Celebrity Life

The international curated art fair Untitled, Art and online contemporary art platform Artland have teamed up to present the world’s first virtual reality art fair called Untitled, Art Online.

Dubbed the “digital fair of the future,” Untitled, Art Online features an e-commerce platform and commission-based structure designed to minimise up-front costs to exhibitors. Collectors can engage in real time shopping, with features such as "buy now" and chat tools that support instant messaging. Visitors are also able to navigate fair aisles, adding to the sense of discovery and exploration that is lost in static online viewing rooms.

The inaugural edition of Untitled, Art Online, powered by Artland, features some 40 international exhibitors, set within Untitled, Art’s iconic light-filled tent that has come to define the Miami Beach edition. The dynamic online fair, which will be accessible 24-hours a day will showcase unique booth presentations and allow for life-like navigation through space, where visitors can virtually stroll the aisles looking for new discoveries and unexpected juxtapositions that have come to define the art fair experience. Exhibitors will also have the ability to customise their booth designs and exhibit artworks that have been sold.

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“We are beyond excited to be launching Untitled, Art Online at a time when the art world is relying more heavily on digital engagement,” says Jeffrey Lawson, founder of Untitled, Art. “This platform, the only virtual reality experience available in the art market, is something we have been hard at work on with Artland for nearly a year now and have decided to launch it earlier than intended in an effort to help reinvigorate the global art economy. Not only have we created an original and innovative virtual experience that is as close to being at Untitled, Art Miami Beach as virtually possible, but we are also providing our clients with a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform at a time when they need it the most.”

Participating galleries hail from New York to Beijing and include Addis Fine Art, Altman Siegal, Vigo Gallery, The Pit, Jane Lombard Gallery, Denny Dimin Gallery, among others. The fair runs from 31 July to 2 August, 2020.

Shop the fair here.

The post Untitled Art, Online: The World’s First Virtual Reality Art Fair appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Lévy Gorvy Gallery’s latest exhibition provides a rare glimpse into art history with concurrent exhibitions of works by two great artists, France’s centenarian Pierre Soulages and the late New York street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

This summer, Lévy Gorvy inaugurated its new global initiative, called Reveal, an ongoing series of single-work focused exhibitions devoted to showcasing post-war and contemporary masterpieces. These are presented along with in-depth contextual materials and educational programming in their gallery spaces and online.

The exhibition, which opened in Hong Kong on July 7, presents a seminal painting by France’s greatest living artist Pierre Soulages, titled Peinture (1953), which hasn’t been exhibited in public in almost 60 years.  As an artist who is still actively painting at age 100, Soulages has offered an extraordinary continuity across his oeuvre. The exhibition strives to provide viewers with a historical perspective on Soulage’s career by contrasting this formative early work with an exhibition of six of his recent Outrenoir paintings, highlighting a period during which he gained international recognition.

[gallery ids="209055,209056,209057,209058,209059"]

Peinture was painted by Soulages as he entered his stylistic maturity and represents a breakthrough moment for the artist. In this work, he introduced a sense of vigorous movement that is also anchored by a powerfully structured composition. The work is also permeated by a compelling sense of inner light created by his brushstrokes in varying hues of black, grey, white and brown, which creates a dramatic luminosity and showcases his lifelong exploration of darkness and radiance. Peinture, along with all six of Soulage’s Outrenoir paintings are for sale, half of which have already been sold.

At the same time, a rare painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat is also being exhibited as a second Reveal exhibition, titled Jean-Michel Basquiat: Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets. This is the first Asia gallery presentation of Basquiat’s work, and Untitled (1982) is one of his most impressive and important works. The work consists of an electrifying portrait of a Black hero figure that is part self-portrait, part idol, standing proud amid the chaos of abstracted forms on a background of blue.

