IHT: Hong Kong artists on the fringe

Contemporary gongbi artist Wilson Shieh Ka-ho with detail from "Architectural Group". Photo by Alexandra A. Seno




By Alexandra A. Seno
Tuesday, December 18, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/arts/seno.php

HONG KONG: As the global cultural community continues to show fascination with just about anything from contemporary Chinese artists and to pay high prices for their work, art from Hong Kong appears to be getting short shrift.

"Hong Kong has been left out of the story," observed David Clarke, an art historian and author of "Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization." A decade since the former British territory was returned to Chinese sovereignty, Hong Kong art seems to exist on the fringe.

In terms of the narratives found in its art, it is easy to see how the city fails to grab much attention. With its tiny apartments and relatively stable economic environment, creative statements by Hong Kong artists tend to be more intimate, more personal and intrinsically different from those of the mainland, where the scale is vast and the problems are huge.

"The mainland art market does not know much about Hong Kong artists, and the visual artists in Hong Kong seldom are involved in events on the mainland," said Jay Sun of China Guardian, a Beijing auction house.

According to Howard Bilton, chairman of the Sovereign Art Foundation, European and American collectors who primarily support contemporary Chinese art simply don't know what to make of Hong Kong's modest scene.

"People talk as if Chinese contemporary art only started now. Hong Kong and Taiwan are modern Chinese cities with modern Chinese art," said Clarke, who is also head of the University of Hong Kong art department. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the only places Chinese art could really thrive were in these two increasingly prosperous communities.

At a Christie's auction in Hong Kong in November, multimillion-dollar records were established for mainland artists, thanks to buyers from all over the world. However, a 1971 painting by the Hong Kong master Luis Chan, who died in 1995, went unsold. Also known as Chen Fushan, he painted whimsical and colorful scenes. Three of his paintings were sold for under $15,000 a piece, not much past the high end of the estimates but considered expensive even by Hong Kong fans.

"If you are a serious, knowledgeable collector, you will find Hong Kong art is very worthy because of the craftsmanship, originality and the current price. If you are a speculator, then you are going to buy with a different intention," said Henry Au-Yeung, founder of Grotto Fine Art, one of the few galleries in Hong Kong specializing in local works. Formerly with Sotheby's, he launched his gallery business in 2001 and was not expecting to make a profit for a decade. And he was surprised to have broken even in less than four years - with the help of a small but devoted group of affluent local art lovers.

Au-Yeung estimates that, of the 45 artists he represents, including big names like Wucius Wong, only 10 percent can make a living from their works. Some like Warren Leung Chi-wo, who has shown at the Venice Biennale, teach; others have commercial careers - the avant-garde photographer William Lim has a successful architectural practice.

"Most of them have day jobs," Clark said. "There is a private side to Hong Kong art."

Wilson Shieh Ka-ho, the best-selling Hong Kong painter under 40 and a rare full-time artist, said: "Painting for me is like a diary. The first audience is myself." Known for his ink-on-silks, collectors love him for the Hong Kong personality and delicate details of his art. Shieh sold almost everything before his show at Grotto opened in October.

Shieh, 36, works in the traditional Chinese gongbi style, an ancient method of ornate fine-brush painting that requires high technical ability. Instead of typical subjects like birds, flowers and pretty landscapes, he renders subjects from daily life.

Among the 15 works for his October show was "Architectural Group," depicting the city's skyscrapers as women. In a corner, he included a little figure dressed as the Star Ferry terminal, its clock tower represented as a hat akilter, a tribute to the Hong Kong landmark that was demolished a few months ago.

"The discussion about heritage has been pushed by artists. In Hong Kong, art has the potential to bring out critical thinking," said Tobias Berger, director of Para/Site, an alternative exhibition space and a champion of the contemporary art scene. This question of identity has become a powerful theme in Hong Kong art.

