Is text writing or image? Bloomberg prize-winner Phoebe Hui examines – video interview

HONG KONG ARTISTS VIDEO ARTIST INTERVIEW

In a short five minute interview on ChooChooTV’s weekly show [art]attack, emerging Hong Kong artist Phoebe Hui gives viewers a peek at her creative process.

In the interview, Hui expresses a strong interest in the transformation of text from one medium to another.  To her, such transformations serve as a way of linking text to other concepts.

Artist Phoebe Hui at work in her studio.

“The way I view text is not just a form of communication but also as an image.”

By removing the meaning of written words, Hui transforms them into more than just a method of verbal expression. In an early piece titled Doublets Doublets Doublets, Hui bases her process on a game by author Lewis Carroll.

“I will remove one alphabet letter in a word…and gradually change other letters too. These are still text that we are familiar with but once we change it our focus is no longer on the meaning of the text but simply on the relation of the symbols.”

After graduating from the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, the artist travelled to England where she studied for a masters degree at the University of the Arts London. Following graduation she decided to move back to Hong Kong.

Although Hui has achieved considerable success as a young artist, it has not come without disappointments. On her move to London from Hong Kong Hui states:

“For me, my path from attaining the scholarship from HKADC [Hong Kong Arts and Development Council], I thought I would have a very successful year in London, but it was not as good as I thought it would be.”

In spite of this setback, Hui went on to win the Bloomberg Emerging Artist award in 2008 after her return to Hong Kong, an accomplishment she is “very satifisfied with.”

While she expresses concern about support for artists’ programs from both organisations and Hong Kong audiences, she remains positive and driven.

“It seems like a very successful road, but I’m still not where I want to be.”

Watch the video here (length of video, 5:22 mins).

EH/KN

Related Topics: Hong Kong artists, emerging artists, installation art, conceptual art

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• Curator Valerie Doran on ‘Hope and Glory’ and challenges for Hong Kong Art world – May 2010
• 3 Young Chinese Artists Awarded Prizes at Inaugural Coachangdi PhotoSpring – May 2010
• gallery EXIT a new Hong Kong gallery to watch – May 2010
• Sound Art, Trickery and Time-Interview Hong Kong New Media artist Chilai Howard Cheng – November 2009
• Young Chinese Artists The Next Generation- Book Review – June 2009

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Contemporary art of China, Korea, Japan course 3 days SOAS London November 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHORT COURSE CONTEMPORARY ART ASIA 3-5 November 2008 SOAS, School of African and Oriental Studies part of the University of London holds a 3 day course on contemporary art of China Japan and Korea.

• Lectures and seminars by leading experts, curators and well-known practising artists
• Visits to museums, galleries and auction houses, including unique access to museum reserve collections
• Interactive discussion with world renowned academics, artists and curators

Details are available from Dr Heather Elgood on  he2@soas.ac.uk

For more from SOAS website http://www.soas.ac.uk/programmes/prog43129.php

Thailand’s Montri photographic installation Nanothailand at Tonson ends August 2008

THAI PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY SHOW 19 June – 10 August 2008 Thailand’s celebrated artist Montri will transform 100 Tonson’s Bangkok gallery with a photographic installation titled Nanothailand. Continuing his interest in cultural hybridity, the subject of these biting images are refugees and exiles. Representing the Thai Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Montri is no stranger to drawing attention and this powerful exhibition packs a punch. Showing until 10 August, visit www.100tonsongallery.com

Source: http://www.artmonthly.org.au/

For more on:

• Contemporary Thai art https://artradarasia.wordpress.com/category/artist-nationality/thai/
• Contemporary Asian Photography https://artradarasia.wordpress.com/category/medium/photography-medium/

55 Days in Valencia. An Encounter with Chinese Art at Instituto Valenciano de Art Moderno

SURVEY CHINESE ART 

The exhibition 55 día en Valencia. Encuentro de arte chino (55 Days in Valencia. An Encounter with Chinese Art), a title chosen in reference to Nicholas Ray’s film 55 Days in Peking, offers a broad overview of the contemporary artistic manifestations that are being produced in the Asian country and permits Western spectators to take a look at the rich, complex Oriental culture.

This exhibition, sponsored by Ferrobús, comprises a total of 448 works arranged in three spaces, two located at the IVAM: the Sala de la Muralla, where the documentary photographs and a pictorial diary made up of 365 pictures are displayed, and Gallery 8, where installations and videos are shown. The third part of the exhibition, at the Museo de la Ciudad, comprises paintings, conceptual photography and a sculpture. 

