs, offer moments to breathe in this dense, multilayered exhibition. For the artist, who describes herself as a naive idealist, it also constitutes an inexhaustible source of vitality and inspiration. In her curatorial statement for the Kochi Biennale (2022-23), she wrote that “Perhaps all that is required for an impossible ideal to exist is for enough people to live, think and work as if it already does”. Despite its underlying violence and its scepticism, this show is imbued with the artist’s own passionate yearning for human culture that is strongly communicative.
Featured image: Film still from A Small Study of Silence, dir. Shubigi Rao, single channel, digital HD, colour, 4 channel sound, 2021. Duration 29:36 mins. Courtesy the artist.
拉奧對於禁書和毀壞圖書館的調查僅僅是這部百科全書的一個切入點。整個創作表達了我們有必要去反抗孤立、擁抱差異、維繫緊密關係。書籍體現了某種抵抗形式，但她並沒有表現出對它們的盲目崇拜。她太瞭解書籍的力量了，這些力量可以被劫持以把暴力或專制意識形態是合法化。為了不讓自己將之神聖化，她在書籍旁邊呈現了從系列作品《The Study of Leftovers》（2013 年）中提取的微小元素——她第一次從印度來到新加坡定居時所收集的垃圾。
此項目的通用名為「紙漿」，指的是生產書籍的迴圈過程——從將樹木制漿到印刷紙，然後再變成灰燼回到樹中。樹是她作品中反復出現的形象。一系列三幅水墨畫作品呈現其標誌性的進化樹，如她在 2022 年第 59 屆威尼斯雙年展上為新加坡館創作的大型進化樹。這些關於人類特徵和文化的奇特描繪模式仿照了我們的古老傳統，用樹代表知識。例如在《Tree of Life in the Anthropocene》（2016 年）的諸多樹枝上掛著諸如「根源為歷史」、「森林為可砍伐的」、「樹木為有用的」等刻板的說明文字。拉奧不懈地在反抗固定分類法、偽客觀性和所有的形式主義，它們會使知識僵化，而知識應始終是動態的、非教條的。因而毫不奇怪，她將自己的第一棵樹命名為《Tree of Lies》（2013年 ）。
她的大部分畫作中都展示了自己精美的書寫：她邊畫邊寫，速度之快有時候連她自己都無法解讀自己的文字。作品《The Mirror of Ink, Or, a Guide to the Four Pillars》（2016 年）全然展現了她的創作過程。這是由五幅作品構成的系列紙上水墨畫，讓人聯想到古代的宇宙圖。透過這個作品能理解她是如何根據個人的直覺邏輯來建立自己的知識體系，比如她將巴別塔、阿根廷作家豪爾赫·路易士·波赫士和德國博學家阿塔納奇歐斯·基爾學聯繫起來。頗有些阿比·沃伯格的《摩涅莫辛涅圖集》（Mnemosyne Atlas）的意味。
「每種語言都是一座圖書館」，拉奧在 《紙漿I》中寫道，她的研究並不局限於人類的交流方式。 「舒比吉」這個名字是她母親起的，模擬了鳥兒的歌聲。《關於沉默的微型研究》（A Small Study of Silence，2021年） 講述了她分散在世界各地的家人們通過WhatsApp 記錄並分享鳥鳴聲，因他們無法用語言表達自己的情緒。從檢疫隔離到物種滅絕再到修剪一新的公園，該錄像就我們與自然的矛盾關係提出了一個令人費解的展望。歸根究底，知識和語言是我們與他人和環境互動的方式。
Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Hong Kong / March 18, 2023 / Ernest Wan
Formed mainly by German orchestral musicians in Prague who were forced after the Second World War to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, the Bamberg Symphony, with its Czech chief conductor Jakub Hrůša, recently appeared at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. It performed a repertoire at which, with its history, audiences expect it to excel: symphonies by Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms, as well as music by the Hungarian György Ligeti, whose 100th anniversary is celebrated this year.
The first of the orchestra’s two concerts began with Dvořák’s New World Symphony in E minor (1893), his ninth and last work in the genre. The lower strings’ doleful playing of the soft opening melody and the fierce, incisive fortissimoattacks soon after in the slow introduction were illustrative of the far-reaching emotional landscape to be traversed. While the Largo was scenic and deeply felt as expected, with characterful woodwind solos and delicate sustained string harmonies, even accompanying phrases in the fast movements turned out to be lovingly moulded and unusually expressive. Details like these made the performance of such a popular work stand out among the crowd.