The city's Schoeni Art Gallery, which specializes in works by mainlanders, gave its first show for a Hong Kong painter in May. He is Mok Wai-hong, a 30-year-old who studies at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts. Mok has produced several paintings about Hong Kong protests, such as the clashes that occurred during the World Trade Organization meeting in December 2005 and those during the pro-democracy march on July 1, 2003.

While she was very pleased with the critical acclaim of the exhibit, Nicole Schoeni conceded that she was disappointed with how hard it was to convince patrons to buy his work. "Because he's a Hong Kong artist. Probably, if he was a mainlander, on the same topic it would have been easier because it would be 'more controversial,' " she said, making quote marks in the air with her fingers.

But, as Clark said, "There are many ways of being Chinese and Hong Kong is one of them."

International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2007 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Newsweek: The Self In ‘Silhouette’

After a health scare, exiled Chinese artist Gao Xingjian returns to the public eye with new works.
By Alexandra A. Seno
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 12:40 PM ET Dec 15, 2007

Gao Xingjian comes from a centuries-old tradition of multitasking. The author of the novel "Soul Mountain" may be best known as the controversial winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000—the first time the prize was ever awarded to a Chinese writer. But he is also a successful painter, poet and playwright. His works have often been about the dignity of the individual, a motif that has earned him international respect as an artist and much personal suffering in a land that has long glorified the collective.

Gao channels all his various skills and favorite themes into "Silhouette Sinon l'Ombre" ("Silhouette/Shadow"), a film finished last year but unlikely ever to be widely screened. "Silhouette/Shadow" has no conventional plot but traces Gao's personal journey toward the metaphysical. It shows him, in almost a Taoist trance, working with brush and ink wash on large pieces of paper. The artist walks in and out of the camera's viewfinder but barely speaks throughout the 90-minute movie. It's a study of visual textures, weaving dreamlike sequences with documentary footage, going back and forth between color and the black-and-white his paintings are known for. Last month he released a book of the same title to make his masterwork a little more accessible, expounding on the film with essays, still photographs and poems. "He always felt this might be one of his last projects," says Fiona Sze Lorrain, Gao's friend and the book's editor.

Indeed, a narrow brush with mortality prompted the new work. Since 2003— declared "The Year of Gao Xingjian" by the French city of Marseille, where he has been a citizen since 1998—Gao, 67, has undergone two heart surgeries. His illness sharply curtailed his writing but inspired this small, self-funded work. Now, with the verve of one given another chance at life, a healthier Gao has been engaging the public once again. Earlier this year, he appeared in Germany for an exhibit of his paintings. In September he traveled to the United States for an academic convention on his work. Last month he made his first trip to Singapore in almost two decades to donate a painting to a museum. Next year Hong Kong will host a major festival in his honor; Gao will preside over a forum at a public library, at least one gallery is preparing a show, his plays will be performed and his film will be screened for art-house crowds.

Early on, Gao's uncompromising devotion to his craft turned him into one of China's most provocative artists. As an intellectual, he was sent to the countryside for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution. When he returned, he made a name for himself with modern, experimental dramas inspired by Brecht and Beckett. He was banned after authorities deemed his 1983 play "Bus Stop" critical of the government. Misdiagnosed with lung cancer and hearing rumors that he was gong to be sent to a labor camp, he began a walk along the Yangtze River that lasted almost a year; the journey became "Soul Mountain," the novel that led to the Nobel. In 1989, as an asylum seeker in France, Gao angered Beijing by writing a play condemning the brutal handling of the Tiananmen Square student protests. In his early years as an exile in Paris, he made ends meet by selling his paintings.

Despite his claims to be apolitical, Gao's relationship with China remains fragile. "Intellectuals know him quite well," says Chinese University of Hong Kong's Gilbert Fong Chee-fun, an organizer of the Gao festival and an expert on his work. "[But] the common people in China have never heard of his name. His books and plays are still banned, and his name is not allowed to be mentioned in the media."

