Celebrity Life

It's hard to believe that 2019 marks only the seventh edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, considering how much our city has transformed since the inaugural fair swept through the halls of the Convention & Exhibition Centre. From West Kowloon to Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong is now bursting with galleries, cultural centres, artist studios and auction houses. Still, at the centre of it all, stands Art Basel. Below, our guide to what to see at this year's fair.

10 to Watch

Among the 242 galleries participating in this year's Art Basel Hong Kong, 21 are here for the very first time. All are influential in their own markets and are sure to bring something unique to the show. Here we introduce our 10 must-sees.

HUNT KASTNER

Prague, Czech Republic

[caption id="attachment_133061" align="alignnone" width="683"] Untitled, 2019. (Photo credit: Michal Czanderle)[/caption]

The first exhibitor from the Czech Republic in the Hong Kong show -- the gallery was opened by an American and a Canadian in 2006 to support and promote contemporary Czech artists -- has been participating in international art fairs since 2007. It presents an installation by Anna Hulačová entitled Pathetic Poetic in Art Basel’s Discoveries sector for emerging artists.

GALERIE GRETA MEERT

Brussels, Belgium

[caption id="attachment_133066" align="alignnone" width="746"] Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Greta Meert[/caption]

Founded in 1988 as Galerie Meert Rihoux, this well-established gallery has always focused on minimal and conceptual art. Besides introducing Belgians to innovative international artists, it was one of the first in Europe to show works by the Vancouver School. The current exhibition presents some 50 years of work by eminent American minimalism artist Robert Mangold.

RICHARD NAGY

London, United Kingdom

[caption id="attachment_133068" align="alignnone" width="940"] Woman Disrobing (Edith Schiele), 1917. Private collection. Courtesy of Richard Nagy Ltd., London. Photo by Leopold Museum , Wien/Manfred Thumberger.[/caption]

Modernist art dealer Nagy started London’s Dover Street Gallery in 1989, followed by his eponymous space in 2010. Among his many specialities are German expressionism, Symbolism and, in particular, the works of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. He stages one museum-quality exhibition a year and participates regularly in art fairs throughout Europe and the US.

RICHARD KOH FINE ART

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

[caption id="attachment_133071" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Herstory, 2018. Courtesy of Richard Koh Fine Art[/caption]

Committed to emerging practices and a diverse range of media, Richard Koh Fine Art has been promoting contemporary art throughout Southeast Asia since 2005. Its travelling pop-up, Richard Koh Projects, reflects the latest developments in the regional art scene. For its ABHK debut, the gallery presents Your Past Is My Future by Bangkok-based Thai artist Natee Utarit.

REGEN PROJECTS

Los Angeles, United States

Founded in 1989 as Stuart Regen Gallery, this contemporary-art specialist has expanded several times and now occupies a 20,000-square-foot space on Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s become known for groundbreaking and large-scale exhibitions by well-known artists such as Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon and Charles Ray. Its most recent show featured multimedia works by Glenn Ligon.

NOVA CONTEMPORARY

Bangkok, Thailand

[caption id="attachment_133074" align="alignnone" width="894"] Tin Pone Chay, 2018. Courtesy of Nova Contemporary[/caption]

With a focus on promoting exceptional Thai artists, this Bangkok-based gallery has helped spread the gospel of contemporary art across Southeast Asia and beyond. For its ABHK debut, it showcases emerging Burmese artist Moe Satt's explorations into "the consequences of political uprising, violence and erasure" in his home country.

GALERIE BÄRBEL GRÄSSLIN

Frankfurt, Germany

This well-established gallery, in business since 1985, focuses on German positions of the 1980s and ’90s, such as Werner Büttner, Georg Herold and Markus Oehlen -- all of who have been represented by the gallery since the start of their careers. It’s also been instrumental in the development of the Frankfurt art scene and its local talent.

CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Copenhagen, Denmark

[caption id="attachment_133075" align="alignnone" width="741"] Julia Haller at Christian Andersen[/caption]

Open since November 2010, Christian Andersen works with emerging local and international artists to stage solo and group shows in its 3,000-square-foot former garage in the Nordvest area of Copenhagen. Current exhibitions include a solo show of works by Astrid Svangren as well as a group show by Tom Humphreys and Rolf Nowotny.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

New York, United States

The first art gallery in New York’s Soho district celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, having expanded to showcase not only conceptual and minimal art but also music, dance, poetry and other creative performances. Its debut at ABHK includes works by Tauba Auerbach, Beatrice Caracciolo, Julian Lethbridge, Sol LeWitt, Paul Pfeiffer, Atsuko Tanaka and Robert Wilson.