[caption id="attachment_209060" align="alignnone" width="1543"] Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (1982)[/caption]

Untitled (1982) is one of a famous trio of large-scale paintings on the theme of a prophet that Basquiat made in 1982, a pivotal year of the artist’s meteoric rise to international stardom. It was in this year that Basquiat was able to realise an ever-more extraordinary sequence of hauntingly powerful paintings with the support of his first dealer Annina Nosei, who provided him with his first supply of high-quality working materials as well as a dedicated space to paint.

“We are excited to launch Reveal, a new series of focused exhibitions that will bring major works of art to our galleries around the world,” co-founder Brett Gorvy says. “At a time when travel is heavily restricted, we look to engage with collectors and the public on the ground while simultaneously connecting to a global audience using our digital platforms to introduce these preeminent artists and their masterworks.”

The exhibitions run until 10 September, 2020 .

The post Lévy Gorvy Exhibits Masterpieces by Pierre Soulages and Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Take a peek behind the curtain with photographer Joanna Vestey’s photo series that features historic venues and their caretakers.

The post Custodians for Covid is Joanna Vestey’s ode of appreciation to unseen caretakers of London’s theatres appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

Take a peek behind the curtain with photographer Joanna Vestey’s photo series that features historic venues and their caretakers.

For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.

It’s been called the China’ most popular painting and even China’s Mona Lisa. It’s a prize possession of the Palace Museum in Beijing and is only unveiled to the public every few years, at most. It truly is a magnificent treasure, that astounds all who can catch a rare glimpse of it.

[caption id="attachment_208840" align="alignnone" width="1373"] Section 1 of the Qingming scroll[/caption]

But for all its fame and glory, it remains an enigma – concealing much more about its mysterious past than has been established as fact. Indeed, no-one in modern times knew of the scroll’s existence until scholars discovered it in the bowels of the Palace Museum in Beijing in 1954, after it was returned from Manchuria after the second world war. By some accounts, the scroll was a favourite of Puyi, the Last Emperor.

[caption id="attachment_208841" align="alignnone" width="1596"] Section 2 of the Qingming scroll[/caption]

Apart from the technical brilliance with which it was completed, there is so much that remains unknown about is handscroll measuring 25.5cm high and 5.25 metres long, depicting everyday life in a busy Chinese city.  And while the sheer technical brilliance of the scroll is there for all to see, just about everything else purported to be fact about its location, provenance and even its purpose is conjecture.

The work is attributed to Zhang Zeduan, who is to have lived from 1085-1145 and is often referred to as “the most popular court artist of the Song dynasty”. But the only historical mention of Zhang that has ever been found is in a written message (called a colophon) on the scroll itself, signed by one of its first owners in the subsequent Jin Dynasty when it was already some six decades old by its own account. No further hard evidence of Zhang has been found, either in other paintings or written accounts by other. Zhang Zhu, the colophon’s author and presumably no relation, was an official curator of paintings for the non-Han Chinese Jin Dynasty that conquered North China in 1126.

[caption id="attachment_208842" align="aligncenter" width="1553"] Section 3 of the Qingming scroll[/caption]

The colophon said that “Zhang Zeduan (styled Zhengdao) is a native of Dongwu [today’s Zhucheng, in Shandong province]. When young, he studied and travelled to the capital for further study. He showed talent for ruled-line painting (draughting and rendering), and especially liked boats and carts, markets and bridges, moats and paths. He was an expert in other types of painting as well.”

He concluded: “On the day after the Qingming festival, in 1186, Zhang Zhu from Yanshan wrote this colophon”.  This, as far as is known, is the only contemporary official mention of Zhang Zeduan.

Another problem for scholars is the scroll’s name, Qingming shanghe tu, which roughly translated from the same characters could be A stroll along the river during the Qingming Festival or Peace reigns over the river. The first name implies a period of stability and peace, while second implies a more volatile epoch.

Scholars are also divided over the location of the scroll. Some say it is Kaifeng, the venerable Song capital, while others say there is no reason to presume, especially as none of the buildings in the painting resemble ones known from records. The scene, they say, is of an idealised city. Many copies, some of them twice the length of the original, were made in subsequent centuries.

