Rebecca Horn
Horn's retrospective exhibition, Bodylandscapes, just moved to
Hayward Gallery in London, after its previous
German edition. In Guardian Unlimited's
feature, not much reads particularly insightful about the German artist's person and her path of creation. Exhaustive descriptions but not sufficient analytical views.
These few sentences, associated less directly to her
body sculptures and
automata installations, are worth some reflection for everybody:
'...This is not the Richard Dawkins universe, where everything can be boxed and labelled. Horn is a mystic. "Every day," she says, "for an hour in the mornings, I breathe, I open my spine, I put up my light. A swam taught me." ... You have to believe in something, and you have to give that out to the world. All my life, I am giving out.... Most people live in a little prison in their minds." She believes that this incarceration happens gradually, as we get older, and that one of the reliefs of art is the light it sends through the bars.' (Photograph: Martin Argles/Text: Jeanette Winterson)
While surfing for information, I came to
this work I visited in Munster back in 1997.
Update: A bit more on
The Pencil Mask by "we make money not art".
On and On with More Madness
Whether fellow director Chan Ping Chiu can work out a
real comedy will be unveiled tomorrow evening. The illustrated poster by
seeman (aka 二犬十一咪), and the feature actress Faye who just came back from
U-theatre create even more expectation!
Formerly I have planned to see
another show first and leave
The Man Who Mistook His Wife as a Hat for Sunday evening. But Chan wants me to speak at the post-performance discussion after the Saturday show, so I have to leave
Brecht for
Oliver.
Too many shows too little time!
DIY Childhood
These
paper toys (image from thetoymaker.com via
del.icio.us) just make me nostalgic. Hmmm...
You are what you played with as a kid, probably. Besides those wild "excursions" up and down slopes and hills behind the public housing estate where my grandma lived, my younger childhood was spent mostly with various forms of paper "toys".
- Mon: Filling colours for popular Japanese icons (Thanks, TV).
- Tue: Paper foldings (and actually the delicate drawings of the instruction).
- Wed: Cut-and-pasting (computer? what was that?).
- Thu: Look-for-differences drawings in "Er-tong Le-yuan (Children's Playground)" (an archeology is available online! Sorry, Chinese only.)
- (Glamorous) Fri: Paper fashion figures and their accessories (Yes, the pre-Barbie campness).
- Sat: Just doodle!
The paper period of my history ended when I started longing for a Lego
fire station (and, of course, the firemen). Then arrived all those
balls and falling objects, etc.... Hey, I am not starting my retro now!
I know, childhood is a myth, and its memories are always mesmerizing, perhaps beguiling. Anyway, no body can really share exactly the joy for this DIY process, right? both the memories, and the toys.
Like a Monk: Veggie Xp
I am never a true gourmet though I claimed once or twice here about those
occasional charming dinners. My appetite for delicious or special dishes rarely overrides the need, even before I became a vegetarian some three years ago. However, it is indeed so difficult in Hong Kong to have more choices than "Rice with fried tomato and egg" or "stewed noodle with mushroom" in "
cha can ting" (like I do always) that I started cooking for myself. With a few new recipes on my shelf, I feel a little more familiar to the culinary art and care more, apparently, about choices.
It was during an unusually "luxurious" lunch last weekend when I decided to introduce places for vegetarian meals in Hong Kong, hoping it would be helpful for other herbivorous comrades to live a slightly more colourful vegi-life.
This is the first entry for "Like a Monk":
Veggie Xp on Wanchai Road, Wanchai.
Probably because more younger people are into vegetarian food in the health-alarmed city, this kind of modernized vegetarian restaurants have succeeded in finding a niche in a couple of years. They've change people's impression not just by their brighter interior design and packaging, but also the fact that it needs not to be greasy for veggie dishes to be tasty. Also introduced is a good variety of invented dishes beside "taro fish (again...)"
The cozy first-floor restaurant is good for around 1-6 people, I think. Their menu include dishes in the styles of various Chinese local cushions, and other lunch sets perfect for single entries. I had a nice Japanese lunch set, with rice green tea and soup (see pic), in only HK$32 (service charge included). I went there two times and it was not very busy. No reservation seems necessary. The only thing I would protest is the paper table-cloth... very unfriendly to trees.
A last reminder: almost all my friends and myself entered the rejuvenated fast-food chain store just facing the staircase opposite Veggie Xp's door by mistake before turning our faces. You know, from the menu, you may not discover the difference.
Creative Campus Channel
The publicity campaign of the new project of
HKICC has been launched this week. I like the "black" sense of the poster, which keeps a fair balance with the freshness attributed to the ample white space and objects in imaginative forms.
This is an earlier version of the poster (designed by
emergencylab) with the dripping cloud which was interpreted as bleeding by the majority of my colleagues. To avoid any association with violence, in the finalized version you can see on the
website, it's shedding drops of tear instead. Too bad my personal advisor vows he hates the site, which appears quite lovable to me. Guess why.