The catalogue published for the exhibition reproduces the works displayed and includes texts by the curators of the exhibition, Rafael Sierra, a journalist and art critic, Zuo Jing, art director of the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and Consuelo Císcar, director of the IVAM.

Contemporary Chinese art began to develop in the late seventies, at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping era (1979-1992). The eighties was a period of incubation for this art, a period that, like many new ideas, participated in the nation’s Enlightened Movement and made its own contribution to it. The 1989 Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibition was the closing ceremony of an era of contemporary Chinese art, which underwent profound changes in the second half of the nineteen nineties. The success of the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, in the post-Deng period (1997-), marked the recognition of contemporary Chinese art by official ideology. Chinese art today is even more complex and more diversified, partly as a result of the influence of market economy.

Today’s art in China has also undergone a spectacular transition since the year 2000. In simple terms, the centre of attention is no longer public history but the history of individuals, and reveals the presence of metaphysical thought reflected in the works.

The painting section of the exhibition includes two extensive series that represent very well the new trends in Chinese art: Beyond Painting and China 2006, by Zong Biao and Sun Jianchun, respectively. The first series comprises a large-format central piece and twelve separate paintings, paintings within paintings that produce a polyphonic visual effect. The second is a conceptual work made up of 365 oil paintings (one for each day of 2006), which reproduce journalistic photographs taken from the Internet and referring to an event that happened somewhere in the country. Thus the work constitutes a sort of graphic chronicle of that year. The exhibition also includes videos by important Chinese artists.

The exhibition has more photographs than anything else, a total of 65 pieces. The documentary photograph section included in 55 días en Valencia illustrates the changes that have taken place in political and social life in the recent history of China, and gives an account of the fast development of the country until the present day. The exhibition also includes a large representation of the conceptual photography that China has been producing since the nineties.

Today more and more European and American museums are interested in Asian art, and specifically the art of China, which has taken the place of Japan at the forefront of Asia in the international art market. To divulge this phenomenon, the IVAM has scheduled three exhibitions focused on Chinese art.

The first one, The Real Thing: arte contemporáneo de China (The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China), was organised jointly with the Tate Liverpool, and was on show last April.

55 días en Valencia (55 Days in Valencia) is the second exhibition of Chinese art held this year and is the first exhibition of Chinese art organised entirely by a Spanish museum.

The third, Tinta y papel contemporáneos (Contemporary Ink & Paper), will open on 29th July, and will show the combination of contemporary art and the tradition of an age-old culture, which for centuries has used ink and paper for artistic expression.
Source: artdaily.org

 

 

 

India Embraces the Contemporary: Financial Times

INDIA The Indian art market is going through a major transformation, where the market’s focus has shifted from modern Indian art to contemporary Indian art.

According to a report this month by ArtTactic, an art market research service which provides analysis and advice for art collectors, art professionals, art institutions and art funds, its contemporary art market Confidence Indicator now stands 20 per cent higher than the indicator for the modern art market. However, recent auction results show that there is still strong demand for the right period works by a selected number of modern Indian artists such as FN Souza, MF Husain, VS Gaitonde, Ram Kumar and SH Raza.

Western museums and private collectors have started to take a strong interest in what is happening in India at the moment. This will continue in 2008, with exhibitions planned at the Serpentine Gallery, the Saatchi gallery, the Mori Art Museum, as well as the current exhibition “Passage to India” at Initial Access, the space recently opened by UK collector Frank Cohen.

According to the ArtTactic Indian Art Market Confidence Survey, the overall Indian art market confidence indicator fell 13 per cent from the last reading in October 2007.

The indicator has been hit by a 54 per cent drop in both the current and future confidence in the economy. With India’s inflation surging to a more than three-year high, with global financial markets in decline and with crude oil prices rising, the economic prospect looks less promising than six months ago. And as the economic component of the confidence indicator carries a 33 per cent weighting in the overall Indian Art Market Confidence Indicator, the significant loss in confidence weighs heavily on the overall results.

However, despite the fall in overall ArtTactic Indian art market confidence, both the confidence levels in the modern and contemporary market increased significantly: up 17 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.

After the slowdown that started at the beginning of 2007, where the modern Indian art market experienced a 38 per cent drop in annual auction volume compared with the record year of 2006, the modern Indian art market is now regaining some of the lost confidence.

