Piecing together discarded shards of porcelain, and marking joins and bare edges with lines of gold leaf, Korean artist Yeesookyung creates new shapes, often softly curved and anthropomorphic, occasionally jagged and alien. Her ceramic practice, which started with the “Translated Vases” series in 2006, has proved therapeutic for the artist, and the resulting works are profoundly, undeniably beautiful.
Kazakh artist Erbossyn Meldibekov is in constant conflict with his identity. His exhibition “Mountains of Revolution,” now on view at Rossi & Rossi gallery in Hong Kong, demonstrates the struggle faced by an artist emanating from a region that is relatively unknown. In his performance at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Meldibekov introduced himself as being from the fictive nation of Pastan. When questioned on the gullibility of his viewers, the artist responded challengingly “few people care where Tajikistan or Turkmenistan is. To them, Central Asia might as well be a meteorite that exploded out of Venus.”
When Michael Chow enters a room, he commands an audience. With his sweeping gestures and boisterous tones, he speaks in overtures; it doesn’t matter what he is about to present so much as the presentation itself. This performative nature has served him well throughout the years—Chow has managed a successful restaurant business, which currently boasts six locations worldwide, and has brushed elbows with the cultural elite—he counts the late Jean-Michel Basquiat as having been one of his closest friends. Now, at the age of 75, the notorious Mr. Chow has turned his attention to art. How will his expertise in fine dining translate onto the canvas?
“Dreaming Rich” is an extension of British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s critical and intellectual interest in colonialism and postcolonialism, and their impact on identity, politics and economic realities. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, at Pearl Lam Galleries, the artist shows a series of new works commenting on Hong Kong’s relationship to labor, power and wealth.
The practice of Korean sculptor and installation artist Do-Ho Suh centers around notions of home—its associations with comfort, memory, displacement and identity formation. Recently, he debuted his Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home (2013) installation at the new National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, in which a life-size replication in fabric and wire of his childhood house in South Korea floats inside his former brownstone residence in Providence, Rhode Island. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong—and the artist’s second visit to the Fragrant Harbor since the 1990s—Suh met with ArtAsiaPacific to discuss his latest fabric pieces and a potential future project.
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Hong Kong streets have a deafening chatter, of the visual kind. Every night, the ICC Tower projects an LED light show in Central and down in the urban canopy hundreds of neon signs chart the alleys. “Visual culture is a fuzzily defined thing. But one can say for sure that neon signs are a very important part” said curator Aric Chen recently after an infamous Sai Ying Pun eatery sign was deemed illegal and subsequently claimed as an objet d’art in M+ Museum for Visual Culture’s permanent collection.
Founded in 2008, the Hong Kong-based initiative Soundpocket examines the interstices of art, culture and life through the fluid movements of sound. Its projects include the Around Sound art festival and retreat—the third iteration held earlier this year—which invites participants to listen through a series of site-specific installations, performances and dialogues. Pocket is the project’s written corollary begun in 2010—and one of its few physical traces—where artists, and other collaborators reflect upon their encounters during various sonic happenings. This second edition of the journal, a small, tasteful volume of blue-gray, takes a revelatory tone, entreating the reader to step back in silence, allowing sounds to emerge.
