All posts filed under: Features

Gaylord Chan 陳餘生

By Joyce Hei Ting Wong 黃熙婷 Although Gaylord Chan might not be a household name, anyone who regularly commutes on the Hong Kong MTR is likely no stranger to his artwork. On the walls of the passageway connecting Central and Hong Kong stations is a metal plate relief mural titled Swift and Safe that Chan completed in 1998. Vibrant and childlike, the work displays a bold use of colour and vital simplicity that are at the core of Chan’s artistic language. Born in Hong Kong in 1925, Chan was one of the most original painters in the post-war period, and also served as a dedicated arts educator to generations of students and enthusiasts. Although he only made his first serious foray into painting at the age of 42, he quickly garnered attention as a promising artist in the 1970s after graduating from an extramural art and design course at The University of Hong Kong. Thereafter, he steadily developed a repertoire of abstract paintings and digital drawings over the span of five decades that continues to …

Jessica Rankin 傑西卡‧蘭金

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Australia-born, New York-based artist Jessica Rankin recently opened her first Hong Kong solo exhibition, Sky Sound at White Cube, which was two years in the making. It comprises 26 works of acrylic and embroidery on linen, and of acrylic, graphite, watercolour and thread on paper; coils of floating colour and shapes swirl and shift across the surface of her intimate and monumental works, intersecting with rigid lines of embroidered thread, a signature element of her work. Rankin builds on the creative innovations of 1970s feminists like Judy Chicago and Margaret Harrison, who upended the traditional hierarchy and distinction between art and craft, bringing “women’s craft” and needlework into the contemporary art space, while at the same time developing her own distinct visual vocabulary. Embracing a fluid approach to media, Rankin uses brushstrokes and embroidery interchangeably, fusing the two with “masculine” fields like cartography, and incorporating geometric forms, astronomical signs and the written word to create an abstracted language. The written word, in fact, has come to be as much a defining element in Rankin’s work …

Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗

Published by Jessica Wan

Where does the water come from? Who is inside these empty aquariums? These questions linger in my mind as I enter the courtyard of a building in Venice’s historic Castello district, encountering Trevor Yeung’s site-specific installation Pond of Never Enough (2024). Created in response to the area’s aquatic identity and maritime characteristics, the work, part of the exhibition Courtyard of Attachments, consists of fishless tanks that extract water from the Grand Canal and filter it back to the Lagoon. Reminiscent of fish farm breeding pools or tanks in seafood restaurants, the aquariums symbolise the exertion of systemic control to produce commodities or desired outcomes. Highlighting how physical infrastructure impacts the ecosystems we inhabit, the water cycle hints at the deliberate support the system demands to maintain itself. From Hong Kong to Venice, the proximity of waterways and densely built urban spaces forms a connection that permeates our interactions with nature and social ecology. Often departing from his personal memory and experiences, Yeung offers a sensuous perspective on how we live with and relate to others. …

Wifredo Lam 林飛龍

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Wifredo Lam, the modernist Cuban painter of Cantonese and African descent, has finally got his first ever retrospective in Hong Kong, a beautiful exhibition at the Asia Society by the name of Homecoming. Faced with such an interesting, deeply original artist, it may seem slightly reductive to start from his biography – but his practice is so deeply rooted in it, and the cultural background he draws from is so unusual, that it is impossible to start from anywhere else. Lam’s complex personal history is given its rightful space in the Asia Society exhibition, with detailed descriptions of his parents and their heritage, supported by a vast archive of photographic material. His paintings and drawings are on view, from his early works of portraiture as a young art student to large oil or tempera canvases featuring his signature mythical figures, taken from African religious traditions and his own imagination, with a lingering, subtle Chinese aesthetic; along with his later works, dedicated to printing and etching, in which his distinctive vision is stripped down to its …

Howie Tsui 徐浩恩

Published by Brady Ng

When Howie Tsui and his family settled in Canada’s Thunder Bay, a sparsely populated, blue-collar corner of northern Ontario, his connection to Hong Kong was getting stretched. It was 1984, after a few years in Lagos. But like many members of the Hong Kong diaspora who were born in the 1970s and 80s, one medium dropped him back into the city’s orbit: its pop culture and entertainment. It arrived on videocassettes, mailed from Hong Kong and flown across the Pacific Ocean before it landed in the city, situated by Lake Superior. For young Tsui, that connection had a particularly personal layer: to satisfy the requirements for being new immigrants, his father had started a videocassette manufacturing business in Canada. The tapes that his uncle used to record programmes in Hong Kong could have been products made by the family business. On these tapes were slapstick comedies, wuxia action flicks and other output from a golden age of Hong Kong cinema, starring the likes of Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Stephen Chow and Michael Hui. There were …

