All posts tagged: Tai Kwun

Myth Makers — Spectrosynthesis III

Published by Brady Ng

Tai Kwun Contemporary / Hong Kong / Dec 24 – Apr 10, 2023 / There’s a quote that aspirational content creators like to share online: “Those who tell stories rule the world.” It’s often attributed to Plato or Aristotle, while some say it is wisdom passed down by the Hopi or Navajo Native Americans, but nobody can pin down its origins. Perhaps the line is a modern piece of prose attached to the distant past to feign legitimacy, or maybe thinkers from different eras and geographies landed on the same thought. In any case, it’s branded into the collective consciousness of 21st-century storytellers, giving a semblance of meaning to the words and images they generate. This is precisely how myths are seeded, their origins eventually lost but tales retold with embellishments and new interpretations injected in each iteration. Maybe those who make myths don’t rule the world, but they certainly shape it. The third edition of the Sunpride Foundation’s Spectrosynthesis exhibitions, presented at Tai Kwun and curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, involved artworks …

Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Published by Artomity Magazine

Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III Dec 24, 2022 – Apr 10, 2023 JC Contemporary Tai Kwun 10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tue – Sun, 11am – 7pm taikwun.hk Tai Kwun Contemporary and Sunpride Foundation are proud to co-present Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, one of the first major survey exhibitions on LGBTQ+ perspectives in Hong Kong. Curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, Myth Makers draws inspiration from artists addressing “queer mythologies,” who highlight same-sex love / desire and gender fluidity as found in ancient belief systems and traditions in Asia. Expanding on the Spectrosynthesis exhibition series from Taipei and Bangkok, this iteration in Hong Kong features more than 100 artworks by over 60 artists in Asia and its diasporas, with one third of the works loaned from Sunpride’s collection. Myth Makers unfolds through three distinctive chapters and encompasses newly produced artworks and historical works from the 1940s to the 1990s. In bringing together such a plethora of artistic perspectives and vocabularies, the exhibition endeavours to present a multiplicity of conversations, representations, and anti-representations of stories, individuals and …

Welcome to the fourth edition of BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair!

Published by Artomity Magazine

BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair 16 Dec 2021 (Thu) | 3pm – 7pm17 Dec 2021 (Fri) | 3pm – 9pm18 – 19 Dec 2021 (Sat-Sun) | 12pm – 7pm 1/F Galleries (JC Contemporary & F Hall)Tai Kwun10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong http://www.taikwun.hk#bookedhk Presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair welcomes over 100 local, regional, and international exhibitors—including publishers, artists, booksellers, and organisations—complemented by a programme of book launches, talks, workshops, projects, displays and performances. BOOKED: provides a platform for creative practitioners and publishers who are invested in books as a medium of artistic and intellectual expression to share their work with diverse audiences. Marking its return to the Tai Kwun Contemporary galleries, this forthcoming edition of BOOKED: once again features Hong Kong–based exhibitors along with our twinning programme, which offers non-local exhibitors the opportunity to participate from a distance, and for disparate people and communities to stay connected over great distances through books. In light of ongoing travel restrictions, BOOKED: highlights how the distribution of books can serve as its own form of …

Reopening: Francis Alÿs and Mika Rottenberg at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Published by Artomity Magazine

Tai Kwun Contemporary has reopened on March 4! / Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and gamesSolo exhibition by Francis AlÿsCurators: Xue Tan, Sunjung KimCo-presented with Art Sonje SeoulNow till March 28 SNEEZESolo exhibition by Mika RottenbergCurator: Tobias BergerPresenter: Tai Kwun ContemporaryNow till March 31 Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong 10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong KongTuesday to Sunday, 11am – 7pm 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. Presented on the 1/F, the exhibition is structured around the artist’s interests in migration and borders, and his fascination with children’s games from around the world. This solo exhibition highlights his poetic, imaginative sensibility, anchored by geopolitical concerns and individual will while being grounded in everyday life.⁠ We are excited to welcome all visitors again with the debut presentation of Francis Alÿs’s two newly commissioned videos that he specially created in Hong Kong for Tai Kwun Contemporary. Mika Rottenberg’s 𝙎𝙉𝙀𝙀𝙕𝙀 also continues on the 3/F gallery, presenting immersive video installations about surreal alternative worlds of global everyday …

