Lee Kit to Represent Hong Kong at 55th Venice Biennale
By Hillary Luong
Lee Kit at Art HK 2009. Photograph by ArtAsiaPacific.
On Friday, June 22, it was announced that Lee Kit will represent Hong Kong in the 55th Venice Biennale next year. Lee began his career as a painter but has since become better known for incorporating painted packaging and table cloths with everyday objects and personal items into installations with an uncanny domestic feel. Recently he was awarded the Hong Kong Art Futures prize for his installation “Something In My Hands” at the Aike-Dellarco gallery booth at Art HK 12. Earlier, Lee was also included in two significant group shows in New York, “The Ungovernables” at the New Museum and “Print/Out” at the Museum of Modern Art, both of which closed in May.
At a press conference, Lars Nittve, executive director of the M+ Museum and head curator of the Hong Kong Pavilion, said, “Lee Kit is to me one of the leading artists in Hong Kong's thriving contemporary art scene. I have during my years here been repeatedly touched by how Lee Kit so seemingly effortlessly manages to mix a deep understanding of contemporary art with something very personal and intimate. His work is at the same time uncompromising and extraordinarily open for participation, intimate and at the same time public. It truly embodies the fundamental and wonderful uncertainty at the heart of all good art.”
The Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), which has participated in the Venice Biennale since 2001, presented the news together with M+, Hong Kong’s yet to be built "museum for visual culture," part of the West Kowloon Cultural District. According to the press release, this new collaboration seeks to highlight the experience and procedural knowledge of HKADC, alongside the contemporary relevance of M+.
