All posts filed under: City

Luis Chan 陳福善

By Joyce Wong All the World’s a ‘Gung zai soeng’: Modernity and Cultural Belonging in the Art of Luis Chan In the whimsical, peculiar pictures of Luis Chan (1905-95), dancers, thespians, circus clowns and magicians brush shoulders with Hong Kong everymen like all the world’s a stage. It was not in Shakespeare, though, that he found inspiration for his paintings of modern life, but in television. After free-to-air TV became available in the British colony during the late 1960s, he tuned in his “gung zai soeng”, or “doll box”, as the TV was called in old Cantonese slang, every night until the last programme finished at 2am and he started to paint. He even commented once that watching TV was his way of doing life study in modern times. While he meant that as a joke, local television did become a powerful medium through which the people of post-war Hong Kong found representation and belonging in a rapidly modernising refugee society. His theatrical depiction of daily life gave expression to the hopes and struggles of …

Noteworthy Shows in Hong Kong Autumn / Winter ’23 Edition

Published by Aaina Bhargava

“Hong Kong is back!” seems to be the city’s official PR motto since quarantine for incoming travellers to the city was essentially abolished in October, and restrictions were dropped. If the succession of gala fundraisers and exhibition openings and the general year-end frenzy is anything to go by, the slogan applies to the city’s art scene, which seems to be overcompensating for its dearth of activity over the past two years. There were numerous shows and events last autumn, from Asia Art Archive and Para Site auction fundraisers to blockbuster exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at M+ to smaller exhibitions such as John Batten’s showcase at Ping Pong to online initiatives such as the launch of David Clarke’s digital archive. Here are eight noteworthy exhibitions. Behind Your Eyelid, Pipilotti Rist at Tai Kwun ContemporaryTai Kwun Contemporary’s blockbuster exhibition surpassed expectations, providing an experience that cultural institutions should aspire to. Serving as a mini survey of Rist’s practice, the show featured a number of highlights from the artist’s career, including I’m not the Girl who …

Hong Kong in Transition 1995 – 2020 香港過渡（1995-2020年）

Published by Artomity Magazine

by Jonathan Thomson / Hong Kong in Transition 1995 – 2020: An open access photographic archive for anyone interested in Hong Kong and its history The word “monument” comes directly from the Latin monumentum, literally “something that reminds”, and is derived from monere: to remind. This etymology suggests a monument allows us to see the past in order to better visualise what might come in the future. The alternative, proposed by philosopher George Santayana, is that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, not all monuments are sculptural, and Hong Kong now has another, in the virtual archive of more than 40,000 photographs by Hong Kong photographer David Clarke that has been established as an adjunct to the Hong Kong Art Archive of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Clarke has been documenting and analysing Hong Kong’s transition beyond colonial rule in words and pictures, both as a professor of art history at the University of Hong Kong and as a …

Arthur Hacker’s Unique Hand 許敬雅的藝術之手

Published by John Batten

Arthur Hacker left London in 1967 for a job as an art director in the colonial Hong Kong Government’s Information Services Department. Among his luggage would have been the air of London’s cultural whirl, glimpsed in the ambience of movies of the time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup; revolutionary youth against the whole (damn) system in Lindsay Anderson’s If… ; and the violence and Stalinist social conditioning in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Hacker brought his tight modernist graphic skills with him, complemented by the era’s psychedelia and surreal humour. His artist’s eye was broadened by the satire and profanity of Oz magazine; the bright animation of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; the era’s counterculture and rock music; its fashion, book, magazine and record cover design; and the ground-breaking pop art of his British contemporaries Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. These progressive influences and an openness to depictions of life’s oddities would form a key source for Hacker’s curlicue graphical drawings. Hacker came to Hong Kong with a liberal, individual outlook on life and over the years he …

The Moon is Leaving Us 月逝無聲

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Roughly 300 years ago, after studying ancient records of eclipses, British astronomer Edmond Halley conceived of a theory that the moon was in fact physically moving away from the Earth. The moon’s recession was later confirmed in the 1970s by laser beams bouncing off mirrors placed on the moon by American and Soviet astronauts. Caused by drags in ocean tides, which slow the Earth’s spin rate, the accelerated rate compensates for the loss of angular momentum, and the moon gradually pulls away at a rate of 3.78 cm a year – about the rate at which our fingernails grow. Upon learning this, Hong Kong artist Phoebe Hui’s existing fascination with the celestial body gained newfound urgency. “For some reason, this matters to me, despite the fact it doesn’t affect us during our lifetime,” she says. Initial inspiration struck when the artist’s visited Le Brassus in Switzerland, home to Audemars Piguet’s headquarters, just after she was selected to fulfil the Fifth Audemars Piguet Art Commission, the first to be exhibited in Asia. During a nighttime stroll, an encounter …

