We've handpicked some art exhibitions and events to check out this March. Read on to discover more.
Art Central
Art Central, a cornerstone event of Hong Kong Art Week, showcases the next generation of talent from Asia’s most innovative galleries alongside distinguished artists from around the world. Presented in partnership with United Overseas Bank (UOB), the eighth edition of Art Central will be held 22 to 25 March 2023 (Preview 21 March) at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, running alongside Art Basel Hong Kong.
Art Central has established itself as an international platform for pushing boundaries in contemporary art and experimentation, and is recognised as a place of discovery for seasoned collectors and new buyers alike. The Fair provides a platform for museum quality artworks from more established names to be exhibited alongside cutting-edge works by emerging artists across different mediums. With a unique identity in the Hong Kong visual arts landscape, Art Central delivers the best in today’s global contemporary art practice to thousands of VIPs, collectors, curators, critics and art lovers who visit the Fair during Hong Kong Art Week – the biggest art week within the Asia Pacific region.
When: 22nd March - 25th March 2023
Photograph: courtesy Art Central
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai
Art Basel
Marking its largest show since 2019, the 2023 edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong will welcome 177 galleries from 32 countries and territories across Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Africa, plus the return of all the fair’s special sectors, including Encounters, Kabinett, Conversations, and Film. Over two-thirds of participating galleries have exhibition spaces in the region – with 33 galleries having exhibition spaces in Hong Kong – reinforcing Art Basel’s commitment to showcasing exceptional art from its host city and across Asia and the Asia Pacific.
When: 23rd March - 25th March 2023
Photograph: courtesy Art Basel
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai
Lisa Huang and Wu Jianzhong: Every Day
The significance of the mundane, ordinariness of every day - being its very predictability offers to us assurance, comfort and even confidence. Our going about, daily habits, the smallness of these are disregarded and insignificant until its seismograph is tipped. Wu Jianzhong and Lisa Huang paint the everyday, in particular Hong Kong’s every day. Less of what they appear but more of what they speak to them or possibly to the subjects depicted. Every Day presents 16 of their available watercolor on paper, a compact selection from their last 5 years of creation.
When: 1 March 2023 - 29 March 2023
Image: courtesy Lisa Huang
G/F, 23 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
+852 9243 5008
ADVERT
Women At The End Of The World
AVA is one of the University Partners this year at Art basel Hong Kong!
Aside from having a representative booth at Art Basel, we will have a parallel exhibition at AVA - featuring some of our alumni excellence through a show called 'Women at the End of the World'. In this exhibition, we want to generate dialogue about care and caring for the environment through the four artists’ works starting from the space at Art Basel, that will continue into our gallery at the AVA Kai Tak campus.
The show will feature prints, performances and installations by Ice Wong, Michelle Fung, Stacey Chan and Mandy Ma.
When: 08th March - 04th April 2023
Image: courtesy AVA Gallery
Kai Tak Campus, 51 Kwun Tong Road, Kolwoon
The World of Salvador Dali
Illuminati Fine Art is thrilled to present “The World of Salvador Dalí”, a solo exhibition of one of the most iconic Spanish Surrealist artists - Salvador Dalí. This exhibition showcases 20 pieces of sculptures and prints by Dalí. The exhibition starts from 10 March to 31 May 2023 at Illuminati Fine Art.
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989, Figueres, Spain) studied art at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in 1922. Interacting with Picasso, Magritte, Miró and Paul Éluard in Paris be- tween 1926 and 1929, as well as inspiration of Sigmund Freud’s writings on erotic signifi- cance of subconscious imagery, Dalí began to indulge himself in hallucinatory states in which he described “paranoiac critical”.
His works have been widely collected by museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres, Spain; National Gallery of Art, Wash- ington, USA; The Dalí (Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc), Florida, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Jeneiro, Brazil; Freud Museum London, London, UK and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasglow, Scotland, UK.
