2015.03.12 Thursday, 文 /
马照跑,舞照跳:2015香港巴塞尔艺博会这一周

一年中的这一周又来了:香港巴塞尔艺博会和随之而来的一大堆艺术开幕、晚宴、派对和讲座,一起出现的还有一大堆藏家与他们的追随者。艺术圈内人士都迫不急待地、一脸无畏地一头扎入这满满一周的集体赶场中。社交积极分子们每天换一身行头;剩下来的大多冲着香槟和点心。哦,还有艺术。

精明的观察者可能已经意识到了不对劲。没错,从五月初挪到三月中,从周初挪到周末,从连绵细雨到雾气缭绕,从温暖的亚热带气候到温和的一丝丝凉意。大概这种雾蒙蒙、凉飕飕的感觉还渗透在整个香港。不过艺术的到来多少缓和了空气中的阴冷,尽管香港本地的艺术家自己都还尚未从未消的余波中缓过神来。一如邓小平对香港回归、一国两制所做出的承诺:“舞照跳、马照跑”,来访的宾客如果照样将香港当作酒肉食场、购物天堂与赚钱机器,或许也是无可厚非,毕竟事实上它也确实如此;只是在表面背后,或已物是人非。

已经开幕了的展览恭候着早起的鸟儿:Spring Workshop日以继夜”展出了 Elmgreen & Dragset, Cevdet Erek, 李杰, Job Koelewijn, Jewyo Rhii和Magdalen Wong的作品,策展理念中藏着一个谜语:“一对姐妹,一个是另一个亲生的,另一个是这一个亲生的。这对姐妹是谁呀?”Para Site位于Quarry Bay的新空间呈现了 “土尾世界-抵抗的转喻和中华国家想像”。奥沙画廊的新展 东南偏南抑或同样野心勃勃地检视了东南亚与东南欧之间的关系。

HK image

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Supported by the billionaire-scion Adrian Cheng (K11 Art Foundation) and David Chau, an important Mainland collector, Xu Zhen’s “Twenty” show will be unveiled at Qube in PMQ (35 Aberdeen Street). Incredibly, this is Xu Zhen’s first solo show in Hong Kong—the celebrated Shanghai-based artist is a real rising star in biennales, kunsthalles, and art fairs globally. Further west in Sai Ying Pun, a new arts hub, SOHO 189 (189 Queen’s Road West), opens. Pearl Lam Galleries will open a second Hong Kong space with a show featuring Ren Ri’s beeswax sculptures, with neighbors like Leo Gallery (with an exhibition curated by Huang Du, featuring the conceptual/installation artist Gao Weigang and the new-media artist Lin Ke, among others) and Galerie Huit.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The big-time local collector Adrian Cheng brings Hong Kong another show, “Inside China”, which had previously been shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (in a co-operation between K11 Art Foundation and Palais de Tokyo) at the K11 Art Foundation Pop Up Space (G/F Cosco Tower, Grand Millenium Plaza, 183 Queen’s Road, Central). Elsewhere, the Goethe-Institut will host “Statements: New Painting from Germany” (14/F, 2 Harbour Road, Wanchai), while in the same building, the HK Arts Centre (2 Harbour Road, Wanchai) has an exhibition featuring collectors… Of course, there is also the Asia Society Gala and Dinner.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Things come into full swing on Thursday. K11 Art Foundation, Pilar Corrias and Leo Xu will present “The Tell-Tale Heart” at Chi Art Space (8/F, New World Tower 2, 18 Queen’s Road, Central). Dealing with narratives and story-telling, the show features aaajiao, Ian Cheng, Cheng Ran, Guo Hongwei, Koo Jeong A, Ken Okiishi, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—Rirkrit will perform with dim sum (instead of Thai curry) in an “anthropological and archaeological way”.

Swing by Duddell’s “Hongkongese” show before heading over to the openings at Pedder Building. While Pearl Lam Galleries will be focusing on “Yi Pai” artists, others in the same building have mostly decided to bring in foreign artists. Gagosian will be showing Rudolf Stingel, while Simon Lee will be exhibiting the Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. Of particular note is Lehmann Maupin’s Alex Prager photography exhibition. Prager’s practice flits between the realm of film stills and fashion photography, but the recent works on show seem to masquerade as documentary photography. The photo caption information would imply that they are recent, yet there is a sense of the uncanny, a slight disjunction, a sort of temporal typo in the wardrobe department, or the flaw of the extreme perfectness with which the figures are arranged that would indicate the images are staged.

