All posts tagged: Kwan Sheung Chi

Event Scores by Artists-Parents 事件譜之又係藝術家又係阿爸阿媽

Published by Rooftop Institute 出版社:天台塾 /Ysabelle Cheung / There is a backwater thought that once an artist (usually female, according to patriarchal hierarchies) bears children, they become somewhat infertile in their creative practices. “After I gave birth, some people apparently thought that I had retired to take care of my child,” Wong Wai Yin once stated in an article. In truth, she had only taken a five-year hiatus from traditional exhibition-making. Then, in 2016, she produced Without Trying, a monumental solo exhibition at Spring Workshop that revealed her engagements in entirely new creative practices as a result of motherhood: learning French, dog training, spiritual response therapy and playing the ukulele. This peeling away from the art world circuit and its capitalist expectations can be liberating, a fact that Wong and 48 other Hong Kong-based artist-parents reveal in Event Scores by Artists-Parents. Published by Rooftop Institute and grouped into six chapters, the contributions document in writing and photographs the co-learning experiences that occur daily between artists and their children, reframed playfully as highly experimental “event scores” or “instructional …

Alan Lau

Alan Lau started collecting Hong Kong art about 10 years ago. He talks about three of his favourite works from his collection. Tozer Pak’s Love Letter (2011) was allegedly dedicated to the artist’s wife when he proposed to her. It is a conceptual, poetic work consisting of four books and the receipt from the bookshop where the artist bought them. Pak plays a game with the Chinese titles of the books so that reading every second character spells out a sentence. In the version in Alan Lau’s collection, it says “I am thinking about you”. The collector likes the idea of finding poetry in a commercial transaction. It also reminds him of traditional Chinese poetry, in which scholars subtly hid messages. The piece itself contains a secret and has its own story: when the work was displayed at Para Site’s annual fundraising auction, a thief entered the gallery and stole the books – and nothing else. Both Pak and Lau found this hilarious, and Lau wanted to buy the piece, or at least a representation …