Other artists who left China in the 1980s have returned. They hold American or European passports but spend months each year in China, where the "cultural industries," as the government calls the arts, are flourishing. But it's not an option for Gao. "He does not have any desire to go back," says Lorrain. "There is too much baggage." Still, Fong insists that Gao's "Silhouette" makes a statement the government can't ignore. "He did the film because if you say something, you exist," he says. Even if you say it primarily through cryptic images.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/78118

© Newsweek Mag

IHT: Cantopop -- Lauding Hong Kong's homegrown music

By Alexandra A. Seno
Wednesday, November 21, 2007

HONG KONG: Beyond the carefully styled public personas of Hong Kong's major singing idols, under the smoke machine effects and the glittering concert outfits, behind the catchy melodies and sugary lyrics, the heart of modern Hong Kong beats steadily in Cantonese-language pop music.

"Cantopop is indispensable in our lives. It plays a part in the formation of Hong Kong's identity and culture," said Professor Clement So York-kee in a speech at the opening of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum show "Riding a Melodic Tide." So, the head of the Chinese University of Hong Kong's School of Journalism and Communication, helped organize the exhibition, which opened on Nov. 11 and runs until Aug. 4, four days before the Beijing Olympics begin.

The ambitious exhibition, a year and a half in the making, occupies an entire top-floor wing of the museum in Shatin, a middle class suburb. Despite Cantopop's domination of the Chinese entertainment world for more than three decades, "Riding a Melodic Tide" marks the first time the city has honored the industry in this way. It documents the development of one of Asia's most commercially successful music industries, focusing on the "Golden Age" of the 1970s and 1980s.

Tunes matched Western pop melodies, with ancient Chinese poetry or plain-spoken Cantonese language, and icons of the period like Roman Tam Pak-sin and Sam Hui Koon-kit - both well-represented in the exhibit - spoke to a generation who for the first time took pride in being modern, prosperous Chinese. They were the children of people who left China after the Communist victory in 1949 or recent immigrants from the mainland who had fled in the early 1970s, the last difficult years of Mao Zedong's rule.

Tam's "Beneath the Lion Rock," the theme song of a TV soap opera that began in 1974, became Hong Kong's unofficial anthem with lyrics like: "Hand in hand to the ends of the earth/ Rough terrain no respite/ Side by side we overcome ills/ As the Hong Kong story we write."

Terence Ng Tak-cheong, the museum's assistant curator and a key member of the team that assembled the exhibition, said that "at the time, Hong Kong enjoyed an economic boom and a relatively stable political environment." While its Asian neighbors were recovering from recent wars and revolutions, the British territory thrived and so did its pop music. "There started to be a local identity and the music played a part in creating that," said Angelina Law Yuen-fai of the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong.

The exhibition faithfully tells the overall story. There are facts and figures in English and Chinese, rare music and video samples as well as hundreds of objects: costumes, fan kitsch, posters, pictures, hand-written music scores. There is even a special corner that pays tribute to Teresa Teng Li-chun, the Taiwanese singer known for "The Moon Represents My Heart" and "Tian Mi Mi," some of the best-known Chinese pop songs of all time. Though she became famous for recording in Mandarin, in the mid-1980s Teng decamped to Hong Kong, where she bought a house and carved out a Cantopop career, a recognition of the industry's premier position in Chinese entertainment.

"Riding a Melodic Tide" has plenty of things from Tam's estate. His sisters donated 3,000 items to the museum after he died in 2002. However, save some reproduced photographs, there isn't enough from Joseph Koo (also known as Gu Gaa-fai) and James Wong, the "Lion Rock" composers who were pivotal to the success of the industry. Also noticeably absent are important memorabilia from Anita Mui Yim-fong and Leslie Cheung Kok-wing, two 1980s greats. Their deaths in recent years were perceived to mark the passing of an era. And aside from a few images and posters, what about "The Four Heavenly Kings?" The biggest individual acts of the 1990s remain masters of the Chinese pop music universe.

What makes Cantopop like no other genre is extreme showmanship, something that doesn't quite come across clearly in the exhibition. The Hong Kong industry took the Japanese pop sensibility and unapologetically amplified it. More than the singing and music, Cantopop concert audiences want their money's worth with dancing, lasers, mini-plays and outfits.

