All posts filed under: Studio

Daphné Mandel

French urban designer Daphné Mandel used to work in public spaces before moving to Hong Kong, where she decided to reinvent herself as an artist. Since then, she has been observing, depicting and reimagining the landscape of the territory, questioning its identity and specificities. Increasingly, she has engaged deeper in fieldwork, exploring abandoned villages in the New Territories and collecting stories from local villagers whose lifestyle is on the brink of disappearing. Between fantasy and reality, her artworks invite viewers to project themselves into this collective heritage and to dive into the unalterable cycle of time. Daphné Mandel. Courtesy the artist. Caroline Ha Thuc: You worked as a landscape architect for a long time. What triggered your desire to become an artist? Daphné Mandel: I moved to Hong Kong in 2008. Seeing the city with my own eyes for the first time, I thought: “How am I going to find work as a landscape architect in such urban density? Where is the public space?”Knowing that I couldn’t practise landscape architecture in the same way that …

Sharon Lee 李卓媛

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Sharon Lee’s practice explores and questions photography as a medium. Inspired by her family life and by the everyday, the Hong Kong artist experiments with various techniques, textures and materials to mould the blurry remains of memory, poetically capturing the slippery layers of time. Her work revolves around the notions of absence and disappearance as tangible and often constructed presences. Caroline Ha Thuc: From the start, you have explored photography in association with various modes of printing, including ceramics. Where does that come from? Sharon Lee: I use photography; meanwhile I do not conform to photography. I embrace alternative image-making as a form of negotiation, not necessarily with a single photograph but with the history, culture, art, science and technology that it carries. I started photography when I found myself with no resources for art making – no studio, no art supplies but a 55-sq-ft shared bedroom. I find the medium a great tool to construct a visual reality. It frames and unframes, hides and reveals simultaneously. I was in Vienna for an academic exchange year …

Zheng Mahler

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Daisy Bisenieks and Royce Ng settled down on Lantau Island in 2013 and established themselves as the Zheng Mahler collective in 2015. Their multimedia, cross-disciplinary, research-based practice mainly investigates the history of Asian commercial relations, trade routes and systems of power from economic, geopolitical, social and cultural perspectives. Recently, with their research about virtual reality and computational theories of mind, they focus on the possibility of human beings embracing non-human experiences and expanding their cognitive abilities. Caroline Ha Thuc: Neither of you are from Hong Kong but the city, as a trading hub but also a unique ecosystem, is at the core of your practice. Royce Ng: I was born in Australia but my parents come from Hong Kong. Daisy is Australian with an Eastern European background and we met in Melbourne in 2005. We decided to move to Hong Kong as a starting point to working on a commissioned project for the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich about the economic relationships between Asia and Africa. We were asked to explore this topic given our background …

Annie Wan Lai-kuen 尹麗娟

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

As embodiments of a fleeting, volatile reality, Annie Wan’s ceramics reflect the artist’s attempts to defy time and capture the ephemeral. Focusing on the everyday and on the intrinsic qualities of her medium, Wan plays with the paradoxical fragility of ceramics and on their ability to give tangible forms to lost moments, collective heritage or vanishing memories. With the idea that reality is subject to successive reinterpretations, she uses the language of ceramics to question the reiterative process of perception, and the reproduction of reproductions, searching for points of resistance against a truth that has slipped out of our grasp. You told me that you first studied design before jumping into art and ceramics. What triggered the change? I am not a person with a clear plan for my life path; I usually follow my intuition. I studied design after secondary school and then worked as a textile designer for a few years. Although I enjoyed the textile design job, I wanted to have some new experiences. Therefore, in 1989, I studied studio ceramics part …

Wing Po So 蘇詠寶

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Wing Po So’s studio is tiny and very tidy: between a large collection of shells, dried molluscs and plants, various other species rest on shelves in glass jars, all properly labelled. The Hong Kong artist, who grew up in a family of Chinese medicine practitioners, also surrounds herself with essential books about Chinese medicine, including a two-volume work dating from the Ming dynasty. Her practice confronts this scientific background with her personal observation of nature, as she transforms and creates organic yet surreal sculptures and installations. Caroline Ha Thuc: You grew up spending a lot of time in your parents’ traditional Chinese medicine shop in Hong Kong, and this family background plays an important part in your art practice. When and why did you decide to draw from this experience and to become an artist? Wing Po So: It was due to the closure of our family’s shop in Soho [in 2012]. I spent all my childhood in this medicine shop and in the neighborhood. Several months after the closure, my parents decided to rebuild …