Away from the Pedder Building but still within walking distance: Edouard Malingue, in a new and bigger gallery space, shows Wang Wei, a Beijing-based artist with a practice of dealing with spatial interventions (memorably building a brick box in Long March Space). Beatriz Milhazes’s first Hong Kong solo in White Cube will also be highly anticipated, coming on the heels of her first solo museum show at the Perez Art Museum Miami. In a way, this follows more generally on the wider interest in South American abstraction from Neo-Concrete onwards, from Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticia to Jesús Rafael Soto—here, with a good dose of the Baroque and of Pop. Up in Galerie Perrotin, the photographer JR will share space with Gregor Hildebrandt, a rising art star in Europe, with wall-based and sculptural works that play on music and images, with abstract and representational pictures—composed of thousands of tape ribbons from (now anachronistic) music cassettes—winding together a matrix of associations, personal and historical.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Art Basel opens! And Cao Fei will begin beaming a sound and light piece “Same Old, Brand New” across the harbor from the ICC building across the harbor in Kowloon. Art Central, the keenly-awaited new satellite fair in Hong Kong launched by Art Hong Kong’s founders, also opens.

At 10 Chancery Lane, a performance by Huang Rui entitled “Black and White Cats 49, Then?” is inspired by Deng Xiaoping’s practical attitudes towards economic reform, but takes us into a kind of Yves Klein’s-eque numerological cult with a host of numbers signifying different things. For instance, seven women are painted and their bodies are used to make rubbings on the canvas. The significance of the numbers is related to political events, for instance 7×7=49, 49 being the date of “liberation” and the number of days it takes for the Buddha to be reborn etc. etc. The Asia Society will feature Yashimoto Nara.

For those interested in the overall development of all things M+, the “SNEAK PEAK OF THE M+ MOVING IMAGES COLLECTION” should provide some valuable intell. The collection (unsurprisingly) showcases Hong Kong-centric topics and issues surrounding concepts of “home” (no doubt a perennial theme in the SAR) spanning mediums from films and documentaries to artist videos and photography. Speaking to the theme of home is Clara Law’s 1996 film Floating Life which tells the story of familial dislocation (one probably familiar to many Hong Kongers) of parents trying to maintain relations with their children spread across two continents while living in Australia.

After dark, the brave could attend Modern Media’s annual scrum in the Grand Hyatt lounge; those with more tempered appetites (who like cigars) can make for DAVIDOFF’s poolside event (with Dita von Teese).

Saturday, March 15

Perhaps an interesting development is the “Chai Wan Mei Art and Design Festival 2015” a vibrant mix of guerrilla art installations, performances, pop-up exhibitions and mobile elements—think literal here—tricycles, carts and containers which will infuse an element of “street” into the highly polished activities in Central and Wanchai. Organized by Peter Lau, Katie de Tilly and Claudia Albertini, the festival has drawn in a number of collaborators in the albeit small HK art circle including Map Office, which will be recycling industrial materials from a nearby building to create a music and performance platform in a nearby car park with a neon installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija and a performance by Didier Faustino, the Portuguese born French architect, known for his “Double Happiness” installation—a swing set raised to billboard height—where the “swingers” appear to dominate the landscape, pursuing their individual desires yet maintaining a certain rhythm and relation to each other and their urban surroundings.

Hong Kong-based curator Inti Guerrero also delves into issue of urban interactions with his “Videos and Words from a Post-Industrial City” which features artists such as Carlos Amorales (MEX), Cao Fei (CN), Liu Chuang (CH) and Kacey Wong (HK)—their works interspersed between the industrial buildings along with neon light installations. Also in the realm of video is Hitomi Hasegawa’s “Immediacy” which examines how artists negotiate various electronic media and features artists Masanobu Nishino, Map Office, Adrian Wong, Hikaru Suzuki and Li Xiaofei. Overall there should be plenty to see, it just takes some willpower to fight the current of free champagne and venture out into the frankly not-very-wild wilds of Sheung Wan. For night owls, the Chai Wan Mei Chai Wan Nites Art Party is on Saturday.

Later on…

As the week progresses highlights include, on Sunday, opening receptions at local Hong Kong galleries and non-profits including Gallery Exit and Spring Workshop; there are the annual Fotanian studios tours. And at night, a rooftop party at Blindspot gallery. Short films and talks continue throughout. On Tuesday March 17, don’t miss Randian Editor-in-chief Daniel Szehin Ho in the Salon entitled “Publishing Asian Editions”, plus Randian associates Laura Tucker leading “Digital Geographies: Net Art” in China, and Kira Simon-Kennedy on “Cultural Residencies in China”, both as part of Asia Art Archive’s Open Platform.