All posts tagged: Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas at Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong

Don’t let Money Change You  Sep 21 – Oct 31, 2020 Ben Brown Fine Arts 202 The Factory1 Yip Fat StreetWong Chuk Hang Ben Brown Fine Arts is proud to present Hank Willis Thomas’s Don’t Let Money Change You at the Hong Kong gallery. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with Ben Brown Fine Arts, following his highly acclaimed shows in London, The Beautiful Game, 2017, and Hong Kong, My Life is Ours, 2018. Don’t Let Money Change You will bring together a new body of work from Thomas’s innovative retroreflective series, depicting serial imagery of international currencies in bold monochromes.

Hank Willis Thomas

My Life is OursBen Brown Fine ArtsHong KongSep 20 – Oct 27, 2018Valencia Tong American conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas is known for examining issues of identity, race, intolerance and protest. For his first solo exhibition in Asia, at Ben Brown Fine Arts, he reinterpreted archival photographs he found of protests in Hong Kong and mainland China from past and present to highlight theuniversality of recurring themes of oppression across history. The artist also explores the notions of materiality and audience engagement, deliberately screen-printing the images onto retroreflective sheeting, which is usually used to make road signs visible in the dark. On top of that, painterly brushstrokes sit on the outermost layer, giving it the illusion of abstraction. It is only when the images are manually activated by light, such as a camera flash or a torch, that the full details of the historical images come to view. Since the appearance of the works keeps changing, mirroring the constant state of sociopolitical flux in the world at large, the viewer is literally and metaphorically invited to look closer and dig deeper, beyond what is …

Sculpture Parks and Street Art: Curating Hong Kong’s Public Art Agenda

Hong Kong, renowned for its booming art market, is widely regarded as Asia’s art hub. While commercial success has unquestionably been essential in validating this rising status, so has been the provision of proper education and exposure of the public to a diverse range of artistic practices. To fulfil its potential as an art capital, Hong Kong needs more of the latter. There are still sectors of the art community that are severely under-represented, from local art initiatives to experimental art spaces and, in particular, public-art projects. Public-art programmes are vital to cultural development in cities, due to the easy accessibility to art they provide. Hong Kong has suffered from a lack of quality programmes, but two recent initiatives seek to change this. One is Hong Kong’s first sculpture park, and the other is the formation of HKwalls, a non-profit organisation facilitating street-art projects citywide. Harbour Arts Sculpture Park opened in late February, altering an iconic space on the harbour front between Central and Wan Chai. Co-curators Tim Marlow and Fumio Nanjo have emphasised the significance of the park in developing public arts …