Celebrity Life

Ruinart was founded almost three centuries ago during the Age of Enlightenment and has been collaborating with renowned artists ever since Art Nouveau pioneer Alphonse Mucha created a seminal ad for the house in 1896.

“Art is in the house’s very nature,” says Ruinart’s president Frédéric Dufour. “We are continuing our commitment to art by supporting major contemporary-art fairs, and giving carte blanche to an artist each year.”

For Art Basel Hong Kong 2019, the fair’s global champagne partner has teamed up with Brazilian photographer and multimedia artist Vik Muniz for a series of works to be displayed at the Ruinart lounge.

Described as an ode to the power of nature and its creative flow, Shared Roots is the result of Muniz’s stint as an artist-in- residence during the 2018 harvest in Reims, France. The artist used blackened wood and charcoal to depict the uniquely shaped trees that struggle to survive in the harsh conditions of one of Europe’s northernmost vineyards.

Muniz also captures the relationship between humans and nature, as shown in his depiction of cellar master Frédéric Panaïotis’s hands gripping a vine stock.

“I wanted to express what couldn’t be conveyed using language and present the complexity that goes into creating the exceptional through a creative flow,” he says, in a possible reference not only to art itself but also to winemaking.

The post Ruinart Partners with Artist Vik Muniz on a New Collaboration appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Slowly but surely, women are changing the art world's traditionally patriarchal landscape. We talk to three experts who are helping to drive change and shift perspectives from the inside out.

Manuela Wirth

Co-founder of Hauser & Wirth, Manuela Wirth is one half of an art-world power couple helming a global network of nine galleries. As one of the world’s most influential gallerists, she’s been a pioneer of championing female-made work for decades.

[caption id="attachment_133263" align="alignnone" width="683"] Manuela Wirth (Photo credit: Paul Wetherell)[/caption]

Tell us about your female artist programme.

We’re very proud of the fact that we represent more women artists than any other gallery -- we started working intensively with women artists long before it became a fashionable talking point. One of the most radical female gallerists, Pat Hearn, introduced us to the work of Louise Bourgeois, Mary Heilmann and Eva Hesse very early in Hauser & Wirth’s history. But really the origin of our in-depth focus on women artists goes back to my mother, Ursula Hauser. Her “discoveries” often found their way into our programme because we also loved the work and wanted to support it professionally. This way, strong women artists, particularly those that have been underrepresented, became an important part of our DNA. In May, we’re celebrating my mother’s 80th birthday by hosting an exhibition of her [all-female] collection at our arts centre in Somerset, UK. Women artists are still sorely underrepresented in museum and gallery shows, so it’s important to me that we use the international platform we have to give voice to their work.

Who are some of your female art heroes?

The ultimate for me is Louise Bourgeois. She was one of the past century’s greatest artists, while at the same time a mother to three children, a wife and a profound thinker. I have admiration for the many women that have juggled family roles alongside a robust artistic practice. Phyllida Barlow is another artist who falls into this category, and her work only became known internationally when she was in her sixties. She quickly grew into one of the most important artistic voices in contemporary art, and even represented her country, Great Britain, at the last Venice Biennale. Ida Applebroog is another wonderful artist. Other women artists that have had a profound impact on me personally include Isa Genzken and Roni Horn, who each show great commitment to their creative practices, and the issues they deal with in their work mean a great deal to me.

How do you see the art world addressing the current imbalance in the representation of male and female artists?

I hope that we’re now living in a time where this balance is being readdressed, and that the art market will soon catch up. I have to believe that women artists aren’t equally represented currently purely because the historical canon favoured men, so the legacies of their female counterparts are not so widely known. This is certainly something we’re working to address by representing many female estates, such as those of Eva Hesse, Maria Lassnig and Geta Bratescu, and by commissioning new scholarship and publications devoted to their work.

What’s it like to run a global gallery network alongside your husband? How does your partnership work?

Iwan and I have been working together for 27 years. We have a shared vision and agree on almost all big decisions, but we also have complementary skill sets. Iwan has always been very spontaneous and is guided by intuition, and it’s this creativity that keeps us on our toes and constantly innovating. By nature I’m more calm, shy and rational, so I help nurture his ideas and shape them into practical plans. Having four children keeps us very grounded and disciplined. Since 2000 we’ve been joined by Marc Payot, our third partner. We feel privileged to work with artists, makers, thinkers. Nowhere else in the world do you meet so many brilliant and interesting people as in the art world.

People have written plenty about the dominant Male Gaze but is there a specific way you would define the Female Gaze?

