2016.01.04 Mon, by
Daniel Chen on New Directions at Kwai Fung Hin Gallery

A professional jazz pianist and New York-based independent curator, Daniel Chen has since August been the associate director of Hong Kong’s Kwai Fung Hin Gallery. One could say that art runs in the family, with his father who previously operated a commercial art gallery in Hong Kong and worked extensively with the Annie Wong Foundation. Since joining the Kwai Fung Hin Gallery, Chen has overseen a Daido Moriyama retrospective and coordinated the current Lin Yan and Wei Jia joint exhibition, “A Garden Window.”

The Kwai Fung Hin Gallery was founded in 1992 by the Hong Kong businesswoman Catherine Kwai. The gallery’s original intent was to introduce European oil painting and sculpture to the Asian market. Since that time, the focus has shifted toward showcasing contemporary Asian artists with Western backgrounds or educational experience—including Chinese painters such as Walasse Ting, Xue Song and Wei Guangqing. Through the introduction of Western and Western-influenced art, Kwai Fung Hin seeks to broaden the horizon of the local art scene and promote cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries. .

Catherine Freeman: Can you tell us a little bit about your trajectory from New York to here?

Daniel Chen: Yes, but before that I was in music; I studied art history, but took a detour to be a professional musician for many years. I came back to art and was curating small shows in New York and working as an art consultant in Hong Kong and doing art shows here as well, going back and forth.

Daniel Chen

Daniel Chen

CF: Tell me a bit about the positioning of the gallery?

DC: We like to work with Asian artists—Chinese, Korean, Japanese—Asian artists who themselves are in a way walking a line between the East and West.

For example, right now with Wei Jia and Lin Yan— they are from Beijing, they grew up there, went to school there and even taught there—but when they started their graduate studies, Lin Yan went to Paris and then to Pennsylvania, and Wei Jia also studied at Pennsylvania and then moved to New York where they have lived for the past 20 or 25 years. The result is a blending of these traditions.

The founder, Catherine [Kwai], has worked a number of times with artists who went to Paris, for example, but are of Asian descent, or with European artists who have been influenced in some way by an Asian culture, whether Chinese or Japanese traditions, for instance. So that is kind of the focus.

CF: And are any of these artists slated for shows in the future?

DC: There is an artist coming in January—he is also a Chinese artist. He is already in his eighties and is amazingly talented. His name is Wu Yi. He was quite well known, actually, in the 1980s before he left China, then he left and moved to New York in 1984 and stayed there. Since then he has continued to paint and to do his work, but as far as exhibiting and as far as his presence in the art market goes, he missed the blossoming of contemporary art over in China. He is a much more scholarly type of artist—but yes, he has been in New York all this time and we have a retrospective of his work coming up. I think that he has in a very unique way synthesized Western tradition with his Chinese background, and come out on the other side with a very unique way of ink painting. His notable for his use of acrylics, and an expressionist period; and now the work he is doing in his 80s is some of his most mature and most successful.

CF: Which other artist’s work are you excited to be planning to exhibit?

DC: Chi Wing Lo. He is up for an award in December. At any rate, he is a designer who lives in Greece; he is originally from Hong Kong and is very successful as a furniture designer, and does architectural work and sculpture. He’s a very versatile artist and designer. Coming up in December we have a new series of works. He has created ink stones—it is what literati ink painters and poets used in order to grind their ink. If you have been to the Liang Yi museum, they have these artifacts there—beautiful ink stones and brushes and all these tools that are very unique—and they’re personal, so the literati during the Song dynasty went to find these particular ink stones, specifically those made from certain types of rock so as to have their own customized stone. I suppose its equivalent to your modern-day office setup!

Exhibition view

Exhibition view

Wei Jia, “No.15185”, Gouache, Ink and Collage on Xuan Paper, 145 x 216cm, 2015

Wei Jia, “No.15185”, Gouache, Ink and Collage on Xuan Paper, 145 x 216cm, 2015

Exhibition view

Exhibition view

Lin Yan, “Living”, Xuan Paper, 191 x 167cm, 2012

Lin Yan, “Living”, Xuan Paper, 191 x 167cm, 2012