All posts tagged: Hong Kong

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 …

Samson Young at Kiang Malingue Hong Kong

Published by Artomity Magazine

Samson YoungMusic for selective hearing, or assisted livingSep 24 – Nov 5, 2022 Kiang Malingue13/F Blue Box Factory Building25 Hing Wo StreetAberdeen, Hong Kong+852 2810 0317By appointment kiangmalingue.comWeChat Kiang Malingue is pleased to present Samson Young’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong space. Titled Music for selective hearing, or assisted living, this exhibition will feature five sets of artworks created by the artist in the last two years. Known for exploring the fabric of the socio-political by examining the history and contemporary conditions of sound and music, Young considers in the exhibition the complicated nature of ‘sound conditioning’ – the active control of ambient sounds, as exemplified by such devices as white-noise sleep aids – as self-care and recuperation, but also as self-imposed isolation, control, and wilful disengagement. Included in the exhibition is Samson Young’s collaboration with his long-time friend, violist William Lane. The installation Often easy, sometimes impossible (2021 – 2022) consists of a two-channel video, in which Lane performs Young’s original composition that was scored for a triangle, a viola, and a synthesised glass harmonica …

John Batten at Ping Pong Gintonería

Published by Artomity Magazine

John BattenRecent Hong Kong PhotographsAug 23 – Nov 20, 2022Tue – Sun: 6pm – 12pm  Ping Pong Gintonería129, L/G Second Street  Nam Cheong HouseSai Ying Pun, Hong Kong pingpong129.com@pingpong129 Free entry  “All things are in a process of change. You yourself are subject to constant alteration and gradual decay. So too is the whole universe.” Marcus Aurelius, ‘Meditations’ John Batten initially began photographing seriously to provide images to accompany his own writing as an art critic, writer on architecture, culture, and politics, and as an urban planning activist*. His photographs have been published in many publications, including the South China Morning Post, Ming Pao Weekly, Perspective, Artco Monthly (Taiwan), Artomity, Asia Literary Review, Yishu, and The Peak magazine.    Over the last twenty years he has increasingly photographed Hong Kong’s urban landscape and the always changing human interventions on the city’s streets. His initial motivation to photograph was pure documentation – to capture moments of beauty, ugliness, intrigue, irony, and oddity. However, during Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, his fortnightly column for the Hong Kong magazine Ming Pao Weekly evolved from discussing art, heritage, and urban planning issues to also …

Arthur Hacker’s Unique Hand 許敬雅的藝術之手

Published by John Batten

Arthur Hacker left London in 1967 for a job as an art director in the colonial Hong Kong Government’s Information Services Department. Among his luggage would have been the air of London’s cultural whirl, glimpsed in the ambience of movies of the time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup; revolutionary youth against the whole (damn) system in Lindsay Anderson’s If… ; and the violence and Stalinist social conditioning in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Hacker brought his tight modernist graphic skills with him, complemented by the era’s psychedelia and surreal humour. His artist’s eye was broadened by the satire and profanity of Oz magazine; the bright animation of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; the era’s counterculture and rock music; its fashion, book, magazine and record cover design; and the ground-breaking pop art of his British contemporaries Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. These progressive influences and an openness to depictions of life’s oddities would form a key source for Hacker’s curlicue graphical drawings.  Hacker came to Hong Kong with a liberal, individual outlook on life and over the years he …

Yeung Hok Tak at Kiang Malingue Hong Kong

Published by Artomity Magazine

Yeung Hok Tak /What a big smoke ring /Apr 30 – May 28, 2022 / Kiang Malingue12 & 13/F Blue Box Factory Building25 Hing Wo StreetAberdeen, Hong Kong+852 2810 0317By appointment kiangmalingue.com The gallery is pleased to present Yeung Hok Tak’s solo exhibition What a big smoke ring, the Hong Kong   artist’s first exhibition with Kiang Malingue. Showcasing more than twenty recent paintings by the artist, the exhibition on the newly expanded 13th floor of the gallery’s studio space comprehensively celebrates the latest development of Yeung’s artistic trajectory over two decades: a body of vibrant, luscious and humorous works that deals in an evermore sophisticated fashion with a city’s history, in relation to a world that deems both the present and the future uncertain.

Tickets to Art Central 2022 are now on sale!

Published by Artomity Magazine

Tickets to Art Central 2022 are now on sale! Staged at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from May 26–29, the Fair returns with over 50 exhibiting galleries, hundreds of artists and thousands of artwork to view and buy. Accompanied by a five-day critically acclaimed public programme of talks, artist interviews, art of moving image and large-scale installations, Art Central is an art lovers must-see event! Buy your ticket in advance to save up to 25% off Adult Tickets, and 33% off Student and Concession Tickets.

Entrance lobby of Tang King Po School, Ma Tau Wei, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 29 December 2021.

Published by John Batten

A few days after hearing of the closure of another of Hong Kong’s remaining pro-democracy news outlets, Stand News, and its web archive, I decided I needed a good walk to shake off the gloom. Before meeting Michele Chu, an artist friend exhibiting at 1a space in Tai Kok Tsui, I wandered around nearby Ma Tau Wai. I entered the beautiful 1950s modernist campus of Tang King Po School, which has an open chapel for worshippers. I admired the inner cloistered courtyards, visited the chapel and chatted to the friendly caretaker. The ambience was utterly solid, stable – otherworldly, almost. It was a perfect retreat for an hour – and a reminder to just get on with it. Later, I mentioned to Michele that I had visited the school and she recalled that when she learnt to drive a car, the instructor told her to remember “Tang King Po” School as she was preparing to drive, a homonym in Cantonese for “seat, mirrors, gears” – a simple reminder to adjust all three before driving. A moral there: …

Unloading a container of fruit near the wholesale fruit market, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 26 September 2021.

Published by John Batten

Daily, from the late afternoon until the early hours of the following morning, the streets surrounding the wholesale fruit market in the old district of Yau Ma Tei are transformed. Large containers arrive from just-unloaded ships or across the mainland border. Teams of workmen quickly unload the contents onto pallets that are trundled on trolleys through the streets, with cars and minibuses weaving in between. The newly arrived fruit is temporarily held in the market’s warehouses or on roadsides before being distributed throughout Hong Kong to independent fruit vendors, restaurants, suppliers and other outlets. The historic market is a labyrinth of alleys linking small wholesale businesses, including a row of 1930s shophouses converted into a warehouse. The site’s heritage extends onto the streets, as the physicality of loading and unloading under darkness amid moving, torch-like car headlights has a timeless, gothic ambience.  However, all this could go; the Hong Kong government has just announced the future removal of the market and its conversion into a place “for tourists” – no doubt, the business plan will involve high-price and/or tacky restaurants, bars and shops. …