The ArtTactic Indian Modern Art Market Confidence Indicator is up 27 per cent from the last reading in October 2007, and while the survey respondents are less positive about the near future of the Indian contemporary market, the “expectation indicator” for the modern art market stands 23 per cent higher than the “present indicator”, showing the modern art market could be about to regain some of the ground that it recently lost.

www.arttactic.com

The ArtTactic Indian Market Confidence Indicator was launched in May 2007. It is derived from polling 81 respondents, including curators, collectors, dealers, galleries and auction houses operating in the Indian art market.

 

 

Asian Art Triennial Manchester UK 5 April – 1 June 2008

INDIA SINGAPORE CHINA KOREA TAIWAN The UK’s first Asian Art Triennial opens 5 April -1 June 2008 and is conceived by Shisha, the UK’s premier international agency for contemporary South Asian crafts and visual arts, in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse, The International 3, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University.  

 

Asia Triennial Manchester 08 shows fresh and innovative work that represents the best of contemporary visual art from Asia: a festival of visual culture that not only celebrates Manchester’s diverse communities but also explores cultural, artistic and political debates of the 21st century. The international programme features stunning venue-based exhibitions, surprising site-specific new commissions, innovative residencies and extraordinary publicly sited work by artists from Mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. None of the work featured has been seen in the UK before and for some of the artists ATM08 will be their UK debut. 

 

The inaugural Asia Triennial Manchester (ATM08) programme echoes Manchester’s radical political and social history, reflects new artistic practice, and seeks resonances between the city and Asia by exploring the notion of ‘protest’ – in its widest sense.  

 

Castlefield Gallery is working with Channel A (Hongjohn Lin and Ella Raidel) from Taiwan and p-10 (Woon Tien Wei, Jennifer Teo working with collaborators Jeremy Chu and Kai Lam) from Singapore who will reside in Manchester in the lead up to ATM08. The gallery space will become a hive of activity with both groups presenting new site-specific work that has been developed through their time in the city. 

Channel A will reinvent the identity of the 18th century bogus Taiwanese, George Psalmanaazaar, as an estate agent, in order to explore the notion of property and fantasy in Manchester and Taiwan. p-10 will create a symposium platform for an accumulative research based investigation into different notions of ‘localness’ within the context of the international Triennial and Biennial. Chinese Arts Centre has initiated both a residency and exhibition programme. 

There will be two artists’ residencies, March – April with Chinese artist Mao Yan Yang, who will continue his interrogation of the media’s depiction of events focusing on the Triennial’s theme of protest and May – June with Hong Kong comic artist Kong Kee. 

For the exhibition, the Centre is working with two Mainland Chinese artists, Chen Shaoxiong and Qiu Anxiong, who both use Chinese ink painting in an experimental way. Using their daily life story and a modern city portrait, they create new ink paintings and animation, which illustrate a sense of insecurity of the rapid urban development in China.  

Cornerhouse is staging “What do you want?” with artists Tejal Shah, Jasmeen Patheja, Shilpa Gupta, Surekha and Shaina Anand, all living in India and working amongst a new generation of artists with activist concepts. The exhibition and community project challenges traditional cultural opinion, contemporary political issues and controversial social situations, the artists use photography, performance, sculpture, video and new media to analyse problems faced by Indian women and those living within conventional family structures. 

 

The International 3‘s project features Chinese artist Han Bing whose work uses photography, video and performative social interventions to question everyday living and the impact of human progress. Han Bing’s art manifests a kind of amor mundi — love of the world — investing ordinary objects with a subtle sense of the sacred. For ATM08, Bing is planning to involve approximately 100 local people in the European premiere of a surprising outdoor performance in Manchester on Saturday 12 April. 

Manchester Art Gallery presents contemporary work by two Korean artists, Gwon Osang and Choe U- ram. Gwon Osang makes extraordinary life-size sculptures of people. He uses hundreds of photographic images to build up the surface appearance of his models, including the face, their hair and their clothes. The process gives his beautifully crafted figures both photo-realist and surreal qualities.  Following a recent Manchester residency, Gwon is now creating new work including a sculpture of the musician Graham Massey – best known as a member of Manchester’s electronic pioneers 808 State. This will be exhibited from 5 April together with an existing work Control. 

Manchester Art Gallery also presents Gwon’s first major UK solo exhibition from 21 June – 21 September 2008. Choe U-ram uses precision cut and polished metals, machinery and electronics to create stunning kinetic sculptures inspired by sea creatures and plant life. Two of the artist’s enormous robotic works, Urbanus Female and Urbanus Male, will be exhibited for the first time in the UK in the gallery’s atrium 5 April – 21 September 2008.  

Source: press release 

 www.asiatriennialmanchester.com