[caption id="attachment_208843" align="aligncenter" width="1174"] Section 4 of the Qingming scroll[/caption]

Valerie Hansen, a US professor of Chinese language and history who also supports the idealised city hypothesis, wrote in a 1991 essay The Beijing Qingming Scroll and its Significance for the Study of Chinese History: “We can only speculate about [the artist’s] unrecorded motives. It would have been natural for him to make his scroll as a reminder of the past glories of the Song, before the humiliating defeat [by the invading Jurchens] of 1126. If Zhang created his scroll under non-Chinese rule, and the first records place it in the Jin-dynasty imperial collection, he would have a good reason to depict a generic city defying easy identification. His scroll evokes a bygone time in which cities prospered and their residents flourished. Like more recent Chinese critics of the government, he left it to the viewer to deduce his target.

[caption id="attachment_208844" align="aligncenter" width="1790"] Last section of the Qingming scroll[/caption]

“The Qingming scroll is a masterful artistic creation, whose many layers of meaning defy a pat reading. With each viewing, the observer gains new understanding of the people and the city show in such vivid detail. The spellbinding artistry of the scroll, coupled with the lack of documentation about its maker and his subject, guarantee that future generations will fund the study of the scroll just tantalising – as their predecessors.”

The post Arty Facts: The Enigma of China’s Favourite Painting, the Qingming Scroll appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Basically, a portfolio is a collection of the works of an artist, intended to showcase their particular signature or style to an art gallery, a university, or even for an employer. It can include both finished and unfinished art pieces, as well as observational drawings. It can also highlight the best pieces or include supplemental […]

The post Portfolios: Why Every Artist Needs One appeared first on Upscale Living Magazine.

The Peak speaks to Andy Chia, artistic director of SAtheCollective, on how the arts can lift moods and strengthen bonds.

The post Why art is essential during a crisis appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

The Peak speaks to Andy Chia, artistic director of SAtheCollective, on how the arts can lift moods and strengthen bonds.

For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.

Twenty years after working on Wong Kar-wai’s seminal movie In the Mood for Love, photographer Wing Shya talks to us about capturing the essence of that film, and his own career as a director.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Wong Kar-wai’s In theMood for Love, arguably the Hong Kong film -- and certainly the one that exported a romantic, nostalgia-tinged vision of our city to a global audience.

This year’s Cannes film festival, though cancelled due to Covid19, was expected to celebrate the movie, on which a relatively inexperienced photographer, Wing Shya, captured still photographs of protagonist lovers Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung under moody lights and dramatic shadows.

[caption id="attachment_208567" align="alignnone" width="1388"] Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love[/caption]

“We worked day and night on that film," says Shya. “At that time we just worked like that. It was a small team and not a big budget ... And we really didn’t know the film would become so huge and famous."

Twenty years on and the man who subsequently became Hong Kong’s most famous photographer is fast becoming an established film director in his own right, with some of his movies - like the ones he’s been shooting lately - being produced by Wong Kar-wai’s film company, Jettone. The tight-knit duo have been working together on-and-off in some capacity for 25 years.

“When I started taking photos for Wong Kar-wai on his films,"Shya says, “the first film job was for Happy Together with Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, in Argentina. I didn’t really know anything about photography ... and it was kind of the same with being a film director. I learned so much on the job just on my first movie, Hot Summer Days, with Tony Chan.

“It’s so different from doing photography - when you’re a photographer you can be very emotional. You take the picture and it can be very focused. As a film director you always have to think about all these different elements - the visual, the actors, the dialogue, the mood - constantly thinking every second of shooting. It’s hard work and so difficult."