EMPTY GALLERY

Hong Kong

The host city’s own debutant may be closed for renovations until late March, but it is geared up for its Art Basel debut. It kicks things off with Tishan Hsu: 1984-1997, the Asian debut of New York-based artist Hsu’s works from his most prolific period and a continuation of his return from a self- imposed exile from the art world.

Short Cuts

Art Basel is a maelstrom of aesthetic confrontations blitz-scaling over a frenzied three-day period. But where to be, what to see and why to bother? Stephen Short presents his cheat sheet below.

MARY CORSE

Berkerley, United States

[caption id="attachment_133046" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Untitled (white inner band, white sides), 1999. Courtesy of Kayne Frffin Corcoran, Lisson Gallery and Pace Gallery.[/caption]

American artist Mary Corse gets her first exhibition in Asia through Pace at H Queen’s, showing eight newly painted works that play to her strengths -- perception, properties of light and ideas of abstraction. Corse uses glass microspheres in a limited palette of black, white and red acrylic paint to create simple geometric configurations that take on greater than conventional luminescence. As a result, Corse’s work doesn’t just represent light, but embodies and refracts and shifts and tilts it. Opens March 26

ASIA ART ARCHIVE

Hong Kong

For the entire month of March, Asia Art Archive puts performance art under the microscope. Form Colour Action showcases Lee Wen’s sketchbooks and notebooks for the first time. Zhang Peili, widely considered the father of Chinese video art, discusses the role of performance in his career at its annual art lecture, and at Art Basel The Body Collective examines the evolution of performance art in Asia from the 1970s.

ELAINE YAN LING NG

Hong Kong

[caption id="attachment_133048" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Courtesy of UBS[/caption]

Everyone’s favourite Hong Kong artist, Elaine Yan Ling Ng, is back, this time under the auspices of UBS’s Cultural Programme. The Chinese-British designer has conjured an installation that explores global air quality (or, more precisely, the lack thereof) in Hong Kong, Shanghai and other major cities. Nexus is fed by data from air-quality monitoring stations, and analysed by the Evidence Lab, a specialist research facility within UBS.

LEE BUL

Yeongju, South Korea

[caption id="attachment_133051" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Courtesy of Deepix[/caption]

If you’re having a moment, milk it. Lee Bul, on the back of last summer’s phenomenally successful Hayward Gallery show, brings her stunning Zeppelin to Encounters, and shows Perdu from her recent Untitled series in the Kabinett section of Art Basel, through Lehmann Maupin. Her retrofuturistic imagery is rooted in biology but collages materials such as human hair with acrylic shards to broaden these concepts beyond the individual body.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY

New York, United States

[caption id="attachment_133054" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Mariko Mori, Plasma Stone IV, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY.[/caption]

Sean Kelly shows at Art Basel Hong Kong for the seventh consecutive year with works by a number of its artists, among them Mariko Mori. The multimedia phenomenon of the 1990s is displaying new work in the form of sculpture. Produced using technically advanced methods, these luminous pieces centre on Mori’s inquiry into the mysteries of the universe through her deepening interest in unobservable energy.

SOTHERBY'S

There’s no thirstier recreation than hiking the labyrinthine halls of the HKCEC, so why not cap things off with a case of Château Mouton Rothschild? Sotheby’s is auctioning 75 limited-edition Versailles Celebration Cases featuring five of its vintages with labels by artists Giuseppe Penone, Anish Kapoor, Bernar Venet, Jeff Koons and Lee Ufan. Auction on April 1

LISSON GALLERY

London, United Kingdom

[caption id="attachment_133056" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Courtesy of Lisson Gallery[/caption]

It’s all go at Lisson. The London gallery opens a space in Shanghai (its Asian debut) on March 22, and brings an embarrassment of riches to Art Basel. Where to start? Ryan Gander, Ai Weiwei, Julian Opie, Djurberg & Berg -- and that’s not even the main event. There’s also Wael Shawky’s hand-carved wood work, Laure Prouvost’s intricate tapestry work, and Carmen Herrera’s Estructura Amarilla plus so much more.

The post What to See at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Is the name ringing any bells? Well, it should for Ai Weiwei is a Chinese dissident and provocative artist, with works indelibly tied to the fight for free speech. He is also the artistic consultant who designed the iconic Bird’s Nest Stadium from the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but later spoke against it: “The Bird's Nest National Stadium, which I helped to conceive, is designed to embody the Olympic spirit of "fair competition". It tells people that freedom is possible but needs fairness, courage and strength. However, almost 60 years after the founding of the People's Republic, we still live under autocratic rule without universal suffrage. We do not have an open media even though freedom of expression is more valuable than life itself.”

In conjunction to Refutation, Ai’s second solo exhibition, which will be held from 26 March to 30 April 2018 at the gallery’s new space in H Queen’s, Prestige Malaysia has picked 5 of his larger than life works that deliberately confront the viewer with their message.

