All posts filed under: City

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 …

Video, Sofa, Bauhinia – Retrospective and Reconstruction of Ellen Pau

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By Leung Po Shan / “They said There’s nothing special about an onion It deserves all criticisms Despite an earthy costume Its name doesn’t inspire trust Its nature is not agreeable. Peel off layer after layer, there is nothing inside that can be called sophistication! How formalistic!” (Yasi: Extract from “Onion”) What About Home Affairs?, the title of Para Site’s retrospective of Ellen Pau, pioneering Hong Kong artist and co-founder in 1986 of the city’s first video and media art collective, Videotage, can been construed as a bilingual pun, taking in both Hong Kong politics and the shackles imposed on women in the home and society. “Home Affairs” brings to mind the Home Affairs Department, which is responsible for Hong Kong’s internal affairs. The ambiguity of the words creates a discrepancy between the title in Chinese and English. In her essay in the exhibition catalogue, video artist Lo Yin-shan, who emerged a generation later than Pau, references academic David Wang Der Wei’s post-loyalist theory to point out that Pau’s Emergence (A work in progress) (2016) was …

Free to Express – Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival

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By Karen Chu / The impact of dementia on a family; a straight-A student’s struggle with a speech impediment; kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of repairing ceramics; premature ejaculation; prostitutes, rappers and farmer-robbers – the 2019 edition of the Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival is a kaleidoscope of youthful creativity. Alongside an international selection, a Japanese and Taiwanese talent showcase and the opening gala premiere of feature film The Pluto Moment by Chinese sixth-generation director Zhang Ming, the festival’s heart is its local competition, where 20 short films by aspiring Hong Kong filmmakers compete for four awards. Now in its 13rd edition, Fresh Wave was launched by renowned Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To. Its aim is to discover and nurture new talents in Hong Kong, where the film industry has struggled to sustain its rich legacy since it suffered a downturn in the 2000s while mainland China-Hong Kong co-productions bloomed, siphoning off established directors and creative talent northward. During the heyday of Hong Kong cinema in the 80s and 90s, Hong Kong actors and directors were …

Power and Perspective: Charles Esche

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Remo Notarianni / If every picture tells a story, then like the picture, that story has a perspective. According to art writer, curator and museum director Charles Esche, the story of art in Asia has been told, over time, from countless perspectives by writers from around the world, in what he sees as a journey towards greater understanding. “It was still not that long ago, in 1982, that the director of Documenta wrote in the foreword to the catalogue that he covered the whole of the art world in this publication, and he described a world which exists between New York and Vienna,” says Esche. “That’s a white, largely male world. He might have been a rather conservative director at that time. Nevertheless, it was a position that was held quite generally in the era.” Europe’s art world flourished with the development of movements reflecting its changing ideas – Renaissance, Impressionism, Fauvism – that grew from and at times shook its classical foundations. But as it made contact with art in distant places, according to Esche, rather than tell …

The WMA Commission Recipient Natalie Lo: Ecology is full of self-contradictions

Published by Fizen Yuen

The WYNG Media Award (WMA) is a series of non-profit making programmes developed to inspire public participation and promote awareness and discussion of social issues in Hong Kong through photography and visual arts. The theme this year is Opportunity, and the WMA Commission selected Natalie Lo Lai Lai as a recipient, commissioning her project The Days Before Silent Spring. On a superficial level, the project documented nature, and Lo’s self-styled “Half-Farming, Half-X” lifestyle, in which she uses farming as a means to personal and artistic autonomy. But visitors to her exhibition at the end of last year at the Bonacon Gallery in Guangzhou discovered more complex narratives. Lo mainly works in video. “I think essay films acknowledge my own more complicated and defensive way of thinking, with its strong synchronicity,” she says. “I use editing techniques, selective images and suggestive texts, which combine to become a vibrant response to it.” In her Guangzhou exhibition, apart from her video works, Lo cleverly adapted to the limitations of the gallery space to create an interesting installation, turning the tile pattern of the exhibition space into …

