All posts filed under: Reviews

Michael Ho, Chris Huen Sin Kan, Timothy Lai, Su Yu-Xin

Inside the White Cube: New Moroism / White Cube / Hong Kong / May 31 – Sep 9, 2023 / By Christina Ko / Blurred lines are very much the theme at White Cube’s summer exhibition, Inside the White Cube: New Moroism. In the literal sense, it refers to the Moroism movement, which emerged in Japan in the 19th century and saw stark outlines replaced by vague or hazy delineations of spatial boundaries. In a more abstract sense, these blurred lines are cultural ones: the four artists contributing to the show are of Asian descent, but no longer live or have never lived in their respective ethnic homelands, and pay homage to their heritage through their work. As such, the painting-dominant show is both romantic and restrained, filled with imagination and longing through an exploration of the concept of home, as embodied in each artist’s practice. The gallery’s lower floor features three works by London-based Michael Ho, who was raised in a small town in the Netherlands, a so-called third-culture kid whose childhood was and …

Szelit Cheung and Olga Grotova

Published by Brady Ng

Door to Door / The Shophouse / Hong Kong / Jul 15– Aug 13, 2023 / Doors open memories. Portals from our past are linked to significant locations or major milestones – the entrance to our childhood home or the gate leading into a campus where we embarked on intellectual explorations, for instance. When we think about important moments that we’ve experienced, those journeys can be traced through doors too, each entryway a marker for consequential junctures in our lives. For its summer show, Tai Hang’s The Shophouse organised a four-week artist residency and open studio programme that led up to a month-long exhibition, Door to Door. The two artists involved were Hong Kong painter Szelit Cheung and London-based Russian artist Olga Grotova, who created new artworks that drew from The Shophouse’s architectural heritage and, more broadly, the city in which the gallery is situated. In Cheung’s section of the presentation, Door I (all works 2023) showed four rotating panels opening up to let beams of natural light into a muted blue space, the rays …

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Published by Christie Lee

The Shop / David Zwirner / Hong Kong / Mar 20 – May 6 / Stepping out of the elevator at David Zwirner Hong Kong, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in the wrong location. What lies before you is an old-fashioned umbrella shop – the kind more commonly seen at street level in Hong Kong. The shop is stuffed to the gills with brollies, Chinese lanterns, manuals, books, a replica of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It’s a delight to peruse. All items are for sale. Installation view. Courtesy David Zwirner Hong Kong. Is the installation a commentary on the idea of art? An attempt to elevate the umbrella from a banal, everyday object to art by situating it in a different setting? Its creator, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, has said that Duchamp’s Fountain is his favourite art piece. Tiravanija is a master at using everyday experiences such as eating and playing to shed light on how the personal is also the political, and how art is a part of the everyday. He …

Postmodern Tales

Published by Christine Chan Chiu

HART / Hong Kong / Mar 20 – Apr 29, 2023 / Showcasing the latest works from HART’s artists-in-residence, Postmodern Tales was a multimedia group show featuring eight different artists whose practices are as thought-provoking as they are diverse. From various cultural backgrounds, they are connected via their unique contemporary sensibilities, as well as their willingness to approach art using novel ideas – or to present novel ideas using art. As HART’s second off-site exhibition, curated by HART director Vera Lam, the presentation not only captured what it means to be postmodern, but also served to cement the non-profit organisation’s commitment to nurturing Hong Kong talent. Visitors were greeted with Body as Lifeguard Tower I (2022), a hanging, life-sized cyanotype fabric work by Michele Chu. Imprinted with silhouettes of her own body, the work is a metaphor for emotional barriers, and aims to break down invisible walls by acknowledging their existence. In Replica of Ruins: Anonymous Road (2023), Natalie Chu Lok Ting invites visitors to step back in time. Her recreation of a pathway in …

Shubigi Rao 舒比吉·拉奧

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Eating One’s Tail / Rossi & Rossi / Hong Kong / Mar 18 – May 13, 2023 / Eating One’s Tail, the title of Shubigi Rao exhibition at Rossi & Rossi, conjures up an image of a self-ingesting creature. As a metaphor, it questions human beings’ tendency to destroy, transform and reappropriate their own creations – and, more generally, it suggests the limits of self-reference. Rao’s artistic practice, in contrast, is an invitation to discover and experiment with multiple ways to inhabit and connect to the world. More subtly, perhaps, the title humorously evokes the artist’s attempt to reflect on her own practice and her claim to subjectivity. As this is her first exhibition in Hong Kong, the whole scope of her practice is presented, with selected artworks from different series. This eclecticism appropriately reflects Rao’s multidisciplinary, encyclopedic working process, which aims to resist any kind of linear, authoritarian mode of thinking. Dead Duck (2013) is the first artwork that attracts the attention when entering the gallery. The large ink drawing features a hanging …