BOOKED: 2021 Art Book Pop-Ups

Published by Artomity Magazine

Feb 25 – 28, 2021Feb 25, 3 – 7pmFeb 26 – ⁠28, 12 – ⁠7pm Tai Kwun10 Hollywood Road Central, Hong KongWeb Various venues in Block 01, 03, 09Free of charge BOOKED: 2021, Tai Kwun Contemporary’s third annual celebration of art and publishing, features over 80 local and non-local participants—including artists, publishers, organisations, booksellers and more—presenting artist-made and artist-centred books, including zines, photo books, monographs, and critical or experimental writing, alongside associated publications and ephemera. This year, due to the pandemic, BOOKED: 2021 is presented within various “pop-ups” throughout the heritage buildings at Blocks 01, 03, and 09, around the Parade Ground of Tai Kwun, and will adhere to the latest health and safety regulations and enforce social distancing measures. As a special “boutique” edition, BOOKED: 2021 brings together not only Hong Kong-based participants but also non-locals contributing from a distance through a special “twin” partner programme. BOOKED: 2021 also offers a programme of editions, special projects, and talks and workshops, both on-site and online, fostering a platform for creative practitioners and publishers who are invested in books as a medium …

They Do Not Understand Each Other at Tai Kwun Contemporary

Published by Artomity Magazine

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

Published by Artomity Magazine

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, …

Fung Lam, Teriver Cheung, Anthony Lai

Published by Artomity Magazine

Hong Kong Episodes (Re-run) / JC Cube, Tai Kwun / Hong Kong / Jan 26–28, 2019 / Ernest Wan / Hong Kong Episodes (Re-run) is a shorter, revised version of an October 2015 show that was conceived amid the social unrest in the city the previous year. The programme note describes the production as a “jazz-classical cross-over piece… accompanied by… video images”, but the visuals turn out to be just as important as the live music, if not more so. One reason is that the video depicts scenes with skyscrapers, housing estates, neon signs and people in a subway station, for instance, that are unmistakably Hong Kong — which makes it impossible not to take the title of the show seriously — whereas the music has about it nothing especially evocative of Hong Kong or, for that matter, any particular locale. Another reason is that the visuals, largely created by Anthony Lai, play with both time and space so effectively that the viewer’s attention is absorbed throughout. Among the eight “episodes”, each representing a three-hour period in a day, …

Performing Society: The Violence of Gender

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Christie Lee / Half-used paint. Paint-streaked trainers. Crinkly plastic drop cloth. Three panels in shades of pink and orangey-red. A scene of unfinished business. But there is also a palpable sense of energy to it. On the wall opposite, an oil painting depicts a row of female nudes ascending the stairs, their bodies half-translucent, their flesh cutting into each other, giving a sense that whoever was there a moment ago had hurried off, leaving behind a trace of their presence. The two pieces could have been by the same artist, but they’re not. While the trainers and panels – meant to evoke “the carnal colour of the flesh”, according to the exhibition catalogue – are part of Pamela Rosenkranz’s Sexual Power (Three Viagra Paintings), the nudes belong to Jana Euler’s Nude Climbing Up the Stairs (2014). It is a liberating but also curious opening for Performing Society: The Violence of Gender, a show that – as one discovers in the proceeding exhibits – puts the systemic violence done to our bodies on glaring display. The exhibition is …

Sara Tse

Published by Artomity Magazine

Re Visit Tai Kwun Hong Kong Jun 8 – Jul 8 Christine Chan Chiu Touch Ceramics, in Hong Kong’s newest centre for heritage and arts, Tai Kwun, kicked off with an inaugural show of Sara Tse’s newest works. An artist long fascinated by the transience of time and the impermanence of life, Tse is known as much for her tactile abilities in modelling and manipulating clay as for the sentimental content of her pieces. The exhibition was not only a tribute to technique and craftsmanship but also a timely throwback to things past. Tse discovered her signature method by chance, when the cloth used to clean her ceramic work table had hardened along with the clay. Experimenting by heating up the cloth, she discovered that while the cloth itself had been incinerated, what remained after the process was the exact replica of the cloth, but in porcelain, creating something that will last forever. Tse applies this method faithfully to her latest works, where she has turned her attention to cartography to highlight how Hong Kong …