Jakub Hrůša with one of the three groups of metronomes. Courtesy the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
Hrůša’s attention to detail was likewise evident in Brahms’s Fourth (1885), another E-minor last symphony: at the slow movement’s second theme, the first-violin descant on the cello melody has rarely sounded so exquisite. His rendition of the work was marked by austerity. While he often slackened the pace at the subordinate themes in the Dvořák, he resisted making tempo changes unspecified in the Brahms score, as if to avoid injecting unwelcome lyricism into this more tragic work. The darkness of the Bamberg orchestra’s timbre added much to this starkness.
The Brahms was prefaced by Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962), a performance of which consists simply of 100 mechanical metronomes ticking away at different speeds. Here the pyramidal devices were divided into three groups and set in motion one by one, rather than simultaneously as the composer instructs, by several musicians. As more and more metronomes ran down in the course of the 11-and-a-half-minute act, it gradually became clear to the ear that the maximally complex chaos near the start was merely the result of aggregating that which is the simplest and most orderly – the regular pulse.
What does all this have to do with the Romantic symphonies on the programme? Written at a time when Ligeti was associated with the Fluxus movement, the “poem”, notwithstanding its inherent musical interest, was in part meant to poke fun at formal concert life: it seems absurd that concertgoers have to hear and watch machines normally used only for musical practice exhaust themselves. The touring Bamberg Symphony’s presentation of a piece in which the performers do not get to display their skills to the world as expected, indeed have next to nothing to do, suggests that it either embraced all of its sarcasm or missed some of it, which has among its targets the stuffy concert tradition, as illustrated by the general conservatism of the orchestra’s own tour programmes. Programming the work alongside other avant-garde pieces, as is more often the case, would have diminished its delightful impertinence, in all senses of the word.
Featured image: Bamberg Symphony. Courtesy the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
This is Pierre Mon Frere’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong after moving to the city from Germany. On display are 12 recent abstract, colourful paintings in acrylic and mixed media, inspired by geometry and an exploration of realism.
Crossing the nights Filling the lines / Grotto SKW / Mar 8 – Apr 1, 2023 /
With what she calls her “emotional landscapes”, Bouie Choi continues to portray Hong Kong as a city on fire, undergoing perpetual mutation. Large, watery flows of paint merge with finer architectural elements in dynamic, poetic compositions where human beings seem lost: in the shape of either tiny figures or giants, they keep searching for their place in a reality that has clearly outgrown them. Despite its apocalyptic atmosphere and the many clouds that threaten the city, the artist’s new solo exhibition at Grotto Fine Arts is not about despair; on the contrary, an extraordinary vitality arises from each painting. A time of change and uncertainty is also a time for potential regeneration.
Walking inside the exhibition space involves walking into darkness. The night seems to be total, just like during the blackout that happened in the western New Territories in June 2022. At that time, Bouie Choi was commuting back home, and was trapped in sudden obscurity. She filmed with her phone the uncanny images of the opaque city, and this incident inspired her works displayed at this exhibition. In the gallery, a few beams of light and scattered luminous points guide visitors’ footsteps. At the entrance, Choi has installed a white light projection system that marks the specific moment when light illuminates her working table in winter. Further on, a subtle shadow is cast on the floor of partition walls, traditional in Hong Kong apartments, featuring flowers. The other lights that accompany visitors are the multiple sparkling points painted on Choi’s wooden panels: eerie lights, headlights, torches, streetlights and all the flickering lights from the tiny windows of Hong Kong buildings.
These lights not only guide the public in the exhibition space, but are also intended to guide the eyes inside each painted composition, while connecting and responding to each other through time and space. What kind of signals they send remains a mystery.
Choi’s conception of a landscape is inspired by classical Chinese shan shui paintings, which reflect reality and cosmology as a whole. Like most traditional Chinese artists, Choi adopts what is often called “a floating perspective”, embracing and combining multiple standpoints. The triptych Crossing the nights Filling the lines (2022), for instance, features a giant man walking through the city and collecting streetlamps that he puts in the pocket of his raincoat. When he pulls them, their light seems to fade. At his feet, among sewers, canals and houses, workers are busy cutting trees and a shepherd is looking after his goats, all represented at various scales. From all sides, nature is spilling out, with water and forests invading the urban landscape. On the left, a sitting man perched on a railway bridge ponders these extraordinary phenomena, overlooking the oversized octopus that stretches across the panels.