Atlas 4013

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Gerhard Bruyns / Cities are constructions. They consist of streets, lanes and alleys. Walls, windows, ceilings and a succession of doorways. Buildings, loose structures, canopies and streets. Trees, shrubs, bushes and garden pockets. In a variety of combinations and orders, the binding together of any of these elements crystallise other formations: spatial complexes and neighbourhoods, articulating cultural burrows and areas of affluence. In its totality it represents a body of material that formulates an urban environment, living and non-living, operating through natural and human processes.  However, for most of us who live in the city, we form an association through our ways of existence, in how we engage with the material world, with the buildings, structures and gardens. We build memories, link important moments to places we have seen, and savour the places we knew while becoming adults. From anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s (1904-80) perspective, this in itself represents specific Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), a way of thinking about the world we know and experience. Irrespective of what the actual artefact is or how that object is woven into our existence, our …

Celebrating the Inclusive Power of the Arts

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By Samson Wong Kei Shun The policy report Celebrating the Inclusive Power of the Arts, released by the Our Hong Kong Foundation (OHKF) this March, is hamstrung by its own reductive view of inclusion and the power of art. Its failure to accurately define its own terms of engagement means that it is condemned to reach over-restrictive, unhelpful conclusions. OHKF is a high-profile, outspoken supporter of government policies. Its recent report Re-imagining Hong Kong with a Game-Changer: Enhanced East Lantau Metropolis was released at an event officiated by its chairperson, Hong Kong’s first chief executive and now a vice-chairman of mainland China’s CPPCC, Tung Chee-hwa. Similarly, media coverage of the launch of Celebrating the Inclusive Power of the Arts was bolstered by prominent speakers including Bernard Chan, convenor of Hong Kong government’s Executive Council; Gwen Kao, chairman of the Charles K Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease; Adeline Ooi, director Asia of Art Basel; Gavin Glayton of New York’s Arts & Minds; and Richard Ings of Arts Council England. With such influential backing, the report deserves closer scrutiny before its version of arts inclusion takes root …

GayBird

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Sarah Karacs Electronic composer turned multimedia artist Leung Kei-Chuek, aka GayBird, is in possession of two racks of vintage synthesisers, each as curious and complex as the next, and each containing its own unique functionality, its own language and a poetry of its own. His favourite is the EMS Synthi AKS, a vintage machine with colourful dials that was made in the UK in 1971, before he was born. “Because the technology is old, the electronics are not very stable,” says GayBird, describing how a sound he makes one day cannot be replicated the next. “The machine is already changed. Even if it’s on the same setting, has the same diameter and everything is the same, the sound is always changing.” GayBird’s workspace in his studio overlooking Chai Wan harbour is one of order, without frills or fuss. Barring a dark sphere placed near the opening of the apartment, the synthesisers are what draw the visitor’s eye in their vibrant, boxy strangeness, like the remnants of an old Star Trek set. He likes to …

Gordon Cheung

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By Remo Notarianni It is hard to think of Gordon Cheung’s worlds as homes. But his landscapes, often mountainous, vast and empty, yet shimmering and abundant with flowers, might begin to look eerily familiar as technology blurs our reality and modernity transforms or even erases our living spaces. Home at Galerie Huit is a body of mixed-media paintings and sculptures that raises questions about the meaning of a domicile: a place of birth, a residence, a source of heritage or identity, or a land that is conquered by an empire. Cheung reflects on his personal story as a Brit born to Chinese immigrants who left Hong Kong, a place that many fondly consider home despite its political turmoil. He sees this as part of a volatile global situation that has created complex individuals who live in an in-between space, caught between rapidly changing layers of history that define, at least temporarily, as they confuse identities. His work asks what we are becoming as our societies change, and what we could become if they disappeared. “This …

Bedroom

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Elliat Albrecht Conceived by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of the mainstays of popular psychology. The pyramid-shaped chart arranges human needs in order of necessity: at the bottom of the pyramid sit basic physical needs such as shelter, food and water, and stacked above are less tangible entities such as safety, belonging and love, esteem and, at the pinnacle, self-actualisation. For Maslow, each tier must be satisfied before the next can be achieved. A similar system could be sketched for the development of a healthy art ecosystem. Needs such as funding, physical space, community support, and political and creative freedom must be met to build a robust art scene that gives artists meaningful opportunities. Such a scene requires a diversity of exhibition spaces, including commercial galleries, museums and non-profit, alternative galleries. But in Hong Kong, where space is at a premium and government funding is lacking, the most visible institutions are often the most commercially viable. Take for example the recent influx of hyper-professionalised, international, blue-chip galleries that tend to deal in canonical luxury objects …