Kung Chi Shing 龔志成

Published by Aaina Bhargava

The first part of Kung Chi Shing’s haunting video City Inside a Broken Sky, Deep Night alternates black-and-white imagery of a construction site amid debris and scaffolding, the colonial-era building of the Oil Street Art Space, and a young boy. Familiar construction noises are interspersed with occasional wailing, an eerie, melancholic sound conveying despair. “Dark in every sense,” in the artist’s own words, the video is the first of four in a series called Soundscape, a meditation on the implications of construction, the use of public space and the city itself. “Construction involves destruction,” he says. “When you destroy something, you’re erasing something that came before it, and Hong Kong is famous for erasing. Every few months an old building is gone, an old space is destroyed to build a new one.” Soundscape was created to mark Oil Street Art Space’s expansion. With two galleries housed in a complex of historical significance, its expansion will include an indoor gallery, and an outdoor venue that will be open to the public. The space has served over …

「阿輝」A’fair

Published by Aaina Bhargava

In the midst of Wan Chai, a neon pink roller shutter poses a seemingly innocent question: “What did you dream of last night?” Reading like an ad, a phone number and website, halfdream.org, are listed above and beneath the question. Surrounded by an eclectic mix of shops plastered with flyers and notices, bustling Hennessy Road might be the last place you’d expect to see Chicago-based Hong Kong artist Doreen Chan’s ongoing project Half Dream (Promotion 1, Hong Kong) (2020). She invites people to recall their dreams and subsequently transforms them into an art work. Surreal in spirit and content, the work marks the beginning of an equally unexpected occurrence. What once was a Japanese restaurant became, for a fleeting moment, a pop-up exhibition, A’fair. Outfitted with jagged edges, dirt, partly pulled-out floor tiles and exposed brick walls, the space’s former function was only hinted at by remnants of white, ceramic-like, fan-patterned tiles. The gritty impact of the unfinished, rough-hewn interiors was intensified by a series of sculptural installations. Raw, visceral and fleeting – it lasted just four days – A’fair took …

Household Gods 「駐家寧神」

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Protests and pandemics have relegated us to the domestic sphere, where we’ve been forced to confront the anxiety and fear induced by the past year’s events. In addition to political, economic and social disruptions of unprecedented proportions, we’re experiencing emotional and psychological upheavals specifically reactive to this point in time. Articulating and reflecting on this complex state of being, Hong Kong artists Shane Aspegren, Nadim Abbas, Tap Chan and Wu Jiaru have come together to stage Household Gods, an exhibition curated by Ying Kwok, on view at Hart Hall in H Queens. Lifted from writer and occultist Aleister Crowley’s early 20th-century play Household Gods, the title of the show explicitly outlines its objective: to question our relationship with the supernatural through our “most intimate setting”, the home. The four artists conceived of the exhibition while working alongside each other at Hart Haus’ sprawling 10,000 sq ft Hart Social Studio in November 2019, before the advent of Covid-19. Despite their seemingly disparate practices, the artists find common ground in using domestic objects, exploring how they serve as channels to activate the unknown or uncanny. Kwok describes this …

Pathway into Film

Published by Artomity Magazine

14th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival / By Karen Chu / Despite the desire to return to normality, the world has changed, perhaps irreversibly, since the outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In Hong Kong, effects of the outbreak as well as 12 months of social turmoil are evident in every aspect of society, and the city is bracing itself for the political unknown looming on the horizon that threatens to alter its character forever. The Hong Kong film industry, for one, has been decimated by the social, political and economic turbulence and the public health situation over the past year. The shutdown of multiplexes in April and May as one of the measures to contain the outbreak dealt a blow to theatrical exhibition businesses, and local film production has become extremely rare. In addition to the postponement of the Entertainment Expo Hong Kong, which includes Hong Kong Filmart and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the once vibrant local film festival scene has also come to a standstill in the first half of …

Community arts: Supporting or Subverting the Establishment?

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Samson Wong / “Is [sic] the community arts becoming too close to the establishment?” my fellow contributor Queenie Liu asked me during the writers’ panel at the launch of Art Readers on Art – Hong Kong (I), a new bilingual volume by seven local artists and scholars. All seven were in attendance, including art historian Linda Lai Chiu Han and artist Ho Siu Kee. Liu’s chapter is on political art, while mine looks at the experiential side of participation in community art, defined here as a practice in which the art-making process aims to help people with their wellbeing – two very different artistic approaches to social intervention. The question presupposes a suspicion of the state that current applies in Hong Kong but is certainly not limited to it. Liu’s observation, though pointed, is commonly put to community artists. The argument has been most strongly formulated by art historian Claire Bishop, one of community art’s harshest critics. She described the UK’s community art movement between 1970s to 1980s as simply “an agitational force campaigning …