Faces: unknown yet familiar
Sets of works in different media are being showed at Zheng Bo's solo exhibition "
Face origami". The video series just next to the entrance enchants the audience at once - for its simple intention to record a couple of aged faces lit up by endearing memories.
Another series with homosexual lovers' voices in earphones talking about their counterparts, from their eyelashes to their characters, exhibits the same quality about human interactions, under the context of identity. The way the portraits of gay men and women are presented -1) facing the floor 2) lit with backlight and 3) some blurred or missing - first seem problematic to me, referring to the "indirect" sightline and difficulty to "see" them. However, I think, the genuine attitude of the artist has saved it from reinforcing the myth of such "invisibility".
"Face Origami" is a hearty and simple subject matter with clean presentation in a frank manner. Zheng is still studying at CUHK. It'a surprising fact I found out on site because the works possess some sensitivity which carries apparently maturer traits.
The image he uses for the publicity was simply created by scanning his own face. He is so sweet to warn people in the introduction not to follow his act for the potential hazard. Now I have certainly a good reason to go to the
graduation exhibition of the school this year.
Castle in your Coffee
When you love it enough, you will discover
art. Thanks, Florence. (Image from
Cafe de Roytawan)
German Art Books for free
Goethe-Institut Hong Kong is giving out their art books for stock clearance. Titles include:
- Remembering Fassbinder (GI-Hongkong)
- The Forbidden Films (DEFA)
- Animated Films (DEFA)
- Anti-fascist Films (DEFA)
- Cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany (Inter Nationes, Bonn)
- Early German Silent Films (GI-Munich)
- Nature and the Environment in Film and Television (GI-Munich)
- The German Experimental Film of the 1990s (GI-Munich)
- Reinhard Hauff: Skeptic or Optimist (GI-Munich)
- Bertolt Brecht beim Photographen (Affholderbach und Strohmann)
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Museum Wuerth)
- Dimensions of Design (Vitra Design Museum)
...
Stock clearance period:
May 11 - 20, 2005
Mon - Fri 10:30am - 7:30pm
Hong Kong Art: Ocean of the South
I won't argue if Wilson Shieh is "arguably the best young aritst in Hong Kong" as Grotto claims in their
introduction, but his art is undoubtedly unique (not just in Hong Kong), referring to the application of the traditional technique (meticulous brush) and medium, with his modern dolly figures, with which he has been playing for almost a decade. Among his
works, some seem exhibiting a stronger consciousness in exploring the chemistry/significance between his reincarnated "Chinese" presentation and his contents. It would be a pity if his adorable experiment becomes just a "collectable" signature without reflections... though I have no idea what it means exactly. What I look forward in his new solo show,
Nanyang-Ocean of the South, which opens tomorrow, includes also the surfacing "campness" that has been contributing much more "contemporariness" to his works rather than the subject matters, in a queer's eyes.
(Image from Grotto Fine Arts Ltd.)
World Aids Orphans Day
Just knew about the
World Aids Orphans Day which was yesterday.
"Every 15 seconds, AIDS kills a child’s mother or father...... In countries where HIV prevalence is highest, 15 to 20 percent of children under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents to the disease. The growing numbers of children orphaned or made vulnerable due to HIV/AIDS is one of the greatest humanitarian, social and economic crises we face today." - from Association Francois-Zavier Bagnoud
There is a nice
kids' platform to educate those luckier ones, though it sounds more promotional than educational.
Singapore Arts Festival
Globalisation of art festivals is not a new phenomenon. Names appearing in this year's Singapore Arts Festival (from 26 May), especially in the
theatre programmes, just affirm the trend.
Robert Lepage has staged three different pieces at Hong Kong Arts Festival in the last few years. I called him as "one of the most sophisticated theatre directors" after I watched
"The Other Side of the Moon" (2003, HK) that still fascinated me with stunning presentational ideas and visuals, after two other preceding successes. (Image from the SAF's website)
"Al-Hamlet Summit" by
Sulayman Al-Bassam (Kuwait) is a provocative adaptation of the classic in a politicized outfit. A clean and affective contemporary presentation. I watched the video recording only when I met the director in Tokyo Arts Festival back in 2002. It will be my second must-see if I were in Singapore... (image from
Zaoum)
Also, "Amber" by Meng Jing Hui (Beijing), with whom I had a few acquaintances and inspiring chats, finds its way towards internationalization after the show's premier in Hong Kong earlier. If I had watched the show, I might be able to elaborate some footnotes upon
International Herald's saying:
"Where even a few years ago it would have been difficult to imagine one of Meng's experimental plays being staged overseas, it is now increasingly easy to imagine his work in the vanguard as theater becomes one of China's next important exports."
Homework: Compare
this amber with
another and tell me what "globalisation of creativity" means.