There are hints of Cantostyle in Hui's suits, created from typical Hong Kong red, white and blue plastic carrier bags emblazoned with a bauhinia flower, the city's symbol. Tam's classic performance-wear includes a fur-trimmed, hand-beaded and mirrored jacket with matching black lace-and-sequins trousers, and another glittery outfit worn with a cape of peacock feathers.

Cantopop got its start when the Shanghai entertainment industry was forced to move to Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist victory on the mainland. Mandarin, spoken by China's educated classes, became the language of choice for quality films and songs. Meanwhile, music in Cantonese, the dialect of Southern China's Guangdong Province and the mother tongue of most Hong Kongers, languished as low-class fodder with an export market targeted at homesick Chinese laborers and household help in Southeast Asia.

The status of Cantonese songs, until then primarily traditional ditties and Chinese operas, was rewritten in the 1970s when Hong Kong went from business backwater to powerhouse. Joseph Koo, then the music maestro at one of the local TV stations, took what was then a radical move by using Cantonese lyrics instead of the usual Mandarin for the theme song of "Fatal Irony," a 1973 drama series starring a young Chow Yun-fat. It was a hit. By 1976, when decent young Chinese men in the British colony only played Western music, Sam Hui, a good-looking graduate of Hong Kong University, ditched his Elvis Presley repertoire and English-language covers to sing "The Private Eyes" in Cantonese. Suddenly, crooning in the local Chinese dialect was cool.

For everything that Cantopop stands for, the Hong Kong music business now appears destined to follow the familiar melancholy narratives of the ephemeral loves enshrined in its songs. Cantopop is having to move on. Walking through the cases full of memorabilia at the Shatin exhibit, Ng, the curator, stopped to declare in a theatrical whisper, hands cupped around his mouth: "The market changed."

A decade ago, tastes changed thanks to greater exposure to Western pop culture. As demand from Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan shrank, music piracy spread. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry estimates annual Hong Kong Music sales to have plunged from 1.7 billion Hong Kong dollars ($217.8 million) in 1997 to 560 million Hong Kong dollars ($71.8 million) in 2006.

The economic pressures have led to an over-dependence on big stars and a small group of proven lyricists and composers.

The future for Cantopop singers (home market: 7 million) hinges on its mastery of Mandopop, the business of entertaining the 1.4 billion Chinese who speak Mandarin. In the past decade and a half, more Hong Kong singers have warbled in Mandarin or recorded translations of Cantonese songs for the mainland market.

As the weather has cooled and new wealth continues to rise in China, Cantopop concert season is in full swing and the Heavenly Kings have hit the road. Jacky Cheung Hok-yau plays Shanghai in December. Andy Lau Tak-wah's "Wonderful World" tour hits Hong Kong at the end of the year. He kicked off the series two months ago in Inner Mongolia - one of dozens of concert venues in mainland China.

International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2007 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

IHT: Imagining Red Guards in China today

By Alexandra A. Seno
Friday, November 9, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/09/arts/seno.php


HONG KONG: Shaking her head gently, more in wonder than in dispute, Jiang Shuo says: "Unbelievable!" It is her response to various questions about her homeland's current economic prosperity or the international interest in the culture of today's China and the record prices being paid at auction for contemporary Chinese art.

Jiang, a respected Chinese sculptor - and one of the very few women in the field to achieve such success - has a unique perspective on these issues. She creates in bronze robot-like figures representing the Red Guards, Mao Zedong's young army that powered the Cultural Revolution.

"This is my generation," Jiang said in an interview here. "We were students and we listened to Chairman Mao. We were against culture, against tradition, against capitalism. But now, look, who are the leaders? Who are running the companies? My work is about this irony." Her latest pieces, recently the subject of her third one-woman show at the city's Plum Blossoms Gallery, continue to explore the Red Guards theme for which she became famous in the mid-1990s.