I don’t know that the Female Gaze can be singularly defined, but in the women artists I’m drawn to I notice a predominant theme in that their investigations stem from their own psychological experience, or focus on exploring the capabilities and limitations of their own body. For example, Alina Szapocznikow made casts of her own body parts, Mary Lassnig developed her concept of “body awareness” painting to explore how her mind perceived her physical presence in the world, Luchita Hurtado literally looked down and painted her own body as she observed it from above, and Louise Bourgeois used her art to work through her emotional trauma. I find this makes for a more charged and meaningful practice than depicting more “passive” subjects.

What excites you about the Louise Bourgeois show?

Our exhibition of Louise Bourgeois in Marchis the first solo exhibition to offer her work in Hong Kong. It will introduce visitors to the overarching themes of Bourgeois’s practice, such as the pull between representing the world around her and her psychological realities. We’ll focus on the final two decades of the artist’s life, and show fabric sculptures, prints, sculptures, and rarely exhibited holograms. The exhibition coincides with Bourgeois’s first large-scale museum tour in China, The Eternal Thread, presented at the Long Museum, Shanghai, and the Song Art Museum, Beijing.

Kate Bryan

A contemporary-art expert and British television presenter who once lived in Hong Kong, Kate Bryan is a curator and art historian who joined the Soho House group in 2016 as head of collections. She’s visiting Art Basel Hong Kong with an eye on acquiring pieces for this city’s Soho House, which opens later this summer.

[caption id="attachment_133262" align="alignnone" width="683"] Kate Bryan (Photo credit: Dino Busch)[/caption]

You’ve been coming to Art Basel since you lived here. How do you feel it’s evolved and what do you enjoy the most?

It’s been an incredible catalyst for the city. I was there from the very first fair and remember being so overwhelmed by the number of kids who came at the weekend. It’s amazing to think they’re now maybe teenagers interning at Tai Kwun. I lived in Hong Kong for four years and left for London in 2011, just as things really took off. Returning to build a collection for Soho House that really speaks of the city and the local artists is such a privilege.

Who are your female art heroes?

Judy Chicago, not just for her pioneering Dinner Party but for her work as an art educator and great thinker. Frida Kahlo, because I’m only human. And Jenny Holzer -- I’m amazed that I agree so much with a woman I’ve never met.

You’ve championed women artists for many years as a curator -- how and why did this happen?

About eight years ago when I was an art dealer I read some shocking statistics about the under-representation of women in the contemporary-art world. After a quick inventory of my own artists’ stable, I realised I was showing nearly 50 percent women and had this huge feeling of relief. But I realised that much more needed to be done. Being silent and inactive is a way of being complicit. Historically, women had a hard time becoming artists but many people don’t realise we haven’t come that far. In North American and European museums it’s said that work by female artists accounts for less than 5 percent [of the total]. One of my favourite young British artists, Sarah Maple, has a piece that reads “Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction”, and it’s so true. I acquired that piece for Soho House in London the second I saw it.

How do you address this in your role?

When I became the head of collections for Soho House, it was an amazing opportunity to acquire female work but also to make an important dialogue happen. A big initiative was Vault 100, on permanent display at The Ned London in the heart of the City of London -- the financial district we associate with patriarchy. I used loaded connotations of the area to make a point about gender inequality and how it affects the art world. Taking the FTSE 100 CEO gender ratio, which was 93 men and only seven women running top UK companies, I inverted it so that we acquired 93 pieces by female artists and seven by men. The response initially was crazy -- people genuinely asked me if they were 93 great women artists in London. It felt so good to prove them wrong! We have work by Tracey Emin, Jenny Holzer, Helen Marten, Sarah Lucas and Lubaina Himid, as well as more emerging artists. It makes me so proud.

There are more female artist-themed shows, but do you think this will move towards thematically organised exhibitions where artists are female? How do you strike that balance between supporting and fetishising female art in 2019?

This is such an important point. There’s not much point in creating a female ghetto, the original feminist artists in the ’70s realised this. There has to be one art conversation with everyone in it. That’s why I shied away from curating all-women shows when I was an art dealer. I felt that selling women together was insensitive to their practice -- they aren’t women artists, they’re artists. As a curator I hope I can create that opens, liberal contemporary and non-gendered context for the work rather than a female art theme.

How do you feel about the current representation of women, their viewpoints and curation in the field?