Joseph Chen 陳敬元

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Christy Lee / In 2018, Joseph Chen was sauntering through the street markets in Sham Shui Po when he happened upon a stack of 50 hard drives. The Hong Kong artist bought all of them for “under HK$100” and extracted the deluge of personal images and documents. That exercise culminated in Shameplant in Glory Hole, a series of performances, a series of performances, a research group and exhibitions from 2019-21 exploring the idea of “second-hand memories”. The latest event was a solo exhibition, Shameplant in Glory Hole, that ran from June 19 to July 17 at Videotage. At the dim art space, one sees as well as enters Chen’s immersive installation, where 8-10 terabytes of “second-hand memories” have been collaged into a psychedelic whole. Walls are plastered with a mishmash of images and documents, from selfies to song lyrics to travel photos to pornographic images, while the objects in the space offer a glimpse into lives, real or imaginary, underlined by the artist’s predilection for juxtapositions. Having kicked off his career as a video artist, Chen is increasingly …

Maurice Benayoun 莫奔

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Caroline Ha Thuc / A pioneer of new media art, French artist and theorist Maurice Benayoun began experimenting with 3D animations in 1987 and interactive VR installations in the early 1990s. Since then, he has developed a complex multimedia practice that combines digital technologies with a conceptual approach. Benayoun, also known as MoBen (莫奔), arrived in Hong Kong nine years ago to teach at City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. There he established the Neuro Design Lab, a studio where he and his team develop and produce his art projects. CHT: Since 2018, you have been working on a very ambitious project, Value of Values, which aims to evaluate the relative value of human values such as freedom, love and power. What triggered this idea? MB: This project arose from a series of questions. We have seen recently how much various governments based their pandemic-related decisions on values: protect the elderly or the economy? Compassion or money? But what does that mean today for individuals? With the Mechanics of Emotions series, I created large urban screen …

LeeLee Chan 陳麗同

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Born in 1984 in Hong Kong, LeeLee Chan is well known for sculptural installations that transform discarded mass-produced objects from daily life into hybrid and often organic forms. For Chan, there is no discontinuity between the human, natural and technological spheres; she has developed a holistic approach to the world and to society. Art allows her to connect these realms creatively, opening up new and sometimes surprising perspectives on our urban environment. Caroline Ha Thuc: You left Hong Kong at the age of 17 to study in the United States and you spent 13 years abroad, including two in the UK, before coming back in 2015. How did this journey shape your work?LeeLee Chan: I guess it changed my perspective on Hong Kong and how I now appreciate my family’s heritage. My parents are antique dealers, and I grew up surrounded by Chinese antiques, yet I did not fully appreciate them until I came back. I am also more open to the urban environment I am now living in, in Kwai Chung, and I have been reflecting on its …

Ng Tsz-kwan 吳子昆

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

A multimedia artist and designer, Ng Tsz-kwan (b.1972) proposes various and reflexive modes of artistic experience based on a poetics of language that unfolds at the borderline of performance. Ng graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, and later earned his master’s at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. In 2006, he co-founded multimedia design company Yucolab. His artistic practice draws from these experiences yet also departs from them. It mainly develops in two experimental directions: immersive, multisensory installations and space-oriented installations based on decontextualised, fragmented moving images. For Ng, “What we see is how we see”. His installations often question and explore the medium of the cinema and the relationships that the audience entertains with moving images in order to open up the space between them. Recently, he created an automated mobile chair that travels along a railway track within the exhibition space, a way for viewers to encounter his works while in motion, on a journey he controls. He disengages from narratives and linear …

Lo LaiLai Natalie 勞麗麗

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Christie Lee / For city-dwellers, it’s easy to romanticise nature. William Wordsworth, who witnessed how the industrial revolution transformed London in the 19th century, for example, wrote such evocative lines as “nature never did betray the heart that loved her”. Three centuries later, Lo Lai Lai Natalie has made rumination on nature a crucial part of her art. But unlike the English poet, she doesn’t romanticise it. For Lo, nature isn’t simply an object for humans to cast an admiring eye on or to destroy. It also exercises its own agency – and can create or kill, oblivious to what humans imagine it to be. This idea is captured in Like a stone, vain hope (2020), a three-minute video-art piece where a woman interrogates a plant, trying to tease out responses in vain. Holding nature up as a mirror for mankind, Lo’s photography, videos and installations reflect on a myriad of topics, from survival and supply chains to religion and freedom. But the artist is also hyper-aware of her own limitations in articulating nature – “after all, I’m a human being”. …