All posts tagged: photography

Catherine Opie at Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong

Published by

So long as they are wild through July 7, 2018 Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present So long as they are wild, a solo exhibition of recent work by Catherine Opie. For the Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Opie will present a series of photographs shot in one of the United States’ most revered and naturally beautiful locations, Yosemite National Park in California. Opie is known for her ability to create photographs that unite contemporary themes and issues with a classical aesthetic that expands upon her exploration of the tradition of photography as well as the greater art historical canon. In addition to the photographs, Opie will include a series of ceramic sculptures. This recent undertaking of sculpture began as a personal pastime but has evolved into an alternative aesthetic pursuit. 4th Floor, Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street, Central T (852) 2530 0025 Email Web Tu-Fr 10am to 7pm, Sa 11am to 7pm Image: Installation view of So long as they are wild by Catherine Opie at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong. 

Leung Chi Wo

Published by

By Caroline Ha Thuc there and thenness “Is History not simply that time when we were not born?” asks Roland Barthes, while looking at a photograph of his mother as a child, in his book Camera Lucida. Leung Chi Wo’s process is all too Barthesian: born in 1968, he focuses here on 1967, the year when the most violent riots in the post-Second World War history of Hong Kong took place. In the womb of his mother, the artist could not witness those events, and to recollect today occurrences that are lost forever, he can only rely on archives, found objects and stories. This exhibition could be perceived as a personal museum, another version of the Museum of the Lost project he and Sara Wong began in 2013, but one dedicated to 1967, a year he was not around but tries to reach for – despite the effects of time and subjectivity – through the power of photography and the socially constructed memory of the past. Fraser (2015) epitomises the artist’s practice and concerns. The installation features …

Alex Prager

Published by

Lehmann Maupin  Hong Kong Jan 18 – Mar 17 Katherine Volk For Alex Prager’s second solo exhibition in Hong Kong, the Los Angeles-based artist demonstrates through staged film and photography that a familiar truth lies beneath fiction. To the left of the entrance sits Prager’s sculpture Hand Model (detail) (2017) of a bent finger with a long, red-painted nail. Next to the manicured finger is Hand Model (2017), a framed, enlarged image of a whole outstretched hand against a muted background. The cropping from body to hand, and from hand to finger, is reminiscent of advertising practices of enlarging and editing to fit ideals and specifications. Advertising is further emphasised when the same image is used in Star Shoes (2017). Hidden in the corner of the large-scale photograph, an advertisement appears on the back of a model’s magazine prop. It questions the importance of imagery and detail in our daily lives and how the smallest image or the biggest billboard can have an effect on our consciousness. In the other portion of the gallery, Prager’s single-channel video Applause (2016) plays against the white-walled backdrop. …

Wolfgang Tillmans

Published by

By Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand Although his photographs had graced the pages of magazines like iD and Interview magazine, for a couple of decades it was at nightclub Berghain’s Panorama Bar in Berlin that the work of Wolfgang Tillmans really seared itself on my mind. The work in question, Phillip III (1993), depicted a man exposing his anus with his hand. The Panorama Bar, known for its hedonism, where music, dance and sex dissolve into one another and clubbers can party the night away with complete abandon and without judgement, was the perfect venue for his work. What struck me wasn’t that the work was confrontational or provocative – Robert Mapplethorpe paved the way for works of this nature in the late 1970s and 80s, drawing the sting from homoerotic art. Instead it was the unapologetic directness of the work, the raw honesty and frankness of it, that impressed me most. Throughout his three-decade career photographing a diversity of subjects, Tillmans’ has demonstrated a commitment to exploring and depicting truth, blurring the boundaries between art and documentary photography. Music and clubbing …

Alex Prager at Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, January 18

Published by

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Alex Prager. The Los Angeles-based artist returns to Hong Kong with her signature style of theatrical and meticulously staged photography and film, as well as her first exhibited sculpture. In her most recent series, Prager manipulates scale and dimension to challenge our understanding of the boundary between fiction and reality. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 18, from 6–8 pm, at the Pedder Building. Those familiar with Prager’s work will recognize elements that recall past series, such as Face in the Crowd (2013), in which her compositions highlighted the contrast between crowded public spaces and a lone heroine. These latest works push the theatrical narrative potential of her prior series. The imagery lays bare the artifice in its creation, achieved through impossible, contrived viewpoints, layering of incongruent scenes—such as a rainy day on top of a sunny one—and other formal and technical controls that challenge the assumed naturalism of photography and film.  One such formal device is scale—a major component in the …

G Roland Biermann

Published by

Transformations By Malcolm MacLeod The works of German-born, London-based photographer G Roland Biermann inhabit a space that flirts with reality, but really exists somewhere between our realm and the surreal. Transformations, his Hong Kong debut exhibition at Galerie du Monde, reveals a thematic concentration on uncertainty and the grey areas of existence, and how we humans interact with these spaces as both individuals and societies. In a city like Hong Kong, where green places mingle with high rises, and the pavements swell with workers glued to their phones, Biermann’s undefined worlds carry a poignant message. The works in the exhibition belong to three projects from between 2009 and 2016. The first chronologically, Apparitions (2009), depicts ghostly figures and objects inhabiting carefully curated spaces of Biermann’s imagining. These compositions resist traditional narratives and are rife with contrasts, making them an ideal jumping-off point for the exploration of metaphysical questions that is a consistent feature of Biermann’s oeuvre. Shown in groups of between two and five, they echo the diptychs and triptychs of medieval Christian art, or even the folding panels …