All posts tagged: video

Vvzela Kook

By Christie Lee / I’d expected a philosophical explanation for Hong Kong artist Vvzela Kook’s quirky name, but it turns out that it was all due to a technicality. The artist had wanted to call herself vuvuzela, after the African horn, but on realising the domain name was taken, took out the two “u”s.   Kook’s art, however, is rather better thought out. Research is key to her artistic process. During our conversation, she repeatedly describes her works as projects rather than videos or installations, and says she spends the bulk of her time reading, researching and mapping the details of her projects in her mind. It’s similar to the artistic process of fellow Hong Kong artist Samson Young, for whom Kook works as an assistant. Born in Dalian, a port city on the southern tip of Liaoning province in northern China, the 29 year old received her BA from Hangzhou University before reading for a MA in Creative Media at City University in Hong Kong. We chatted at her new studio in Ngau Tau …

G Roland Biermann

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 …