All posts tagged: Wu Jiaru

Postmodern Tales

Published by Christine Chan Chiu

HART / Hong Kong / Mar 20 – Apr 29, 2023 / Showcasing the latest works from HART’s artists-in-residence, Postmodern Tales was a multimedia group show featuring eight different artists whose practices are as thought-provoking as they are diverse. From various cultural backgrounds, they are connected via their unique contemporary sensibilities, as well as their willingness to approach art using novel ideas – or to present novel ideas using art. As HART’s second off-site exhibition, curated by HART director Vera Lam, the presentation not only captured what it means to be postmodern, but also served to cement the non-profit organisation’s commitment to nurturing Hong Kong talent.  Visitors were greeted with Body as Lifeguard Tower I (2022), a hanging, life-sized cyanotype fabric work by Michele Chu. Imprinted with silhouettes of her own body, the work is a metaphor for emotional barriers, and aims to break down invisible walls by acknowledging their existence. In Replica of Ruins: Anonymous Road (2023), Natalie Chu Lok Ting invites visitors to step back in time. Her recreation of a pathway in …

Wu Jiaru 吳佳儒

Published by Brady Ng

To the Naiad’s House / Flowers Gallery / Hong Kong / Sep 29 – Nov 12 / The story of Southeast China in the 1990s is one of breakneck transformation. Cranes worked in tufts of dust, new structures climbed steel frames to scrape the sky, and opportunity was in the air. For many millions of people in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and smaller townships, the proverbial first bucket of gold seemed less like a fantasy and more like a real possibility. As China’s economy opened up, Southeast China felt closer to Hong Kong than ever before. Media and information moved across the border. Even though a border and bureaucracy separated Guangdong province from Hong Kong, people couldn’t help but form impressions of the city through glimpses offered in films and portrayals on television. For her recent exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Wu Jiaru mined her upbringing in Guangzhou and feelings as a Hong Kong transplant, revisiting experiences as a child who spent time in her mother’s restaurant, watching the world change through a TV screen. The solo presentation …

Gloria Awareness

Published by Artomity Magazine

Sickroom / Hong Kong / Jun 16 – Jul 17, 2022 / Yang Jiang / “Sickroom” is a term used in Japanese to describe a house in which a murder has been committed. In those who hear of this term, it creates a psychological predisposition without an actual experience, and emphasises a sense of passiveness. The recently formed experimental conceptual art collective Gloria Awareness used this concept of the sickroom as a starting point for its imagination. The exhibition of the same name examined human cognitive mechanisms, with the six exhibiting artists exploring how to cope with the sickroom. By analysing the process of psychological association, Amy Tong and Nicole Wong both set about exploring the conditions of a sickroom, with the former focusing on its cause and the latter attempting to propose a solution. Tong’s video This Is A Dog Reading A Newspaper (2022) had a sense of déjà vu from broadcast news – the voiceover came from found footage of someone teaching mnemonic strategies, borrowing their nonsensical nature to explain the completely invisible …

Household Gods 「駐家寧神」

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Protests and pandemics have relegated us to the domestic sphere, where we’ve been forced to confront the anxiety and fear induced by the past year’s events. In addition to political, economic and social disruptions of unprecedented proportions, we’re experiencing emotional and psychological upheavals specifically reactive to this point in time. Articulating and reflecting on this complex state of being, Hong Kong artists Shane Aspegren, Nadim Abbas, Tap Chan and Wu Jiaru have come together to stage Household Gods, an exhibition curated by Ying Kwok, on view at Hart Hall in H Queens. Lifted from writer and occultist Aleister Crowley’s early 20th-century play Household Gods, the title of the show explicitly outlines its objective: to question our relationship with the supernatural through our “most intimate setting”, the home.  The four artists conceived of the exhibition while working alongside each other at Hart Haus’ sprawling 10,000 sq ft Hart Social Studio in November 2019, before the advent of Covid-19. Despite their seemingly disparate practices, the artists find common ground in using domestic objects, exploring how they serve as channels to activate the unknown or uncanny. Kwok describes this …