[press release]
Para Site is pleased to present A Lecture, A Performance, and A Panel, three public programmes taking place alongside The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction, our current exhibition featuring works by Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Tomie Ohtake, and Tang Chang. This exhibition is part of Para Site’s series of groundbreaking exhibitions employing a speculative approach to the art histories that need to be written around our regions, and gathers a small but consistent body of works by Motherwell, Ohtake, and Tang, three abstract painters active outside of East Asia whose experimental practices incorporated artistic traditions of ink painting and calligraphy.
The three public events provide a wide range of perspectives and a comprehensive historical analysis of abstract art. Prof. Kurt Chan Yuk Keung explores the relationship between abstraction and contemporaneity, while artist Ip Wai Lung presents an intervention in the space by performing a repetitive gymnastic exercise in response to Bruce Nauman’s video performance in the exhibition. The series of programmes ends with a panel discussion that gathers experts sharing their insight and research on the individual artists’ works and discussing the aesthetic and political paradigms conveyed under the backdrop of the Cold War.
Saturday, January 30: Kurt Chan on Abstract Art and Others
3 – 4.30 pm (Cantonese)
Professor Kurt Chan Yuk Keung talks about the relationship between the abstract art movement and contemporaneity, about how abstraction has been represented in different contexts throughout the past century, and about how it has evolved and mutated in today’s global circumstances.
Prof. Kurt Chan Yuk Keung teaches at the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 1989, teaching studio courses on Western media. He has participated in over 80 exhibitions, among which the 51st Venice Biennale and the 2nd Asia Pacific Art Triennial. He was awarded the First Prize in “Public Art Scheme Competition” (Taipo Central Town Square) and the Second Prize in “Art for Expo Competition” in Hannover. Prof. Chan was the chief editor of the “Hong Kong Visual Art Yearbook” for several years, the Art Director of “City Art Square”, and he currently serves as advisor of Asia Art Archive and Yale-China Association, as well as honorary Advisor for both the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. Prof. Chan is also on the Board of Directors at Para Site. Prof. Chan graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He then obtained his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan.
Saturday, February 20: An intervention by Ip Wai Lung
4 pm
Responding to Bruce Nauman’s video performance “Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square”, artist Ip Wai Lung works with the passage of time and the restriction of body movement while wearing a rubber outfit and performing repetitive gymnastic exercises.
Ip Wai Lung is an artist working with photography and body performance. His works explore personal repression and emotions and convey the bizarre distance between people and the city. He has participated in exhibitions at 100ft PARK, Hong Kong, Los Angeles Fotofolio, and studio 52, Hong Kong.
Thursday, March 3: Panel Discussion
7 – 9 pm (English)
The panel discusses the works of Robert Motherwell, Tomie Ohtake, and Tang Chang as well as the international and national circumstances in the US, Brazil, and Thailand during the Cold War, in which abstraction was a key cultural pawn with ideological implications. The position, identity, and dislocations of the three painters in the exhibition, their political allegiances, intellectual influences, levels of reception and inscription in art histories, as well as their formal choices will be discussed by curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero, M+ Ink Art curator Lesley Ma, and independent curator and art historian David Teh.
Para Site is Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia. It produces exhibitions, publications and discursive projects aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomena in art and society.