When: 10th March - 31st May 2023
Image: courtesy Illuminati Fine Art
31 - 33 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong
+852 2889 6992
Ink Alchemy Beyond Tradition
Alisan Fine Arts is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Ink Alchemy: Beyond Tradition at their gallery during Art Basel, co-curated by Dr. Susan L. Beningson and Daphne King Yao. Ink Alchemy: Beyond Tradition includes new work created for the exhibition by established artists Zheng Chongbin, Imagined Landscape: Rabbit made by Yang Yongliang to celebrate the Lunar New Year, and emerging artists Zhang Xiaoli, Cheuk Ka-Wai, Cherie, Kelly Wang, Ren Light Pan. Other works by Lui Shou-Kwan, Wang Tiande, Lee Chun-Yi, Zhang Jian-Jun, Tai Xiangzhou, Zhang Yu, Lin Guocheng, Zhang Yirong and Chu Chu will also be on show. Featuring 15 Chinese artists from Hong Kong, mainland China and the US of different generations and varying backgrounds, the exhibition seeks to highlight the changes in Chinese ink painting over the last half-century. They move beyond the tradition, adopting innovative materials and ways of creation yet maintaining the spiritual energy of ink or qi.
Landscape Reinterpreted
Landscape as a traditional subject of Chinese ink painting, its artistic essence has rarely been about realistic depiction, but spiritual resonance or the reflection of the state of mind and personality. Inheriting the core spirit of ink art and landscape, the artists further transformed ink landscape painting with new mediums, materials and composition, responding to their reality and imagination through Chinese landscape context of human feelings and literary culture. The section features Lin Guocheng’s three-dimensional surreal landscapes, Tai Xiangzhou’s Cosmoscape paintings, Wang Tiande’s landscape created with burn marks from incense sticks, Kelly Wang’s abstract landscapes that exist somewhere between two and three dimensions and combine contemporary and pre-modern materials, Yang Yongliang’s digital realistic Chinese landscape and Zhang Xiaoli’s boxed landscape inspired by a dicing game from the Song dynasty. By experimenting and creating landscape paintings based on different themes and through various mediums, these artists show a contemporary facet of this time-honoured subject.
Bird & Flower
Besides landscape, bird-and-flower is another traditional subject in Chinese ink. Inspired by the resilience and the beauty of creatures found in nature, as well as human virtues and the principle of nature, the artists in this section create ink paintings of flowers, birds and butterflies employing a new composition style. In this section, the curated works from Chu Chu, Lee Chun-Yi and Zhang Yirong present flowers on their own with a plain background, emphasizing the ultimate delicacy of flowers that the viewers have yet to notice. Cheuk Ka-Wai, Cherie, who specially creates new works for this show, does not adopt a botanical surrounding for her birds but a turbulent environment, symbolizing the peace out of chaos. The way they infuse their ink paintings with calligraphy, chop carving and stamping, and gongbi style is worth noting.
Abstraction
For contemporary ink artists who explore the form of ink art, they have created a new visual vocabulary derived from abstraction, symbolism and endless experiments with materials and techniques. The fascination of their art is no longer limited to the pictorial space but also their roots in their reconstruction and concern and study about the state of the world and the existence of oneself. Highlight in this section will be Zheng Chongbin’s immense B/W painting, Plateau ,which the artist specially created for this show. Zheng endeavours to present ink as the subject, as we can see from the bold manifestation of black, white and grey. Other works on display in this section include: ink master Lui Shou-Kwan’s Zen painting which explores the emptiness of Zen and channels the spiritual connection to his materials; Ren Light Pan’s abstract works imprinted with her body, emotion and experience; Zhang Jian-Jun’s elemental ink series which is based on the elements of fire, water and wood; Zhang Yu’s conceptual Fingerprint series, exploring the relationship between self-identity, time and existence.
When: 21st March - 5th May 2023
Photograph: Alisan Fine Arts
21/F Lyndhurst Tower, 1 Lyndhurst Terrace, Central, Hong Kong +852 2526 1091
ADVERT
Jeremy Fung: Fibrillation
“Sketching and speedwriting are all about immediacy. Our feelings will be different and irregular in every moment, and the act of sketching is to grasp the irregular rhythm and unpredictable emotions at that moment.” Jeremy Fung said.
Jeremy begins the habit of speedwriting and taking notes and recording intriguing things in sketches since his secondary school period. Most of Jeremy’s subsequent works are based on his notes, especially the random doodles on them. Words or those unconscious pencil traces and sketches are the unique and secret codes of the artist, he transfers them onto the wooden board, and then reinterpreted them on the woodcut with the intuition of the immediate perception forthwith.