Mark Chung

Published by John Batten

The Next Level / Mark Chung’s exhibitions often feature opposites and duality. Objects are intentionally broken or deconstructed alongside ones that are carefully built. Claustrophobic installations are created in which settings, artwork and videos offer freedom and space, depicting or alluding to grids-as-cages set against free-floating-clouds. There are intense, blinding light and spots of darkness; technical skill and analogue craft-worship. Objects used for one purpose are skilfully reobjectified. At times, there are moments of anger and then great empathy, often sudden. Everything in Mark’s exhibitions is considered and holistic, his efforts often a balance of raw individuality and boyish camaraderie with friends who have assisted. There is considerable thought and a striving-for-better anxiety: to remain genuine and true, and not to be a slacker. That motivation is familial, a matter of working as his paternal Hong Kong Chinese and maternal Austrian families would expect: striving for the next level. For a time, after his Wheezing exhibition in September 2020, and before he began studying in Amsterdam in late 2022, we would meet for lunch or …

Julie Curtiss 朱莉·柯蒂斯

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Hair, both beautiful and abject, ornamental and beastly, is a semiotic system that holds a powerful attraction for French-born, Florida-based artist Julie Curtiss. Born and raised in Paris, Curtiss studied at l’École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden before making her way to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Arguably, the Chicago imagists of her alma mater, like Christina Ramberg – to whose work Curtiss’ is often compared – and her years working as a studio assistant to both Jeff Koons and Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) have informed Curtiss’ aesthetic, with its vibrant colours, cartoonish figuration and smooth, skilfully rendered lines. It’s a highly stylised visual language that helped her work get noticed on Instagram and reach stratospheric heights of success in the art world. But unlike Kaws’ Happy Meal cartoons and figurines, Curtiss’ work is personal, a deep dive into the female psyche and femininity through Jungian archetypes. Bitter Apples, Curtiss’ first exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, brings together works across varied media, including …

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Six years after his first solo exhibition at Para Site, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has come back to Hong Kong to present his recent artworks at Kiang Malingue Gallery. The Thai artist and film director has played with the gallery’s unusual architecture, filling its high ceilings and empty spaces with haunting presences, widening hitherto invisible fault lines and holes from which the mind can easily flee away. Conceived as a calm, meditative exhibition, A Planet of Silence gathers an incredibly rich array of works from different series, reflecting the multiple experimental approaches of the artist’s practice. It opens with A Minor History (2021), Apichatpong’s recent series of photographs taken in Isan, Thailand’s northeastern region and the artist’s homeland. He travelled there during Covid, along the Mekong River, staying in different hotel rooms that he photographed. The departure point of his journey was a piece of news about the murder of two political dissidents, whose bodies were found in the river. However, many more issues coalesce in this eerie series, which portraits the Mekong as a witness and …

Virtue Village

Published by Brady Ng

Even in the most diverse communities, clusters of people must share culture, space and experiences for bonds to form. As individuals mingle and interact with each other, their identities are sculpted by external forces. We may conform to norms established by others, or rebel to smash the status quo and shatter homogeneity. Village Porn, the first major solo presentation by the artist duo Virtue Village, formed by Joseph Chen and Cas Wong, deploys the visual grammar of BDSM, auto repair and shibari, layered with urban grime, queerness and anal sex, all dropped into PHD Group’s raw space in Wanchai. The show started with RUSH (all works 2022), a digital print that spans more than 5.5 metres to present an orgiastic mishmash of sparse references pointing in different conceptual directions, with a couple of visuals that thread through other works in the show – flames and hearts. More interesting was the physical presentation of RUSH at PHD. A shallow bed of dirt ran along the wall on which the print hung, with several green plants situated …

Cerith Wyn Evans 凱裡斯·懷恩·埃文斯

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Since the 1990s, Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans has created work about language, perception and representation. The artist skilfully weaves in elements of the musical, literary, philosophical and cinematic, resulting in exhibitions that are densely layered and at times even cryptic, and that have won him acclaim from international institutions such as the Tate Britain, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and Austria’s Kunsthaus Graz, and participation in numerous biennales and triennials. His most recent exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, …)( of, a clearing, featuring installation, sculpture, painting and sound, continues his exploration of the visual and the aural, the relationship between them and the things that lie in between. Using the work of several modern artists as a point of departure, Wyn Evans creates a series of pieces that refer to seminal moments in art history theory, in particular Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale aesthetic (1947–68), which erased the boundaries among architecture, painting, sculpture and the fourth dimension within art, which cubist artist Max Weber described as “the consciousness of a great and overwhelming …