Read also : 8 feminist artists to know

[caption id="attachment_77425" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] (Bottom to Top): "Colored Vases", 2007-10, and "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn", 1995/2009, top, are part of the exhibit at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden entitled, "Ai Weiwei: According to What?" | Photo by Matt McClain[/caption]

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995)

One of his earlier works, Ai dropped and smashed a 2000-year old ceremonial urn right outside his mother's home in Beijing. What’s more shocking is that the artist paid the equivalent of several thousand US dollars for the artefact, which has an incredible symbolic and cultural worth. It is clear that the Han dynasty is considered a defining moment in Chinese civilization, thus understandably, antique dealers were outraged, calling Ai's work an act of desecration. However, Ai countered by saying "General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one." It was a provocative act of cultural destruction in reference to the erasure of cultural memory in Communist China, an anti-elite society that carefully monitored access to information, especially about its dynastic history.

[caption id="attachment_77421" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Chinese artist Ai Weiwei poses with his work "Straight" during a press preview at the Royal Academy in London | Photo by Leon Neal[/caption]

Straight (2008-2012)

The work consists of 150 tons of steel rebar that the artist and his team painstakingly collected from the site of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The tragic event took the lives of more than 5000 school children, all crushed when their government-constructed “tofu-skin school” collapsed. Each rebar, varying in diameter, had been used to reinforce the concrete walls of the schools, serves as a forceful testament to the government’s responsibility for the tragedy when displayed on the gallery floor. The concept of straightening the retrieved metal parts as if new is also seen as an act of adjusting the pieces in a way metaphorically speaking of the artist trying to make things right. The sculptural installation was presented at the 2013 Venice art biennale.

[caption id="attachment_77422" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] People walk underneath a sculpture made of backpacks by Ai Weiwei called, "Snake Ceiling" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass | Photo by Jessica Rinaldi[/caption]

Snake Bag

Rebar was not the only thing Ai collected during his visit to the site of the Sichuan earthquake; children’s backpacks were scattered in the rubble as well, a tangible symbol of the boys and girls whose lives had been cut short. The Snake Bag, which is 55-foot-long and uses 360 children's backpack, was also created out of Ai’s frustration that the government officials refused to release the number of deaths or acknowledge any accountability. Through this work, he hopes to memorialize the children of Sichuan to ensure that neither their deaths nor the devastation would be forgotten. For that, Ai undertook an investigation of the Chinese government’s attempted cover-up of the incident, with violent consequences. He was not only severely beaten by Sichuan police to prevent him from testifying at the trial of fellow researcher Tan Zuoren, Ai also spending 81 days in illegal detention in 2011.

[caption id="attachment_77424" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei holds some seeds from his Unilever Installation 'Sunflower Seeds' at The Tate Modern in London, England | Photo by Peter Macdiarmid[/caption]

Sunflower Seeds (2010)

In 2010, Ai filled the enormous Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern with exactly 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, each made by a craftsman from the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Porcelain is an important substance made for export that has long sustained the Chinese economy whereas the sunflower is an important Chinese communist symbol. While the meaning of this work remains an open question, the label "Made in China" will never look quite the same. Questions about how it was made led the audience to a greater understanding of contemporary mass-manufacturing practices in China. Much is still made by hand in an economy where machines are expensive and labour (and human life in general) is cheap. The artwork, cast on the ground, therefore, evoke an oppressed, downtrodden society, far from the ideal that Chairman Mao once described and promised. The piece is a clever pretext for calling attention to a politically sensitive issue.

[caption id="attachment_77426" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] The sculpture 'Surveillance Camera' made of marble in 2010 is displayed as part of the exhibition 'Evidence' at the Martin-Gropius Bau museum in Berlin | Photo by Johannes Eisele[/caption]

Surveillance Camera (2010)

Apart from a series of fines, arrests, and brutal beatings, the Beijing police also installed security cameras in Ai’s home and studio in 2011. He became a prisoner in his own city and home. Constantly under surveillance, even his slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities. The artist, in turn, created Surveillance Camera, an austere and quite beautiful marble sculpture, reminding us of the omnipresence of this feature in Ai's life, as well as its role as a stand in for an authority, like the statue of a Roman emperor. Set on a plinth at eye level, the resemblance of the shape to a head and shoulders is a visual twist characteristic of Ai's broader sense of humour about the absurdity of his situation.

Refutation | Ai Weiwei
Curator: Cui Cancan
26 March to 30 April 2018
Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong

The Refutation opening reception will be held from 26 March to 30 April 2018 at the gallery’s new space in H Queen’s

The post Ai Weiwei: Freedom of Speech appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.