Street Stories Khin Zaw Latt
 
Artist Reception : Tuesday 21st May 2013 - 5.30 to 9.00pm
 
Exhibition dates : 21st May - 22nd June 2013 1
0.30am to 6.30pm Monday to Saturday
Venue: Asia Fine Art gallery
 
Khin Zaw Latt, the rising star of Burmese art, who was recently rated one of the top five sian artists opens an exhibition in Hong Kong on 21st May inspired by the streets of Mandalay.
 
Now in his early thirties, his work is attracting the attention of serious collectors of modern Burmese art worldwide. Interest increased steadily since his enormously successful Buddha and Moving Forward painting series.
 
His current work reflects the social and environmental changes, which affect the outlook of city people as Myanmar leaps into the 21st century. As with any developing country, urbanization bears the brunt of social change, but is the young who have to make the biggest changes – hence his street children series.
 
When recently asked about the children, he explains - “It is about the street children who have never had the chance to go to school. I saw so many street children during my last trip to Mandalay. I talked with them, got to know about their difficult lives. Some of them have shining eyes even though they are begging on the street - I keep thinking about their future. What is going to happen to them next...”
 
Khin Zaw Latt, a graduate of Yangon's University of Culture majoring in oil painting. He won the Myanmar Contemporary Art Award in 2008, was a finalist in the 2009 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and won the first Myanmar National Portrait Award in 2011. Since then, he has regularly exhibited overseas.
 
KZL has deep reserves of raw artistic talent and the desire to search for and create new themes and illustrate new subjects. The plight of less fortunate young people is something which really disturbs the artist. He is involved with one of the many orphanages which care for children, who have been left alone due to cyclone Nargis or the conflict in the north of Myanmar.
 
For more information and more visuals, please contact :
 
Sidney Cowell or Catherine Lam
Tel : (852) 2522-0405 Email : art@asia-fineart.com Website: www.asia-fineart.com <www.asia-fineart.com>
Ground Floor, 14 Sik On Street, 99 – 101 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Nature of Speed
23 May – 22 June 2013
Opening: Thursday, 23 May 2013, 6 - 9 pm
 
Gallery EXIT 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street,
Tin Wan, Aberdeen, Hong Kong
 
Hours: Tue - Sat, 1100 - 1800
 
Participating artists:
David Adamo
Alfred Boman
Lin Xue
Ni Youyu
Christopher Orr
Alexander Ruthner
Tsang Chui Mei
Xie Zhengli
Xue Feng
Yang Xinguang
 
Nature of Speed is a group exhibition co-organised by London gallery Ibid. and Gallery
EXIT. Paintings, anchored by sculptures that explore the natural media, will present a
hyperbolised view of our contemporary environment as we are engulfed by the madness
that ensues.
 
At the centre of the exhibition is a series of cedar wood beam works by David Adamo. In
an almost performative process, the artist gouges and chops into the raw material,
revealing the structures of pillars, plinths or totems. Adamo explores sculpture’s narrative
possibilities, and the act of making as staged and choreographed activity is a constant
theme throughout his works.
 
The surrounding canvases present a world of accelerated change and offers
interpretations from the exhilarating to the outright eerie. Xue Feng’s paintings are a riot of
flamboyant strokes depicting the vibrancy of Spring. His works shows in a rich manner our
contemporary mindset towards nature and its politics of artificiality, framed in an
articulated vocabulary of both Chinese and western painting traditions.
 
Alexander Ruthner will be in Hong Kong and will be available for interview. For images
and more information, please email info@galleryexit.com or call +852 2541 1299.
Alfred BOMAN, Untitled, 2013, acrylic,
glue emulsion, enamel varnish and
spray paint on canvas, 197 x 131.5 cm
Image courtesy of the Artist and
Ibid. London
 
《瘋景》
2013 年5 月23 日至6 月22 日
開幕酒會： 2013 年5 月23 日
(星期四) 下午6 時至9 時
 
地點： Gallery EXIT 香港香港仔田灣
興和街25 號大生工業大廈3 樓
 
辦公時間： 星期二至六 1100 - 1800
 
參展藝術家包括：
David Adamo
Alfred Boman
林穴
倪有魚
Christopher Orr
Alexander Ruthner
曾翠薇
謝正莉
薛峰
楊心廣
 
《瘋景》是由倫敦Ibid. 和香港Gallery EXIT 安全口畫廊合辦的群展。畫作和一批探究天然
物料的雕塑將會引領大家用一種極緩慢的眼光去觀看瘋狂大自然如何快速地吞滅我們。
 
在展覽的中央是David Adamo 的香柏木作品。出自表演的表達角度，藝術家把原始的物
料挖掉和剁碎，從而顯出棟梁、圖騰和柱基的結構。Adamo 探討利用雕塑去敘述的可能性，
再者，如同經過編排和富表演性的創作過程更是作者重複探討的主題。
 
四周的畫作呈現著高速變化的自然世界，使人有愉快和奇異怪誕的感覺；那些薛峰奇幻、
充滿瑰麗色彩的油畫展現春光的燦爛。在中西畫傳統的詞匯框架下，薛氏以誇大的手法展
示了當代人類對於大自然以至其人工制造政治的思維。
 
Alexander Ruthner 將會訪港和接受各傳媒訪問。
查詢資料及圖片請電郵至info@galleryexit.com 或致電 +852 2541 1299。

SITE/CAMBODIA presents five contemporary Cambodian artists for whom ‘site’ is integral to their practice. Mao Soviet, Anida Yoeu Ali, Kim Hak, Sera and Srey Bandaul navigate sites of change, displacement, melancholy, identity and spirituality, which speak to a Cambodia in transition.
 