Zhao Meng, a sculptor who is also vice-dean of the Academy of Art at Beijing's Tsinghua University, contributed an essay to a book published to coincide with the exhibition. He notes Jiang's use of her signature Red Guard figures. They pose alongside the stuff that has replaced Mao and the Little Red Book at the center of urban Chinese aspirations today: karaoke, McDonalds, becoming rich, the pursuit of the good life. "The sardonic take on history presented by these works is but a part of the greater joke that history plays on mankind, and as such contain within themselves a much deeper meaning," Zhao writes. "Just as the Red Guards in their day contributed to the writing of history, so the living generation remains actively involved in the creation of the present."

In Jiang's latest works, Red Guards appear to cruise jauntily, as if on skateboards, atop flashy new automobiles, Little Red Book in one hand, money in the other. In a 76-centimeter, or 2 ½-foot, high piece called "Wu Fu Lin Men" that she created with her husband and sometime collaborator Wu Shaoxiang, five figures frolic on a laughing Buddha who shares Mao's distinctive hairstyle.

She also goes back to traditional symbols. She has Red Guards balance on sleeping cat figures, a nod to a popular animal in folk art. And in typical Chinese style, she engages in a little word play. Though the written characters are different, the word for cat (mao) can sound a lot like Mao.

Jiang was born in 1958 in Beijing. Her skill as an artist earned her admission to the elite Central Academy of Arts and Design, where she apprenticed under Zheng Ke. As a student, she designed film award trophies and public monuments for the government, considered highly coveted commissions. After graduation in 1985, she became a lecturer at the school, an affirmation of her talent.

In 1989, the year of the Tiananmen crackdown, Jiang won a scholarship to a university in Austria. Like so many of China's finest artists around that period, she moved her young family with her - by then, she and Wu had a 3-year-old son - and started from scratch.

"It was tough. I left my parents behind in Beijing," she said. She recalled how she and her family got by speaking English the first few years while learning German and settling into their new life. She joined shows when she could, gaining the interest of some European collectors and slowly building a reputation. By 1991, Austrian organizations were asking her to design awards and sculptures, and she was selling through galleries.

Her family gained Austrian citizenship in 1993. She visited China over the years to see her mother and father and slowly witnessed the changes taking place. In the mid-'90s, an English collector suggested that she try to sell her works in Hong Kong. Since then, the former British territory has been a key market for her works. Her 2.6-meter, or 8.5-foot, tall sculpture, "Going Forward! Making Money!" adorns the lobby of the Langham Palace Hotel.

After nearly a decade and a half of primarily filial visits, Jiang and Wu last year opened a 600-square-meter, or about 6,500-square-foot, studio in Beijing, where they plan to spend half their time. "All my ideas, my inspiration comes from China, so I need to be there," she said.

On the place of art in China now, she said: "Art is no longer like before. Art is now part of economic development." Jiang's smaller works, about 20 centimeters in height, sell for just over 55,000 Hong Kong dollars, about $7,100. Bigger ones, like "Wu Fu Lin Men," sell for 510,000 Hong Kong dollars. In September, a Singaporean collector sold a 166.7-centimeter karaoke piece from 2004 at a Sotheby's New York auction for $67,000, more than two and a half times the estimate.

"The insights that Jiang Shuo can provide lies in the fact that she experienced both the trials and tribulations of the past as well as the current era of prosperity and economic growth," Zhou wrote in his essay. "Besides embodying the huge transformations that China is currently undergoing, Jiang Shuo's works illustrate the rational and intelligent advances made by the present generation."

Jiang's son is now in his 20s and attends university in Germany. He has spent most of his life in Europe, which he considers home. Sometimes he visits China with his parents, because "he likes to eat Chinese food," his mother said with unmistakable pride. Her face also lit up as she talked about how he is working toward a degree in "mathematics and informatics," maybe culminating in a doctorate. What about art for the child of two sculptors? "No, no. The artist's life is very hard," she said, smiling wistfully.

International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2007 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com