Bouie Choi 蔡鈺娟

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Crossing the nights Filling the lines / Grotto SKW / Mar 8 – Apr 1, 2023 / With what she calls her “emotional landscapes”, Bouie Choi continues to portray Hong Kong as a city on fire, undergoing perpetual mutation. Large, watery flows of paint merge with finer architectural elements in dynamic, poetic compositions where human beings seem lost: in the shape of either tiny figures or giants, they keep searching for their place in a reality that has clearly outgrown them. Despite its apocalyptic atmosphere and the many clouds that threaten the city, the artist’s new solo exhibition at Grotto Fine Arts is not about despair; on the contrary, an extraordinary vitality arises from each painting. A time of change and uncertainty is also a time for potential regeneration. Walking inside the exhibition space involves walking into darkness. The night seems to be total, just like during the blackout that happened in the western New Territories in June 2022. At that time, Bouie Choi was commuting back home, and was trapped in sudden obscurity. She …

Vaevae Chan

Published by Brady Ng

She Told Me to Head to the Sea @ Juen Juen Gung / Hong Kong / Ceramist Vaevae Chan has built a private cave. Located within a nondescript industrial building in Sun Po Kong, Kowloon, the space is where Chan retreated while contending with health problems, a parent’s death and upheaval in Hong Kong. Between 2018 and 2021, the artist toiled in private, turning it into a studio and exhibition space. This culminated in her inaugural project, She Told Me to Head to the Sea, which was a unique experience for visitors. For a time, Juen Juen Gung, as Chan calls her space, was shrouded in mystery. Posts on Instagram created some buzz, but none of the images delivered the feeling that Chan aimed to instil in visitors. While descriptions of the show spread by word of mouth, little information was available. The only way to find out more was to book a slot for a visit. She Told Me to Head to the Sea can be accessed via four locked doors, with three of …

Chu Chu

Published by Christine Chan Chiu

Awakening / Alisan Fine Arts, Central / Feb 1 – Mar 16, 2023 / Chu Chu’s second solo exhibition at Alisan Fine Arts in Hong Kong was an overview of the emerging artist’s works from 2007 to the present. It was curated mainly to provide viewers with background knowledge of her practice, featuring some of her best-known earlier works, as well as showcasing her latest multimedia experiments. Highlighting her roots in photography and Chinese calligraphy, Awakening not only traces Chu’s development over the past decade and a half, but also serves as an affirmation of her talent at reinterpreting and reconciling vastly different genres. The presentation started with her iconic Material Immaterial series from over a decade ago, featuring five monochromatic works depicting dried fruits, gardenias and twigs. You could easily be forgiven for dismissing the photographic renderings of such objects as banal or commonplace. However, understatement is the key here. Embedded in the photographs among the nuanced shadows are calligraphic scrolls so subtle and delicate that they could easily be mistaken for shadows themselves. …

Myth Makers — Spectrosynthesis III

Published by Brady Ng

Tai Kwun Contemporary / Hong Kong / Dec 24 – Apr 10, 2023 / There’s a quote that aspirational content creators like to share online: “Those who tell stories rule the world.” It’s often attributed to Plato or Aristotle, while some say it is wisdom passed down by the Hopi or Navajo Native Americans, but nobody can pin down its origins. Perhaps the line is a modern piece of prose attached to the distant past to feign legitimacy, or maybe thinkers from different eras and geographies landed on the same thought. In any case, it’s branded into the collective consciousness of 21st-century storytellers, giving a semblance of meaning to the words and images they generate. This is precisely how myths are seeded, their origins eventually lost but tales retold with embellishments and new interpretations injected in each iteration. Maybe those who make myths don’t rule the world, but they certainly shape it. The third edition of the Sunpride Foundation’s Spectrosynthesis exhibitions, presented at Tai Kwun and curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, involved artworks …

Wing Sze Lam and Heiwa Wong

Published by Ophelia Lai

Dailyscape / 1999 Art Space / Hong Kong / Oct 8 – 30, 2022 / In Wing Sze Lam’s stars in the woods (2016) and stars in the water (2018), a pair of moving-image works, darkness descends gradually over dense foliage and docked boats until the only sources of illumination are streetlamps and passing vehicles. The camera never moves in either sequence, registering the day’s slow surrender to shadow. Screened near the entrance of 1999 Art Space on two wall-mounted smartphones, the works are an apt introduction to Lam and Heiwa Wong’s Dailyscape, a dual show about documentation and urban memory. Wong’s photographs likewise carry a sense of duration despite their static medium, evoking long evenings spent under an artificial glow. Images of a laptop screen reflected in a bedroom window and bands of light cutting into a dark footbridge (both from the series stars in the city, 2022) capture the electric quiet of the nighttime. Lam finds a hidden language of luminescence in “Turn on the light when you are back” (2017–18), comprising clips …