The large format of the triptych allows us to lose ourselves inside the composition, oblivious to the boundaries between reality and the painted landscape. Choi puts us in the same position as her figures, who can cross time as well as pedestrian gateways, being simultaneously inside, above and beneath the city while still surrounded by it. This permeability is perfectly expressed by the fluidity of colours that melt, overlap and dissolve. The circularity of the clouds also suggests a circularity of time, with urban ruins soon turning into forests, buildings into mountains or waterfalls, all in a continuous movement. The rhythm of her compositions evokes poetry, a balance between breathing spaces and highly dense areas.
The Bars by Bouie Choi, Acrylic on wood, 91.4 x 60,9 cm, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Grotto SKW.
Railings, balustrades, barriers, roadblocks – in urban spaces, our daily life is influenced by these elements of architecture that guide our bodies, conduct our movements and shape our mindset. Similarly, in Choi’s paintings, our gaze glides along the highways, arrested by buildings, oriented by the wind, constrained by lines. This theme of containment is pervasive throughout her work. The bars (2022) features a group of vertical pine trees that resemble the bars of a cage. A man crouching, barely visible, is hiding behind them, probably afraid of showing himself or to face social rules. Sometimes, she only paints limbs, the corresponding bodies having been perhaps swallowed by the landscape. In The red is too hot to stand (2022), it is the artist herself who is depicted as a giant, squeezed between two high buildings. We are left to wonder whether she is trying to hide herself or to fit in.
All the featured works are on wooden panels, most of them recycled from ancient floorboards or from the benches of an old church. Choi favours this material because it requires a long preparation time and allows her to engage in a conversation with the matter itself and its history. Although photographs of scenes from the city are often the starting point of her compositions, Choi likes to begin a work by letting washed colours flow freely on her panel, following the veins of the wood, forming inspirational clouds, after which she will take over. In Dimpled (2023), for instance, the knots of the wooden panel are magnified by the paint and seem to open like scars. A lonely pig, standing on top of a rock that could represent the leftovers of civilisation, watches how flows of lava drip from a burning sky. The colour of the wood provides the dark brownish, autumnal hues that characterise Choi’s work. It also evokes the traditional Chinese landscapes painted on silk. Choi is mostly interested in negative spaces, and she often intervenes by erasing the paint to create her own shapes. For her detailed figures and outlines, she chose to work with black acrylic because of its precision and texture. Unlike ink, acrylic cannot be totally washed away and will resist, offering a strong contrast with the fluidity of her washed colour effects.
The Light Gatherer (Detail) by Bouie Choi, Acrylic on wood, 152 x 60,9 cm, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Grotto SKW.
Although influenced by Japanese manga and contemporary events, Choi maintains the essence of traditional shan shui paintings as depictions of landscapes from a very personal inner perspective. Her vision of Hong Kong is highly intimate, poetic and emotional. As a child, her dad had to face darkness at night to bring home water in a bucket from outside their village house. He is represented as the child in The light gatherer (2022) who tries to collect water, or a flow of light, running from a cliff. Just like him, as viewers, we collect from this bright exhibition the illuminating effects of poetry and imagination.
Featured image: Crossing the night Filling the night by Bouie Choi, insallation view at Grotto SKW.
在城市空間中，我們的日常生活會受到欄杆、扶手、欄河、路障這些建築元素的影響，它們帶領我們的身體、引導我們的動作並塑造我們的心態。同樣地在蔡鈺娟的畫中，我們的目光會沿著高速公路而看，給建築物攔住，受風所引導，被線條束縛，這種控制的主題貫穿在她的作品之中。在《鐵扇骨》（2022年）中，垂直的松樹就像是籠子的圍欄，一個若隱若現的男人蹲在後面，似乎是害怕曝露自己或面對社會規則。風景吞沒了人的身體，所以有時她只會畫手腳。在《The red is too hot to stand》（2022年）中，藝術家將自己描繪成一個擠在兩座高樓之間的巨人，不知道她到底是想隱藏自己還是融入其中。