I'm really optimistic about the growing status and visibility of women at the very top of the art world that will undoubtedly have an impact. Frances Morris runs a very progressive exhibition programme at Tate Modern and Maria Balshaw became the director of all the Tate Museums, making her the first meal director of a national museum in the UK. Nancy Spector occupies a very senior position at the Guggenheim and even the Vatican Museum now has a female director. It's extremely important that women are decision makers as well as men -- it's already affecting what's being shown, validated and therefore sold.

Karen Smith

Director of Ocat Xi’an contemporary-art centre and art director at Shanghai Center of Photography, Karen Smith is an expert in Chinese contemporary art and a writer and curator with decades of experience. She’s lived in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, overseeing the rise of the Greater China art scene and its greatest names.

[caption id="attachment_133259" align="alignnone" width="768"] Karen Smith[/caption]

You’ve worked extensively in Chinese art. Tell us about how accepting the industry has been with female curators and artists.

It has in terms of how many of the galleries who contribute to the scene here are [run by] women – beginning from critic and curator Liao Wen in the 1980s, the writer Tao Yongbai and younger individuals such as Sun Ning, who was effectively one of the “founders” of Beijing’s 798. But perhaps it’s still true that male counterparts aren’t confident enough to feel comfortable working with women curators to allow them to rise up beyond being underlings.

Tell us about projects you’ve worked on that focus on female artists.

I’ve done several projects -- solo exhibitions such as Qin Jin’s I Wish I Could Be Your Companion for a Longer Time [Magician Space, Beijing 2009]; Miss P [Peili, Platform China, Beijing 2011]; and more recently solo projects for Qin Jin, Carol Lee Meijuan Carol Lee Mei Kuen, Liz Hingley, Ma Qiusha and Peili at Ocat Xi’an. This year we have more coming at Ocat – Hao Jingban, Wu Di, Xiong Wenyun and Edy Ferguson. At the Shanghai Centre of Photography, we’ve had Anna Foxand Karen Knorr, and Gan Yingying and Wang Yingying. It’s important that women support women. I dislike the fact that society today is in a position where we still need to make women a conscious focus. You’d have hoped by now that we’d have achieved a state of natural equilibrium. But since we haven’t, I do what I can as far as possible to support women artists clearly deserving of opportunities.

There are more “female artist”-themed shows, but do you think this will move to thematically organised shows that feature female artists? How would you strike that balance between supporting and fetishising female art in 2019?

This will continue to go in cycles. The argument is found in facts of how short a memory the human race possesses; we adjust to new situations, we integrate and then socio-political and economic situations change and old ideas remerge as we fall back into default modes of self-preservation which require the putting down of one group to favour the social status of another. So, yes, we need these kinds of shows from time to time to remind us of better modes of thinking via-a-vis our less egalitarian proclivities. Personally I try not to put “women” in front of every description and discussion, and instead keep talk focused on the work. To reference to what makes an art work compelling may or may not be related to gender, or the gender of its author. It’s important not to create new divisions by suggesting that women should receive exceptional treatment.

How was this dealt with in China in the rise of its contemporary scene?

In the 1990s, women artists in China felt extremely uncomfortable being corralled into all-women shows. They didn’t want to feel marginalised, or separated from the wider art scene, even though they were often marginalised within it. Shows happened -- the attitudes of the largely male critics were supportive but condescending at best. What was lacking then was a really good public media platform that could debate the fact that artists like Lin Tianmiao and Yin Xiuzhen were breaking moulds and boundaries, and making art that was at the very least as progressive as the next contemporary [male] artist in China. Each generation has produced outstanding women artists in China. The more opportunities that women have to show their work the better. All artists have to know how to handle relationships with curators who may or may not have their own agenda. You can only be fetishised if you let yourself be.

Is the art world consciously moving to address the gender imbalance? Should it?

Yes, and yes. The art world ought to be as liberal and permissive in its thinking as it must be open to creative and innovative activities and ideas. If we really believe that art speaks to people, and is able to convey human ideas and experiences across borders and boundaries, then we’re bound to contend imbalance whenever and wherever we encounter it.

Who are some of your female art heroes?

Generally, Agnes Martin, Sarah Lucas; here in China Cao Fei, Ma Qiusha, Peili, Ju Ting, Wu Di and Alice Wang.

The post How Women Are Reshaping the Art World appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Despite a damaged hand, Singaporean artist Mark Chan will not be stopped.

The post Artist and musician Mark Chan on Chinese brush painting and overcoming adversity appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

Despite a damaged hand, Singaporean artist Mark Chan will not be stopped.

