All posts tagged: Ilaria Maria Sala

Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Tetsuo Mizù, Julie & Jesse, Kohei Kyomori 前川強、水島哲雄、Julie & Jesse、京森康平

Contours of Expression /Whitestone Gallery /Hong Kong /Aug 9 – Sep 20, 2025 /Ilaria Maria Sala / The Hong Kong branch of the Japanese-owned Whitestone Gallery has inaugurated its new Hong Kong space in Wong Chuk Hang with a group show, Contours of Expression. It features four artists: Tsuyoshi Maekawa, a member of the avant-garde Gutai Art Association group, which was active from 1954 to 1972; abstract painter Tetsuo Mizu, who passed away this January, at 80 years of age; Kohei Kyomori, born in 1985; and the Hong Kong and Jingdezhen-based ceramic artist duo Julie & Jesse – Swiss designer Julie Progin and American artist Jesse Mc Lin. Maekawa’s works date from the early 1960s to 2015 and are all variations of his signature jute/burlap cloth on canvas: using adhesive and paint, he shapes the cloth on the canvas so as to create a three-dimensional element. He adds paint either before shaping the cloth or after, creating abstract works that immediately recall the Gutai approach, with its bright colours and devotion to a process that …

Salvatore Emblema 薩爾瓦托雷・恩布勒馬

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Born in Terzigno, near Naples, Salvatore Emblema (1929-2006) initially pursued a rather traditional artistic education, going to art school, training as a cameo jewellery carver (a practice that has a distinct Neapolitan declension, in the Torre del Greco school, which specialised in corals) and then enrolling in a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Naples. He didn’t finish university but instead dedicated time to travelling – going to France, the UK, and the Netherlands, and to New York for a year – after which he returned to Italy and started his career as an artist. In the 1950s, he worked for the Cinecittà movie studios in Rome, the largest in Europe, where he collaborated with Federico Fellini on films like La Strada (The Road, 1953-54), making the sets. His artistic practice bears little resemblance to old-school academic training involving even meticulous jewellery-making skills: the modernity of his approach to painting and sculpture is striking even more than half a century later. In his hands, the unprimed jute and sackcloth canvases he uses have …

Ruth Asawa 魯斯·阿薩瓦 Scott Kahn 斯科特·卡恩

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Doing Is Living /Once in a Blue Moon /David Zwirner /Hong Kong /Nov 19, 2024 – Feb 22, 2025 / David Zwirner Hong Kong’s double show, with ethereal sculptures by Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) on the lower floor and the moon paintings of Scott Kahn (b. 1946) on the upper one, pairs two very different artists, allowing the viewer to find unexpected connections between their works. In Asawa’s first solo show in Greater China, Doing is Living, her mesmerisingly beautiful sculptures float in the air with magical, perfectly mathematical rhythms. Born in California, Asawa created these, as she has said in a past interview, “by observing plants” and then taking “a wire line and [going] into the air and [defining] the air without stealing it from anyone”. In this show, complementing the sculptures hanging from the ceiling, we can also admire a series of lesser-seen preparatory works, mostly watercolours of roses and irises but also meticulous renderings of leaves and their veins, and initial transpositions of these into patterns of lines and curves, both in ink: geometrical …

Lain Singh Bangdel

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Rossi & Rossi /Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong /Sep 28 – Nov 14, 2024 / The adjective that you will most often see associated with Nepali artist, preservationist, novelist and scholar Lain Singh Bangdel (1919–2002) is “iconic”. He is the man who single-handedly brought contemporary art into the Himalayan country, while at the same time being the most dedicated scholar of Nepal’s artistic past, painstakingly and doggedly compiling catalogues of looted or lost art, and making a remarkable contribution to our understanding of Nepal’s history and artistic heritage. A pioneer and the first truly international Nepali artist, Bangdel kept his deep interest in his country’s ancient art rather separate from his own artistic practice, which mainly consists of very modernist oil paintings, with clear influences from his contemporaries from all around the world. A recent show at Rossi & Rossi Wong Chuk Hang’s gallery was a very rare chance for people in Hong Kong to get a glimpse of the work of this household name in Nepal – a small but still quite comprehensive overview …

Chow Chun Fai 周俊輝

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Map of Amnesia /Tang Contemporary Art /Hong Kong /Sep 13 – Oct 15, 2024 / The latest solo exhibition of Chow Chun Fai’s works at Tang Contemporary Art, Map of Amnesia, is a return to some of the artist’s favourite themes – Hong Kong city scenes, streets, taxis (Chow was a taxi driver for a few years), Hong Kong movies and nostalgia – which are explored on 14 canvases in a bright palette, slightly acidic, recalling the neon signs that used to fill the urban landscape. For these acrylic paintings, Chow used some of the images he has collected during more than 20 years of street photography. They show partially distorted buildings and streets, as if they were taken using an ultra-wide-angle lens. The result is akin to those vivid dreams in which familiar places appear not quite as they are in reality, yet perfectly recognisable, a kind of retinal memory that becomes entangled in meanings hidden in our subconsious. And to further complicate the picture, Chow has inserted some of the most iconic Hong …