Compared to painting on canvas, Jeremy is much fascinated by wood carving, especially the sharp edges shown by knives when carving on the surface of wood boards, and the natural layering of wooden clothes. The delicate picture of the thick and thin lines intertwined on the wood appeals to Jeremy a lot. The artist carved/painted his emotions and memories on the wooden board in an abstract form, and this has become his unique personal emotional diary.
“ I think both sketching and speedwriting are about feeling and cognition of different things, the more appeal you are with a specific object, the smoother the direction of brush strokes will be.” he said.
The lines on Jeremy’s woodcuts are very tense, which is the expression of the artist’s strength and confidence. The lines are very neat from the start to the end, without any hesitation. This not only shows the artist’s proficiency in skills but also shows the artist’s uniqueness in objects. The mastery of it is already completely handy.
“The expression and interaction of lines and woodcuts show much pure power and tension, which allows me to immerse myself through it and explore the intensive emotions from the inner self” he said.
When: 1st March - 1st April 2023
Photograph: courtesy SC Gallery
Unit 2, 19/F, Sungib Industrial Centre, 53 Wong Chik Hang Road, HK
+852 3795 3826
Over The Boundary
In celebration of International Women’s Day, The Stroll Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Over The Boundary”, featuring two young female Korean artists, Yeonwoo Kim and Heeina Im. The exhibition, curated by Yu-Kyung Jang, is part of an artist support program dedicated to discovering young and emerging artists in Korea. Yeonwoo Kim and Heeina Im visualize what they feel in unique artistic visual languages – beyond the dichotomous boundaries dividing human and nonhuman and me and others. Through this exhibition, “Over The Boundary”, we hope to share the unique perspectives of these young artists on the contemporary era, offering viewers a chance to open their minds to those often-ignored parts of daily life – and consider the possibilities of solidarity with each other. About the Artists Artist Yeonwoo Kim’s work focuses on the small existences that pass by our surroundings in day to day life, things like discarded plant pots from the street, abandoned but still full of vitality. Using ambiguous colour tones and traditional painting techniques, she depicts these discarded flora with a vibrancy and richness that blur boundaries between background and foreground. In her work, abstract shapes on the screen look like paint smudged on paper, and may at first seem soft and loose, but deliver a clear energy of life we might not have noticed before. By examining things that do not fit in, the artist feels deep emotions and senses, reproducing those feelings on the canvas as she reflects on personal experiences. Artist Heeina lm’s work raises questions about the boundaries of identity that distinguish us from one another – and the social norms to decide when we other or not. With this in mind, she uses diverse sizes of circles weaved with different coloured fabrics to visualize dynamic individuals’ characters and reproduce them as one fluid object installation in the space. This installation is about balance and the coexistence of various boundaries with each other. But as every individual interacts and changes constantly, Im’s installation is temporary and variable at the same time. In an ever-changing landscape, the artist asks viewers to imagine the boundless potential of solidarity with each other.
When: 10th March - 29th April 2023
Image: courtesy The Stroll Gallery
Unit 504, 5/F, Vanta Industrial Centre, No. 21-33 Tai Lin Pai Road, Kwai Chung, N.T, Hong Kong +852 6366 0717
Lost In Translation
Galerie du Monde is thrilled to present group exhibition “Lost in Translation” curated by Anqi Li from 15 March to 22 April 2023. Opening Reception: 15 March 2023, 5pm to 7pm “Lost in Translation” narrates the ambiguity as creative intentions, visual languages, and verbal interpretation are translated from one to the other. It is an unspeakable sense of struggling or losing control, yet a reserved pause to read between the lines. This constructs a subtle lostness in a series of recent works by eight Chinese artists. The group show wonders in between abstraction and figuration, obscurity and clarity, reality and fantasy, tranquility and lamentation, inviting the spectator to immerse into the eternal fluidity of artistic languages. Participating Artists: Dony Cheng Hung, Liang Shuni, Qin Xiaoshi, Song Yuanyuan, Tang Kwong San, Astra Huiment Wang, Wang Zhiyuan, Xiao Jiang
When: 15 March 2023 - 22 April 2023
Image: courtesy Galerie du Monde
108 Ruttonjee Centre, 11 Duddell Street, Central http://www.galeriedumonde.com A complete list of exhibitions can be viewed here.
