All posts tagged: Tai Kwun Contemporary

Francis Alÿs and Mika Rottenberg at Tai Kwun Contemporary

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Now till February 2021 / Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong / 10 Hollywood Road / Central, Hong Kong /Tuesday to Sunday, 11am – 7pm / Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and gamesSolo exhibition by Francis AlÿsCurators: Xue Tan, Sunjung KimCo-presented with Art Sonje Seoul Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and games gathers for the first time in Hong Kong important recent works by Francis Alÿs, one of the most influential conceptual artists of our time. Structured around the artist’s interest in migration, borders, and his fascination with children’s games from around the world, this solo exhibition highlights Francis Alÿs’s poetic, imaginative sensibility, anchored by geopolitical concerns and individual will while being grounded in everyday life. The title of the exhibition was the spark to Alÿs’s works in this exhibition: “Wet Feet, Dry Feet” refers to the US policy on Cuban refugees in 1995. Under this policy, Cuban migrants headed for the United States faced vastly different treatment depending on whether they were intercepted at sea or on land, on US soil. If intercepted at sea (“wet feet”), …

Tap Chan, Thea Djordjadze, Jason Dodge, Eisa Jocson, Pratchaya Phinthong

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My Body Holds Its Shape / Tai Kwun Contemporary / Hong Kong / May 25 – Sep 27, 2020 / Jacqueline Leung / Little Mermaid Ariel’s song preceded the exhibition hall. By the time the dancer was seen, he had already turned on all fours, stretching his limbs with feline grace. In Eisa Jocson’s Zoo (2020), performance is in a constant state of becoming. Working with the expanse of the room, the dancers shifted between routine and improvised imitations of characters and animals, enlivening a space made to confine – previously as a women’s prison, now as a four-walled enclosure for art. Loosely organised around metaphorical interpretations of the body, such as its existence as a physical container, or as a mental framework of the self, My Body Holds Its Shape questions our efforts to sustain these edifices structuring our understanding of the world. Through the work of five artists, the exhibition opens up these limits as interstices of new relations and significance, creating, according to the opening statement, a “view that was not there …

Online conversations with Tai Kwun Contemporary

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Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong  8 Aug, 6 pm 15 Aug, 7 pm Eisa Jocson, Akira Takayama, Kohei Sekigawa Tai Kwun Contemporary is launching an online series of tours and conversations, in addition to our VR 360° virtual gallery. On select Wednesdays and Saturdays in August, we will be live-streaming tours of our current exhibitions, along with conversations between curators and artists. This hopefully highlights the enduring power of art in connecting people and communities, and sustains an inquisitive attitude towards our world at this challenging time. Find out more about the online programmes for They Do Understand Each Other and My Body Holds Its Shape. Conversations: Saturday, 8 Aug 2020, 6 – 7.15 pm Hong Kong time“Trust in the Public: Akira Takayama and Kohei Sekigawa in conversation with Yuka Uematsu” (Japanese with closed captioning in English) Yuka Uematsu, curator at The National Museum of Art, Osaka and co-curator of They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary will engage Akira Takayama and Kohei Sekigawa in a conversation on performative actions by people often unseen in society, activating the democratic potential of commercial spaces …

They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary

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Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong /  May 25 – Sep 13, 2020 / Saori Akutagawa (Madokoro), Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Agnes Arellano, chi too, Heman Chong, Chua Chye Teck, Ho Tzu Nyen, Sojung Jun, Tsubasa Kato, Charles Lim, Kumi Machida, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Wit Pimkanchanapong, Kohei Sekigawa, Kazuo Shiraga, Akira Takayama, Than Sok, Ming Wong JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong Mon 2 – 8pmTue – Sun 11am–8pm Two figures are seen performing a simple task together on a small island, while not comprehending a word uttered by the other. The setting for this artwork by Tsubasa Kato, from which the exhibition draws its title, is the Tsushima islands that lie halfway between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. The success of the artist and his Korean collaborator in this act of cooperation appears to have been achieved, if not by virtue of their good humour and patience with each other, then by an understanding that exceeds the plane of language. The exhibition They Do Not Understand Each Other brings into dialogue commissions and artworks from …

Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future

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Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong  Oct 5, 2019 – Jan 4, 2020 Nadim Abbas, Bettina von Arnim, Chan Wai Kwong, Chen Wei, Cui Jie, Aria Dean, Ho Rui An, Tishan Hsu, Tetsuya Ishida, JODI, Lee Bul, Seiko Mikami, Takehiko Nakafuji, Shinro Ohtake, Yuri Pattison, Sondra Perry, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Hiroki Tsukuda, Nurrachmat Widyasena, Zheng Mahler From its outset, cyberpunk depicted radical technological advances—plugged-in consciousness, androids indistinguishable from people—but also worlds divided by unequal access to wealth and resources, where multinational corporations, sovereign states, hackers, and criminal underworld enterprises all manoeuvre for control. Far from having become outdated, cyberpunk’s dystopian scenes—its protagonists, networked and yet isolated, navigating neo-noir city streets illuminated by the glare of commerce—look like an average night on the town in 2019, whether in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Jakarta or New York. Like so much that was once seen as “cyber” or virtual—as outside of us, a separate and distinct terrain to be explored or conquered—the realms of cyberpunk have begun to seem less like an otherworldly plane, and more of a funhouse mirror of our world, lives, …

Various artists

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Contagious Cities: Far Away Too Close / Tai Kwun Contemporary / Hong Kong / Jan 26 – Apr 21 / Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand / In 2003, the SARS outbreak led to a shutdown of Hong Kong. The virus infected 1,755 people in the city, killing 299. Fear of the epidemic led many, mainly expats, to flee. Those who didn’t leave avoided public spaces. A housing estate was put under quarantine, public transport and public areas were deserted, and schools were closed. At the height of the SARS crisis, iconic Hong Kong actor and singer Leslie Cheung jumped to his death from Central’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, adding to the trauma, gloom and anxiety that were already consuming the city. The crisis impacted Hong Kong physically, psychologically and economically, and like epidemics before, it shaped the city and its habits, policies and people. Contagious Cities: Faraway Too Close at Tai Kwun Contemporary, a group show with works by 10 local and international artists, attempts to explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of disease and contagion. Presented by the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical institution …

A hollow in a world too full—Cao Fei solo at Tai Kwun Contemporary

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Cao Fei 曹斐 A hollow in a world too full 在過滿的世界挖一個洞 Tai Kwun Contemporary 大館當代美術館 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong 香港中環荷李活道10號 8 Sep – 9 Dec 2018 Presented by UCCA尤倫斯當代藝術中心呈獻 Curated by: Philip Tinari in association with Xue Tan 策展人 : 田霏宇 (譚雪聯同籌劃) Cao Fei is among the most internationally renowned artists of her generation. Her first major solo exhibition in Hong Kong centres around the newly commissioned work Prison Architect. Comprised of a film, installations, and sculptures, the work subtly spreads throughout the three floors of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s exhibition spaces. Inspired by the sombre historical material of Victoria Prison and shot with downtown Central as backdrop, the new work conceives of a scenario where “an architect hesitantly accepts an invitation to design a prison”. In the film, the two protagonists each entertain imaginations and personal experiences of imprisonment in two parallel realities (one of the present day and the other of an ambiguous past). This cross-temporal-spatial dialogue reflects the artist’s contemplations on our relationship with the world. Apart from this ambitious film installation, the exhibition also showcases …

Tai Kwun

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By Elliat Albrecht Hong Kong has a soft spot for crime and police stories. Films about gangs, double agents and bloody conflicts have long been a mainstay of local cinema. There is an underlying psychological reason: a surge of public interest in the genre occurred in the 1980s, coinciding with the UK and China’s negotiations over the 1997 handover. Amid anxiety about the political future, the movies often depicted the goings-on of crime syndicates and their clashes with authority to explore themes of loyalty, heroism and chaos. This blue-coat fascination laid the foundation for some of the most significant pop culture of the 1980s – and continues to provide inspiration today, in the form of the city’s newest cultural institution. While Hong Kong awaits the opening of M+, its much-anticipated major museum of visual culture, the recently opened Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts is poised to tick the mid-size museum box. Built on a historical site, the 19th-century Central Police Station compound on Hollywood Road, Tai Kwun has an unusual cross-disciplinary remit. The …