All posts filed under: City

A Vision in ink

Following the success of the inaugural Ink Asia fair last year, expectations for the second edition are high. Artomity talked to its director Calvin Hui about the cultural aspirations and market vision driving the world’s first art fair dedicated to modern and contemporary ink. By Charlotte Chang What was the concept behind creating a fair specialising in ink art? From the beginning I was not only concerned about the market but also strove to define a mission. I have long been a collector and lover of contemporary ink, because I think ink is the most important language of our cultural tradition. But I felt that resources in this field in China were often not put to good use. The DNA of ink culture – its core spirit – is in our blood as Chinese people. I knew that this shared cultural understanding would allow a fair dedicated to ink to build a very strong connection with the audience. I believed that, coupled with the steadily increasing popularity of ink art in the region, commercial success would follow. How does Ink …

Gender Matters

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Ellen Oredsson “I’m so happy you can see that this is really an exhibition about gender,” says curator Tang Ying Chi when I speak to her about What Do You Want For Tomorrow?, currently on display at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. Although all 12 participating artists, including curators Tang and Wong Wo Bik, are women, only one of them refers directly to gender issues in her work. Part of the fourth annual Hong Kong International Photo Festival, the exhibition showcases a variety of subject matter, rapidly shifting in tone and medium. A Hong Kong perspective is woven through it: Zoe Chu Wing Man’s Tin Ha Tai Ping features cinematic photographs of urban landscapes covered in drawings lit up like neon signs, while Gretchen So’s Ten Thousand Messages couples her shots of deserted areas of Hong Kong with online discussions to create community engagement. Gender, as an issue, is almost invisible. Tang’s work is, of course, the exception. It’s not the first time she has addressed gender in the art world, having organised female-focused exhibitions …

Broken histories, bright futures: Ernest Chang and the Blue House.

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Margot Mottaz Photographer Ernest Chang and the Blue House share more than addresses along Stone Nullah Lane in Wanchai: they both overcame troubled pasts that could have cost them their existence. The former has emerged stronger and ever more tenacious after recovering from drug addiction, but the latter is still in the process of making a full recovery. The story begins in the 1920s, when a four-storey tenement building, or tong lau, was erected at 72 Stone Nullah Lane, replacing what was once the district’s first hospital. Over the years it housed a martial-arts school run by a former pupil of kung fu master Wong Fei-hung, and then an osteopathy clinic, always with a few residential units on the upper floors. Accidentally painted royal blue during maintenance in the 1990s by workers who only had the Water Supplies Department’s blue paint to hand, the building was named accordingly. Today, though temporarily moved for the duration of the renovation, a charity shop and an exhibition space, House of Stories, occupy the ground floor, while eight families live upstairs. …

Hong Kong in the 1970s

Published by Artomity Magazine

By John Batten I remember the 1970s as a smoky-hazy, evolving time, with a generation gap opening up between World War II/Depression-era parents, and teenagers experiencing the overhang from the previous decade, the dreamy 60s. Hong Kong in the 1970s was caught in some of the overhang. In the early years of the decade the Vietnam War’s destruction continued, and its aftermath would continue for decades, with boatloads of refugees arriving in Hong Kong; and China’s Cultural Revolution and its “struggle sessions” murderously justified retribution between the classes and China’s competing political factions – until it ended with Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Meanwhile, Hong Kong was an active and important interface for Cold War posturing. It was a highly militarised place, with countless docks,barracks, airfields and spy-listening facilities scattered around the “territory” – all now,ironically, occupied by the People’s Liberation Army. Naval cruisers, destroyers and aircraft carriers of the western powers regularly pulled into Victoria Harbour for refuelling or a wild period of R&R. Only vestiges of that time survive: Tsim Sha Tsui’s Red …

Making History

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Catherine Shaw The Herzog & de Meuron-designed M+ museum of visual culture might still be a construction site, scheduled to open in 2019, but that hasn’t stopped its curators from staging a host of mobile exhibitions, including its most recent and ambitious show, M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art. Featuring 80 contemporary Chinese works by 50 artists, including painting, sculpture, installation and photography, it was drawn from a collection of 1,510 works donated by the Swiss collector Uli Sigg. The exhibition, shown at ArtisTree in Taikoo Place, and previously at the Bildmuseet at Umeå University, Sweden in 2014 and at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 2015, offered a new perspective on one of the country’s most transformative periods, from the end of the Cultural Revolution until 2012. Divided into three periods approximating decades – 1974-89, 1990-99 and 2000-12 – it also demonstrated the benefits of working on the space with creative designers. M+ senior curator Pi Li and the founders of Beau Architects Gilles Vanderstocken and Charlotte Lafont-Hugo talk to …

Sound and Space

Published by Artomity Magazine

By John Batten The growing maturity and diversity of Hong Kong’s art scene can be seen in the crossover of visual art and music. Hong Kong is surprisingly well served with international western and Chinese classical-music programming and visiting artists. Itinerant, traditional Chinese opera and music ensembles perform during the city’s festivals, while the city’s western orchestras and music-festival initiatives, by both the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and other musical organisations, offer varied, year-round programmes. One particularly successful example is Premiere Performances, with its annual February chamber-music festival and stimulating programming throughout the year. Similarly, the New Music Ensemble promotes modern and contemporary music through its own festival and performances. In early 2015 the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra faced criticism for its conservative repertoire that season. Audiences have shown plenty of support for contemporary music and ambitious musical presentations, reflected in the more adventurous repertoire of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and although the Philharmonic came up with a more adventurous programme for 2016, it could still find its claims for residency at the new …

Switched On

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Margot Mottaz Cities buzz. Like giant batteries, they store energy and release it; their air is electric. They are fuelled by the intangible networks, both human and digital, that run tirelessly through their tall skyscrapers and narrow back alleys. In an attempt to reveal these imperceptible forces that make up urban environments, Human Vibrations, Hong Kong’s fifth Large-Scale Public Media Arts Exhibition, explores the relationship between technology and city dwellers. Through site-specific public works by eight new-media artists, both local and international, the exhibition looks on notions of time, transience and ephemerality, as well as how people relate to each other and to their environment. Taking centre stage in the exhibition is Fly High – Time Flies (2016) by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer, in which swarms of flies smother the ICC’s facades as they would cattle on a hot summer day. The randomly generated mass aggregates, crowds the building on all sides and dissipates again. The tower, suddenly filled with life, becomes akin to the city it looks over, bustling with millions of …