All posts tagged: Richard Lord

Onnie Chan 陳安然

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Richard Lord / No one’s route into as niche and demanding a field as immersive theatre is a straightforward one. But for Onnie Chan, founder and artistic director of Banana Effect, Hong Kong’s first immersive theatre company, hers has particularly deep roots. “My father died when I was very young,” she says. “It made me a bit disconnected from people, and kind of confused about my own identity. When I was about nine or 10 years old, I realised I could get connected with the world again through drama.” That search for connection, she adds, has powered her entire career. “That word is very important throughout my theatre journey. Through acting, I thought I could connect with people around me.” It eventually led her to apply for the acting course at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts behind her mother’s back, and after five years of study, she was offered a full-time job by the Hong Kong Repetory Theatre. It was her dream come true – but something was missing. “A big theatre company is like a corporation; everything …

João Vasco Paiva

Published by Artomity Magazine

Benches, Stairs, Ramps, Ledges, Ground By Richard Lord The work of Hong Kong-based, Portuguese-born artist represents a formal investigation of how urban environments are affected by human use – and how those environments in turn affect those humans. Even by his standards, however, his latest work, Benches, Stairs, Ramps, Ledges, Ground, shown after a three-month residency at Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, is a particularly direct interpretation of this mission, with urban materials that depict aspects of urban environments subjected to the stresses and strains typical of those environments. While in New York Paiva contacted people who make skate ramps, covered those ramps with satellite images of urban areas, depicted in ink that would run readily, and got skateboarders to do their thing on them. “I’m very interested in not controlling the final outcome, and so I wanted to work with these images but I wanted not to control them,” he says. “Street skateboarding is interesting – it’s a repurposing of urban space. It’s about which parts of structures they find interesting and use. …