All posts filed under: City

Roberto Bolle 羅伯特 · 波雷

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Caravaggio /Hong Kong Arts Festival /March 7 – 9 2026 /Grand Cultural Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre / Roberto Bolle shows no signs of slowing down. The widely celebrated Italian ballet maestro has a packed schedule this year, from performing McGregor / Maillot / Naharin at Milan’s La Scala Theatre to showcasing his contemporary ballet fusion Roberto Bolle and Friends at Verona’s iconic Arena, where he just performed as a part of the Winter Olympics closing ceremony. Next up, he’s coming to Hong Kong, where local audiences will see him essaying the titular role of the Baroque Master in Mauro Bigonzetti’s Caravaggio. Growing up in Italy, Bolle was no stranger to Caravaggio’s art. “He’s always been one of my favourite painters and I was always fascinated and moved by his work,” says the dancer. He adds that he was particularly amazed by the three paintings on display in Rome’s Church of St Louis of the French, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602) and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600). …

Corps Extrêmes 無涯之軀

Published by Aaina Bhargava

May 31 – Jun 2, 2025 /Xi Qu Centre / Ann Rabar never considered herself an outdoorsy person. Growing up in Houston, Texas, she felt more comfortable in urban environments. That changed drastically when, at the age of 26, she joined an all women’s climbing club and went on a camping trip outside Austin.  “I wasn’t especially seeking nature, but through climbing I learned how to be a part of it,” she says. Since then, climbing has headlined a list of physical and performative pursuits she developed throughout her life, including gymnastics and theatre. Though she pursued them individually, she never saw a path to merge all those disparate interests, until French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane asked her to participate in Corps Extrêmes – a show that brings together all manner of extreme sports, interpretive dance, acrobatics, high-lining and climbing. “Not since climbing did something feel so for me,” says the climber on the unique venture. “When I saw the diversity of the crew – the acrobats, athletes and dancers working together, and that I was …

Xu Bing’s Hong Kong Square Words 徐冰在香港：英文方塊字書法

Published by John Batten

After he was appointed as Hong Kong’s Ambassador for Cultural Promotion in 2024 for a term of five years, renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first commissioned art initiative, Xu Bing in Hong Kong: Square Word Calligraphy, can be seen at locations around Hong Kong. His exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), Eying East, Wondering West – Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, has converted the museum’s ground-floor annex into a classroom where the audience can learn about and practise Square Word Calligraphy, a unique form of writing he developed that transforms English into a visual style strongly resembling Chinese characters. Newly emblazoned on the museum’s exterior glass canopy using Xu’s Square Words are the museum name and the text: “Connect Art to People”. Expressing both the museum’s mission and Xu’s belief “in making art accessible to everyone”, this new display demonstrates the contrast between traditional Chinese calligraphic forms and the English alphabet to become an old-new, east-west, cross-cultural blend. Taking Xu’s art outside the museum to the public, his calligraphy is now exhibited to …

Frida – Hong Kong Ballet 香港芭蕾舞團 芙烈達

Published by Aaina Bhargava

When Columbian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was a child, she thought pantings could come to life and that at night, the objects and figures in them would walk out of frame. “I would look at the painting, look away, and then look back and it felt like they moved. I thought they had a soul,” Lopez Ochoa recalls. “The artist made a decision and froze a certain moment in time [in the painting], so I know they have a present and future. My process is to reverse the freezing and ask: but how did we get to that moment and what happened after that moment?” The paintings Lopez Ochoa has been ruminating on are those of Frida Kahlo. The Mexican artist is the subject of her ballet Frida, which is premiering in Asia this April, performed by the Hong Kong Ballet. “What really fascinated and inspired me [about Kahlo] was how this artist was unashamed about expressing her emotions, the pain she felt and the tragedy that she lived,” the choreographer tells Artomity a month …

IM Pei 貝聿銘

Published by John Batten

The 1980s were volatile. Amid uncertainty over Hong Kong’s future before the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the FCC’s relocation in November 1982 to its current home, the Old Dairy Farm Building, offered some stability for a club with an itinerant history. A few months earlier, in August 1982, the city’s social climate had plummeted as the Hong Kong government announced the sale of a key piece of land to the Bank of China, triggering the Hong Kong dollar and the city’s stock market to tumble. The site was symbolically significant: Murray House, the officers’ quarters of the British Army at Murray Barracks at the bottom of Garden Road. The sale was a first step in the dismantling of British military facilities in Admiralty. The current big show at Hong Kong’s M+ museum is devoted to the work of Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei (known universally as IM Pei, 1917-2019), designer of Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower and other prestigious projects, including the Louvre  Pyramid in Paris. The exhibition avoids discussing the …

signals… at Para Site

Published by Christie Lee

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

Luis Chan 陳福善

Published by Artomity Magazine

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 …