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

Neo Rauch's canvases are dense panopticons, the figures he paints trapped in their own story, frozen in time among other lost souls condemned to the same fate. The stories the paintings tell are just as easily interpreted as misinterpreted: twisting roads that lead to haunted houses or burning furnaces, oversized beetles performing for or preying on their human companions, and often a stern-looking woman chastising an exhausted man hiding behind a canvas or hunched over a table with his head in hands.

“They come from my mind, my soul and therefore must be of me, but they are also not me,” their creator says, when we meet at his studio on the top floor of an old cotton mill in Leipzig, Germany. The 58-year-old Leipzig native goes on to describe how the pieces flow out of him, at times summoned through excursions or trips, such as a visit to Crete, and other times bubbling up from his childhood or seemingly thin air.

“I approach the canvas like a white haze. I spend hours, days, weeks meditating into that fog until the images start to surface in front of my eyes,” he says. “I often paint a figure over and over again, the shoulder or arms or head all need to be of a very specific weight and proportion before they are finished and sit perfectly in the frame -- one figure could send the whole cosmos another way.”

[caption id="attachment_132910" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]

Rauch says a “quick” painting could take around a year but it’s never as linear as that. And his studio definitely attests to the fact. The space is filled with canvases, some on easels, others stacked against walls, table legs, chairs. In fact, every available surface seems to be supporting a frame. There are also books, CDs, bottles of wine and whisky, and even a beautiful array of house plants. It’s every bit the studio you’d imagine, down to the thick crust of oil paint coating it all. The only rather uncanny fixture is a little pug, who dominates the space in a loveable way that reveals a hint of Rauch’s sweeter side.

When asked to explain his process, Rauch says, “In general my work bundles all the images, reflections and information into one stream of consciousness. I then occupy that particular point of internal and external influences, and react to that. I paint from that starting point always. That’s the moment when the image finds me.

[caption id="attachment_132921" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]

“I’m a rather chaotic person and so the canvas tames my mind. My images reflect on narratives that I find inside me. They are somehow inconsistent and hence painting them gives them a form that holds a certain plausibility; saying that, they do keep me awake at night. They are a waking dream. I do see one consistent trope in my expression and that is that the form has to be legitimate and has to tame the pandemonium that is my internal landscape.”

The air in the studio is heavy with turpentine and oil. It’s a smell that reminds me of lilies, I tell Rauch. He smiles and says, “Every studio has its own scent.” We talk briefly about lilies being symbolic of the moon, a space of light and death, and this leads to talk of his formative years and how he began to paint.

Rauch’s life has been as tumultuous as his paintings -- skewed awkward reveries that would haunt anyone, well, forever. At birth he was christened Neo, an ancient Greek prefix meaning “new” or “revived”. It was just four weeks later when he lost his mother and father in a train accident, and a year after that when the wall was built that would divide Berlin for almost three decades.

[caption id="attachment_132917" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]

Rauch, who recalls despising the wall, grew up in East Germany under strict Socialist order, where art was seen as political. It had to fall under the doctrine of Socialist Realism, a genre that dealt with proletariat depictions that were often easy to grasp conceptually in order to be accepted by the dominating powers. There were, however, certain younger artists like Rauch who didn’t aspire to such norms and would hold bootleg shows in living rooms and other private spaces.

[inline-quote author="Neo Rauch"]"Art is about leaving the airtight concrete surfaces and entering the marsh districts, the peripheral areas."[/inline-quote]

When I ask him if his own history and story influenced his paintings, he answers while slowly turning the pages of a book of his works from the early ’90s -- sullen dark blurs of abstract shapes and rough lines entitled Dromos or Gesang. “We all, in the first years of our lives, unconsciously absorb and memorise certain things, without reflecting on them or sorting through them in an intellectual or logical manner,” he says. “These memories, this material is getting stored in subterraneous archives, it is unconsidered and unsorted. It might reappear and emerge much later or it may not, but it’s always there.

“For example, if you’re a painter, it’s likely you archive colours and shapes. You can see that certainly inside me. I have a lot of stored aesthetics (in my mind) from the early ’60s. The way I accessed this was much more intense, say, 20 years ago,” he continues. “Today I’m not that focused on infantile perception -- or should I say I’m not really pulling from that memory bank. But these early childhood experiences definitely have been a great source of inspiration for me once I found my real artistic/painterly identity around 1993.

“This was when I finished the first period of self-reflection. Until that point, I was going down all different routes, trying to find my own language. I had idols and role models, but I was mostly wandering around in foreign territory, disconnected from my peculiar and authentic self.”

