All posts tagged: Venice Biennale

Map Office

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Caroline Ha Thuc / For more than 20 years, Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez, known together as Map Office, have been working in the field of art and architecture with a rhizomatic approach, exploring both the reality and the mythology of territories. They represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and and won the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2013. Caroline Ha Thuc: For this Venice Biennial, you are presenting an exhibition, seminar and book launch about the deep sea, working with both artists and others whose work involves the ocean, who write about their relationship with it. What triggered this idea? Map Office: Our project in Venice has to be seen as a meeting platform around the theme of the ocean. An Ocean Archive is the title of the exhibition, and of our research at large on oceans and islands, implemented last year during Art Basel within the Open Platform programme at the Asia Art Archive. Along with the exhibition, we are launching the first part of the archive as Our Ocean …

Samson Young

Published by Artomity Magazine

Songs for Disaster Relief Venice Biennale 2017 May 13 – Nov 26, 2017 Diana d’Arenberg Parmanand With over a decade of practice, artist Samson Young has made audiences question and examine their relationship to sound and music, and their relationship to history, politics and identity through sound. Young is a product of a certain time and place. Born in 1979 in Hong Kong, he grew up under British colonial rule in the city, and moved with his family to Sydney after the handover to China in 1997, fearing the worst of Chinese rule in Hong Kong less than a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 20 years since the handover, the people of Hong Kong have constantly reassessed what it means to be a Hongkonger, and are undergoing the self-scrutiny of a nation whose identity is in flux. Trained in classical music composition, and generally described as a sound artist, Young has explored the relationship between mainland China and Hong Kong by recording sounds in the border area separating the two, arranging them into sonic compositions and then transcribing them in graphic …

There are no misinterpretations of nothing

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Winnie Lai Artist Tsang Kin Wah represented Hong Kong in last year’s Venice Biennale and has brought home a continuation of his quest for life’s ultimate meaning at the M+ Pavilion. This time the exhibition programme also includes the Misguided Tours, in which three curators who have previously worked with Tsang shared their alternative interpretations of the work. After The Infinite Nothing in Venice, nothing in Hong Kong takes the artist’s attempt to realise endlessness and perpetuity to another level. This time he wants to visualise and present nothingness: a personal visualisation of being under a nihilistic spell, and a manifestation of responses to realising the futility of life. It isn’t a straightforward or light-hearted work to digest. The Misguided Tours are an effort to counter the idea that there is an official way to understand art. Everyone has a blind spot; other people’s perspectives can dispel preconceptions and expand the understanding of a work. Tsang, a fan of Nietzsche, who famously said that ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’, would agree. nothing is the first show at the M+ Pavilion, …