[caption id="attachment_208569" align="alignnone" width="1384"] Leslie Cheung[/caption]

Acclaimed writer and film director Tony Chan teamed up with Shya for Hot Summer Days, after asking him to help direct a script that he’d been working on. Shya says it involved almost a year of sitting down with each other in Starbucks to work on the film. Remarkably, especially for directing newbie Shya, it became the first Hong Kong

Chinese film made by the giant 20th Century Fox “We went for a five-minute presentation with the guy from Fox, as he was about to go to the airport. It was so rushed but he loved it, and three months later they decided to fund the film. It was really crazy, they met a lot of other directors in Hong Kong and China but decided to choose us."

Now Shya is in the midst of directing his third and fourth feature films (in addition to a few shorts) - shooting in Shanghai was temporarily stalled because of the virus, but will resume shortly. All his films have been quirky romantic comedies set in Hong Kong or mainland Chinese cities.

[caption id="attachment_208566" align="alignnone" width="1398"] Angelababy and Jing Boran in Hot Summer Days[/caption]

Along with Hot Summer Days (2010), his second film Love in Space (2011) really established Shya’s nostalgic, witty and light-hearted style and genre. When I ask why he chose comedy, he says it’s something that he always wanted to do. “I love comedy," he says. “I want to go to a movie theatre and laugh out loud."

In terms of stars and celebrity, Shya has worked with almost all of them, capturing images of the late golden era of Hong Kong stars, such as Leslie Cheung, Shu Q, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as they acted or waited on set. Shya was a deft hand at shooting these stars off-guard, a style so different from the glossy, cultivated looks of Hong Kong celebrities that the media had previously been used to.

In the last 10 years as a filmmaker, he’s directed the likes of Aaron Kwok, Eason Chan, Nicholas Tse, Angelababy, Barbie Hsu, Daniel Wu and Rene Liu, and continues to work with some of China’s biggest rising screen stars.

When I ask if he has any favourites, since there are a few names that regularly come up, Shya diplomatically replies, “Sometimes I don’t choose the stars, actors and actresses ... Jettone is producing my films now and sometimes they’re chosen by the producers. Sometimes there are so many investors to take care of, and they also have a say in casting the stars," he says with a laugh.

It’s Shya’s laidback attitude, wit and sense of humour that have made him such a unicorn in the world of photography, fashion and film. There are no airs nor graces, despite his having achieved cult fame in Hong Kong and China. He’s exhibited in London’s V&A and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and has shot for the likes of iD Magazine,Vogue Italia and Numero. Today, Shya remains one of the most down-to-earth talents I’ve met in this city. Even when talking about his remarkable reputation and success, his take is very typically Shya. “Everything that happened in my life and career has been partly luck ... All the moves and new directions have been natural and organic ... I didn’t really plan it, I just kind of go with the flow and how I feel."

As for that instantly recognisable signature mood, aesthetic and style, Shya says that meeting Terry Jones of iD and shooting for the magazine early on was a defining moment in his career. “Terry was kind of my mentor in establishing my style. When I met him, he just gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted; that creative freedom was amazing and not something that I could find easily in Hong Kong. I could shoot naked people, or blurry pictures - it was the freedom that gave me the inspiration to create my style."

[caption id="attachment_208570" align="alignnone" width="1383"] Shu Qi opposite Du Juan[/caption]

In late 2017, the Shanghai Centre of Photography held a retrospective exhibition of Shya’s work, titled Acting Out - a collection of personal work as well as broad selection of images from his time as Wong Kar-wai’s on-set stills photographer - curated by noted Chinese art critic and curator Karen Smith from his entire image archive (outtakes and mistakes included). The opening, attended by Shya’s family, was an emotional event for him.

Today, the once-prolific fashion photography has mostly stopped. He still shoots for a select few clients and magazines, but is kept increasingly busy by film protects. But that doesn’t mean Shya doesn’t still keep an eye on the photography and fashion scenes, and the many young photographic talents coming out of Hong Kong, China and Asia.

“My style is already vintage style, a bit nostalgic, and honestly I’m not really up to date any more, but I love what the young photographers are doing -- it’s so exciting. It’s not the same stuff that I can do -- but I love it."

The post Photographer Wing Shya on Light and Shadow appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.