All posts filed under: Reviews

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 …

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 …

Vvzela Kook

Published by Christie Lee

Phantom Island / Oi! / Hong Kong / Sep 5 – Jan 2, 2023 / In 1851, the government used rubble left by a giant fire in Sheung Wan to extend the shoreline by 15 metres. Since then, many more reclamation projects have taken place in Hong Kong, and 20 or so islands have disappeared from the city’s map.  The extension of our city and the disappearance of our islands find playful expression in Vvzela Kook’s Phantom Island exhibition, at Oi! until January 2.  The idea for a show on Hong Kong’s disappearing islands emerged from the artist’s research into the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club (RHKYC). She’d come across a photo of the former clubhouse of the RHKYC, which used to sit on the current site of Oi! before it was relocated to Kellett Island. Kook noticed that Kellett Island itself stopped being an island after reclamation work in the area. After the discovery, the artist started researching Hong Kong’s disappearing islands. “Wikipedia says 19 islands have disappeared, but I actually found more than …

Wu Jiaru 吳佳儒

Published by Brady Ng

To the Naiad’s House / Flowers Gallery / Hong Kong / Sep 29 – Nov 12 / The story of Southeast China in the 1990s is one of breakneck transformation. Cranes worked in tufts of dust, new structures climbed steel frames to scrape the sky, and opportunity was in the air. For many millions of people in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and smaller townships, the proverbial first bucket of gold seemed less like a fantasy and more like a real possibility. As China’s economy opened up, Southeast China felt closer to Hong Kong than ever before. Media and information moved across the border. Even though a border and bureaucracy separated Guangdong province from Hong Kong, people couldn’t help but form impressions of the city through glimpses offered in films and portrayals on television. For her recent exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Wu Jiaru mined her upbringing in Guangzhou and feelings as a Hong Kong transplant, revisiting experiences as a child who spent time in her mother’s restaurant, watching the world change through a TV screen. The solo presentation …

Jaffa Lam 林嵐

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Chasing an Elusive Nature / Axel Vervoordt Gallery / Hong Kong / 15 Oct 2022 – 7 Jan 2023 / A long piece of dark wood welcomes visitors at the entrance of the gallery. Like a totem, or the unique remnant of a larger structure, A Piece of Silence from Lying (2022) simply stands on the floor, vertically, as if abandoned. Its delicate, carved lines suggest the fluidity of running water, as if frozen or trapped in its flow. Created from a recycled pine crate, it epitomises Jaffa Lam’s attempts at magnifying the mundane and revealing the fundamental mutability of matter. Her first solo exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery explores the porosity and transformations of media, as a metaphor for the human quest for identity and a sense of belonging. Immediately, there is a large installation, flooded by the window light. Taishang LaoJun’s Furnace (2022) resembles a graveyard, with hundreds of small volcanic stones aligned on dark soil. On closer inspection, the rocks turn out to be made of aluminium, bronze and concrete, all moulded from …

Haim Steinbach

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

tin drum / White Cube / Hong Kong /Sep 14 – Nov 12, 2022 / Four horizontal display shelves line the exhibition walls of White Cube’s ground floor gallery. The open shelves are lined with groupings of objects – rubber dog chew toys, robots, spaceships and monsters, metal Star Wars lunch boxes. The display is reminiscent of a child’s bedroom, with cherished objects lined up on shelves in a way that may be cryptic to an outsider but hold personal meaning to the child. Angular and wedge-shaped, the shelves and the objects are all in a palette of black and red, sitting in stark contrast against the white walls. Two geometric, black and red toy cars sit beside a snowman-shaped black dog chew toy atop a red and black shelf. The work, El Lissitzky II-4 (2008-2012), references the Russian artist who cofounded the suprematism movement. Allusions to the Russian constructivist movement are echoed throughout the four shelf arrangements, creating a formal visual cohesion.  ‘tin drum’ – named after a 2011 work, tin drum, in the exhibition, …

Gloria Awareness

Published by Artomity Magazine

Sickroom / Hong Kong / Jun 16 – Jul 17, 2022 / Yang Jiang / “Sickroom” is a term used in Japanese to describe a house in which a murder has been committed. In those who hear of this term, it creates a psychological predisposition without an actual experience, and emphasises a sense of passiveness. The recently formed experimental conceptual art collective Gloria Awareness used this concept of the sickroom as a starting point for its imagination. The exhibition of the same name examined human cognitive mechanisms, with the six exhibiting artists exploring how to cope with the sickroom. By analysing the process of psychological association, Amy Tong and Nicole Wong both set about exploring the conditions of a sickroom, with the former focusing on its cause and the latter attempting to propose a solution. Tong’s video This Is A Dog Reading A Newspaper (2022) had a sense of déjà vu from broadcast news – the voiceover came from found footage of someone teaching mnemonic strategies, borrowing their nonsensical nature to explain the completely invisible …

Kong Chun Hei 鄺鎮禧

Published by Fizen Yuen

Off Beat 「踏空」 /Feyerabend /Hong Kong /Apr 1 – May 14, 2022 / As you enter art space Feyerabend, located in an old Tai Kok Tsui tong lau – a type of residential building built before the 1960s – a barber’s pole catches your attention. Its spinning action draws your eye yet lacks focus. As you continue to approach the centre of the space, the audio effects that usually come before announcements at old-style Cantonese teahouses or railway platforms blast from four mini speakers, filling the rectangular space, as if an announcement is imminent but not forthcoming. An abandoned wooden ladder and a dried up can of latex paint give the space a sense of being stuck in the past. If not for the video Sudivision playing, one might suspect that the objects were left behind from a previous occupant, instead of being part of an exhibition. I was told by the person in charge of the art space that many viewers had expected to see Kong Chun Hei’s technical pen drawings in the exhibition …

Law Yuk Mui

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

There Is No One Singing on the River /Oil Street Art Space, Oi! / Dec 12 – Jul 31, 2022 / There Is No One Singing on the River relates Law Yuk Mui’s experience and fieldwork along the Ng Tung River, located in Hong Kong’s northeastern New Territories. The river drains a large area and flows down on the western slope of Wong Leng, going underground in some parts of its lower course, irrigating Lau Shui Heung and Hok Tau reservoirs. Since the 1990s, its natural landscape has been radically modified due to flood control projects. Its catchment is very wide and its trajectory difficult to map out. Furthermore, the river has many names, changing as it meets various branches and tributaries. It even used to be called the Indus River, thanks to South Asian surveyors during the colonial period. Rather than trying to grasp this elusive, complex reality, Law reflects on her working methodology and proposes a very open interpretation of her journey. Based on her investigation, sound recording and mapping of the river, …