Lee Jin Woo 李鎮雨

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Inside the White Cube: Lee Jin Woo /White Cube /Hong Kong /Jun 1 – Sep 7, 2024 / Lee Jin Woo’s solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s White Cube Gallery, provides a rather distinctive, nearly spiritual experience, as we stare at his semi-sculptural, abstract paintings, created through the methodical, slow manipulation of paper and charcoal. Some of his works are in various shades of light blue, while others are in grey-black monochrome. They have been arranged at White Cube with the gallery’s signature spaciousness, leaving a whole wall for each work and fully drawing in the viewer. The paintings, with their monochrome stillness and the dynamic jagged surfaces, created by the way in which Lee manipulates paper and charcoal to create texture, seem to change constantly: if we look at the overall effect, we see an imaginary geological landscape, darker at the bottom, where the ground would be, gradually becoming more ethereal as we look at a dreamlike, sometimes ominous looking sky, pale blue or pale grey. Lee, born in Seoul in 1959, moved to Paris in …

Debe Sham 岑愷怡

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Park Solo /Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre /Mar 13 – Sep 16, 2024 / Debe Sham’s exhibition Park Solo, at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, is spread throughout all five floors of this singularly shaped venue, and is best viewed by going down the stairs from the fifth floor all the way to the first – which opens onto Hong Kong Park’s children games precinct, a charming echo of some of the sculptures on display. The first works the visitor encounters on entering the building are Windmills (xx),a series of gold-plated, spiky, stainless-steel circles. “My inspiration for these comes from the colourful paper windmills people buy at temples during Lunar New Year for good fortune, called fongche. I find that this is a traditional Hong Kong shape that is quite overlooked. They are very characteristic and very beautiful,” says Sham. Like windmills, these golden, minimalistic fongche spin when touched or when the wind coming through the door is strong enough. As this first encounter makes clear, Sham’s practice is highly informed by play and …

Kings’ Inscriptions · Contemporary Interpretations

Published by Artomity Magazine

Kwok Mang Ho, Lee Wing Ki, Prof. Lee Yun Woon, Prof. Leong Lampo, Dr Leung Kwan Kiu, Tso Cheuk Yim, Yeung Yuk Kan / University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG), The University of Hong Kong / Sep 23 – Dec 30, 2023 / Ilaria Maria Sala As ink has become more popular, and more gallery and museum space is being dedicated to the medium, there can be a slight confusion as to what it exactly is – and isn’t. A small but very diverse show at the University Museum Art Gallery at Hong Kong University, Kings’ Inscriptions · Contemporary Interpretations, provides a suitably wide panorama of what ink can be – starting from one of its first uses: ink rubbings of engraved steles. As the show’s title suggests, the inscriptions, especially the most ancient ones, often retell the stories of kings, expanding on their moral qualities. Travelling literati would stop and copy the engravings by covering them with ink and pasting rice paper sheets on the stones, which would then be “rubbed” by tapping a …

Welcome >_< Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)歡迎光臨矛盾漩渦 >_<

Published by Artomity Magazine

Various artists / Tomorrow Maybe at Eaton / Hong Kong / Aug 13 – Sept 3, 2023 / Ilaria Maria Sala / As you enter the exhibition space on the fourth floor of the Eaton Hotel, you are greeted by a small print of an image macro, a digital picture with text superimposed, hanging from the roof, attached with string and clips. It features an image of a manga girl sitting on a messy bed with her legs bent against her chest, provocatively showing the back of her upper thighs, left uncovered by her pink miniskirt – coordinating with her pink baby shoes – her mouth hiding behind a mobile phone. The floor is strewn with all sorts of items: shopping bags and takeaway containers, bits of paper and other undecipherable debris. On top is the sentence that gives the show part of its title: “Welcome >_< take a seat wherever” (not that there is anywhere to sit in this rubbish-piled room). Internet neologisms, and neologisms from internet neologisms – like the cringevibing of the show’s title – …

Chow Chun Fai 周俊輝

Published by Artomity Magazine

Portraits from Behind / Gallery Exit / Hong Kong / Mar 14 – Jun 13, 2020 / Ilaria Maria Sala / Throughout the summer of 2019, as Hong Kong was shaken by the most intense mass protests the city has ever witnessed, photography moved from ubiquitous to a scrutinised medium for recording reality. As thousands were arrested and charged with rioting, protesters started to ask onlookers not to take their portraits, to avoid being identified. At the same time, border officials decided to scrutinise what people saw, and asked to check the telephones of those who wanted to cross into mainland China, looking at their photos to determine if they had taken part in the protests. Social media posts appeared with participants’ faces blurred or cropped out. More frequently, people would take public photos that only showed people’s backs, making identification impossible. Hong Kong artist Chow Chun Fai’s new solo exhibition at Gallery Exit, Portraits from Behind, moves along the same lines. On a series of small canvases that illustrate stills from the protests, no face is recognisable, with the exception of two self-portraits, in …