Rauch and his peers fell into a genre that was dubbed the New Leipzig School, a somewhat controversial term for a group of artists who emerged in post-reunification Germany in the 1990s and was championed by the likes of Eigen art gallery, curator Christian Ehrentraut and dealer Gerd Harry Lybke.

[caption id="attachment_132915" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]

The self-described “very angry young man”, who studied at the famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, found painting to be an outlet for his penchant for rebellion and irony, and railing against the Concrete Art movement that had declared the medium dead. “I’ve found it’s about creating openings on the canvas that allow the human mind to sink into them,” he says. “Art is about leaving the airtight concrete surfaces and entering the marsh districts, the peripheral areas, the zone of transition where language fails, where I as the painter have to trust my instincts and my perception.

“That’s how I find my place in the production of art. That’s the domain of art. If I find I can explain everything rationally, it’s not art. It remains only an airtight surface under some neon lights framed in the studio or gallery or seminar room or in the latest Documenta.”[inline_related_article article_id="104737"]

When I visit, Rauch is preparing for Propaganda, a solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery that opens on March 26 in conjunction with Art Basel. His debut solo exhibition in Asia features 15 new paintings and is accompanied by a new catalogue with a short story by novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann.

A tiny mock-up of the space sits in the corner of the room. “Would you like to see the show?” he says, laughing. The canvases overwhelm even the model of the gallery, squeezed on to its tiny walls. As I look down into the rooms, I feel as if I could walk straight into his paintings. The familiar figures Rauch depicts are there, all hegemonic in a European aesthetical sense. They mostly conform to traditional gender norms and roles, yet in these new paintings they’re dressed as clowns, magicians, animal tamers or jesters doting more on the mystical.

There’s something morbid about the figures, almost like the walking dead. I once heard someone refer to them as “sleep walkers”, but this description seems somehow too comfortable. They’re frozen and cast into their roles forever, unable to escape.

[caption id="attachment_132923" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]

When asked if his figures are inspired by sleep and dreams, Rauch explains that he no longer uses his dreams as inspiration but instead paints as if he could be dreaming. He speaks in depth about the practice of becoming lucid and the point of view that creates.

“We, of course, are not able to grasp dreams in any rational way,” he says. “They have their own mechanics. Time changes and proportions become irrational. And then there is, of course, the demonic component of every sleeping pattern. There’s often something eerie to dreams. Freud spoke of it as if a dream could be likened to some sort of hairline crack in the familiar. For example, when we dream we encounter a familiar person and recognise that there’s something slightly different to them. It might not even be that person. That’s the weirdness I try to capture and for me, that is a space where painting as a form of expression can become very interesting.”

This hairline crack seems to have found its way into Rauch’s new body of work -- you see it depicted in curtains that fall away into the sky or openings that slip into passages of worlds all connected by rhizomes of rooms. They could be likened to works by MC Escher, although they’re never as regimented and nor do they simulate one pattern for one frame.[inline_related_article article_id="112921"]

Rauch’s paintings seem more to traverse between frames. “There are periods in the studio, and each canvas then becomes familiar to the others,” he says. “Like a family, they exist next to one another and therefore they begin to take on characteristics from the others. That’s why you see recurring motifs. They almost become genetically connected, as they’re formed in this room.”

It’s a very romantic notion of painting, I tell him. “Well yeah, sure,” he says with a smile. “It’s about re-enchanting the world.”

Re-enchanting or possessing? This is the question I pose to Rauch, as all art aims to possess the viewer in the sense that the eyes cannot look away. “If we encounter real art, which isn’t always the case just because someone claims it to be art, we experience a moment of absence of gravity. Paused time,” he responds. “We become unhinged, taken away from any rational frame of reference we might have held before. Something is talking to us that’s not entirely human, such as a painting, and it’s sucking us into a parallel universe. In any case, a painting has to have the ability to imprint itself on to someone’s retina to call itself art.”

The post Artist Neo Rauch on His Paintings and His Upcoming Hong Kong Exhibition appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

The performance blurs the lines between mediums to give a glimpse into Lam's storied history.

The post Theatre review: Still Life is a self portrait of activist-artist Dana Lam appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

The performance blurs the lines between mediums to give a glimpse into Lam's storied history.

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

Design collective FEATHR is on a mission to fill the world with more art and less decoration. FEATHR roams the world collaborating with contemporary artists to create original wallpaper and fabrics. Their latest collaboration is with British graffiti and mixed media artist, Lee Herring. Herring’s contemporary landscape paintings are rich in physicality, texture and color: […]

The post Living In Color appeared first on VUE magazine.