What’s Showing at Hong Kong Art Week, May 2021: South Side

Hong Kong Art Week—coinciding with the city’s ninth edition of Art Basel—kicks off with South Side Saturday, a spate of exhibition openings across the factory buildings of Wong Chuk Hang and Aberdeen. Here's a selection of shows opening this weekend.

de Sarthe

May 15–Jul 3

Drawing inspiration from technologies and cyber cultures, Zhong’s multimedia practice channels contemporary anxieties with a light touch of his dynamic, colorful visual language. His second solo exhibition at de Sarthe unveils a new painting series along with the large-scale biomorphic installation Forget (2021), which considers the ways in which digital networks serve as an extension of the individual in a time of physical separation and stagnation.

Ben Brown Fine Arts

May 15–Jul 3

At Ben Brown Fine Arts, “What is a head?” surveys the practices of British figurative painters Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan, both known for their studies of the human head. Featuring paintings from the 1960s to present day, the show aims to “set up a dialogue not only between generations but within painting’s renewed insights into mind and identity,” in the words of curator Michael Peppiatt.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery

May 15–Jul 10

Germaine Kruip’s first exhibition in Hong Kong, “Screenplay,” will delve into the interplay of sound and light through installations combining theatrical lighting with sculptural forms that can be played as percussion instruments. The opening performance will see musician Karen Yu activating the works for an immersive, reverberating soundscape.

Gallery Exit

May 15–Jun 19

At Gallery Exit, Kwong Wing Kwan’s “Good morning, sweet dreams.” spotlights oil canvases of transient views seen through glass windows at various times of day, while Tang Kwong San’s “Nightbirds” includes large-scale paintings and mixed-media works utilizing appropriated historical images and symbols with personal significance for the artist in an interrogation of memory and identity.

Alisan Fine Arts, Aberdeen

May 15–Aug 7

As part of Le French May Arts Festival, the Aberdeen gallery has curated an exhibition of six Chinese surrealist figures in response to “Mythologies: Surrealism and Beyond — Masterpieces from Centre Pompidou” at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Highlights at Alisan include emerging Hong Kong artist Cherie Cheuk Ka-wai’s gongbi ink painting No Man is an Island (2018) and pioneering sculptor Wu Shaoxiang’s abstract, bronze Fitting 1 (1986).

Edouard Malingue Gallery

May 17–Jun 30

At the Blue Box Factory Building in Tin Wan, Edouard Malingue presents Nabuqi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring the Beijing-based artist’s silkscreen prints, colorful sculptures, and an installation of a mini playground titled Game and the Importance of the Joints (2020). Meanwhile, “The Shape of Water,” part of the global Galleries Curate project, showcases works by five artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China that explore the motif of water.

Blindspot Gallery

May 18–Jul 3

Known for his experiments with analogue photographic processes, Jiang Pengyi is showing works from his latest large-scale photographic series, Sun! Sun! (2018–20), in his fifth solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery. For this project, the artist uses a magnifier to focus sunlight onto a cardboard construction housing light-sensitive film, resulting in images that trace the burns. Also on display, the Foresight (2017–18) series involves leaving plant matter to rot on top of his negatives so bioluminescent pigments from bacteria and fungi leach onto the images.

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