Space and memory of space are themes that transverse the art we present by Cambodian artists who grew up in the country and those who have returned from the Diaspora carrying their memories of war and genocide which are transposed on to new realities. Also of importance is the identification of new spaces existing somewhere in-between, transnational, as Cambodia begins to profit from entering the global market.
 
The Cambodia of today is not what it will be tomorrow or was yesterday. The soundtrack of the urban centers is a cacophony of building noise. Sometimes it is only at lunch, when tools are put down, in this small reprieve, we realize how constant is the change. The landscape is evolving, big buildings, mansions and industrial expansion, boutique coffee shops for the emerging middle class and expat stalwart.
 
Sometimes invisible is the displacement of people amidst this change. People and communities - evicted, moved sometimes forcibly to sites further outside the city. What remains temporarily is the evidence of these large communities in debris from their homes. A testament to their existence. An archive. It is this that is found in Battambang-based artist Mao Soviet’s work The Black Wood. Using abandoned objects from the sites of eviction his work brings into plain view the narrative of those displaced in the new Cambodia.
 
In Daun Penh Kim Hak speaks directly to a more-known story of displacement, the eviction of over 2 million Cambodians from the capital city, Phnom Penh, by the Khmer Rouge, which began on the 17th of April 1975 and resulted in genocide. Photographing Phnom Penh in the moody rain from the back of a tuk-tuk creating a cinematic letterboxing composition, Hak is actually referencing the black fabric that was used to cover the victim’s eyes before they were executed. In a poetic call and response for this exhibition, Hak’s video calls for “the return home” of those who departed to 3rd countries like America, Australia and France.
This call is heard by Khmer-American artist Anida Yoeu Ali who now lives and works in Phnom Penh. Growing up as a Khmer Muslim in Chicago she is drawn to explore her transnational identity between two sites, locating herself inside/outside both in the literal and societal spaces of her landscape performances. “I am constantly navigating a kind of insider/outsider perspective, often switching between the two depending on the situation.” Says Ali.
 
Sera turns to look at site from a perspective of loss. His paintings capture iconically Cambodian landscapes, such as Angkorian temples, stupas and even the traditional form of dance with a certain melancholia. Born in 1961, Sera left Cambodia for France as the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh. His early chaotic memories characterize his frenetic style.
 
Artist Srey Bandaul looks inward seeing the body as a metaphorical site of tension. Creating intestinal forms he speaks to the cycle of life whereby the psychological and laws of cause and effect meet. Using fabrics synonymous with daily life and the protection of the body, the kroma, the sarong and mosquito netting, he locates this tension in the local communal consciousness, as well as more broadly within South Asia. He creates a critical dialogue about the politic of the local and the global. The digestion of the ‘outside’ or global influences into the main body creates visible ruptures in the intestinal form.
 
Reflecting on a global instability, like the economic crisis of 2009 and the growing reliance on foreign investment and cultural commodities, Srey asks, “How can we protect the people, how can they be independent?”
 
Cambodia as a site is loaded with contestation of space, layered in memory and the ‘now’, personalized, communal and in transit.
 
Using ‘site’ we bring space and memory together with visions and responses from local artists and returning Diaspora. This exhibition makes connections in site, the personalized and public. What sites can be owned, shared, celebrated, connected to body and its life cycle, psychology and environment and what sites are prohibited to speak about.

[05 April, 2013, HONG KONG] – Subjective Truth, Contemporary Art from Thailand is a special project curated by Southeast Asia specialist Iola Lenzi, presenting artists Sutee Kunavichayanont, Tawatchai Puntusawasdi, Michael Shaowanasai, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit and Prapat Jiwarangsan. The exhibition is part of the exciting program line-up of 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, which coincides with its participation in the first edition of ART BASEL HONG KONG. The exhibition will run from 20 May to 20 July at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Central.
 
Contemporary Thailand has never been more polarized. The country embodies paradox: for outsiders it represents all that is serenely Buddhist. But from inside, it is perceived by many Thais as politically, socially and even spiritually dysfunctional. Bangkok, the City of Angels, is simultaneously booming and burning, affluent Thais partying in the capital’s sky-scraping night-clubs, while Red and Yellow shirts clash on the streets below. Social media speak for the nation, fiction and reality tangled into one on facebook, streams of contradictory truths disseminated via twitter. In Subjective Truth, curated for 10 Chancery Lane Gallery by Southeast Asia specialist Iola Lenzi, six Thai artists grapple with their version of today’s Thailand.
 
ARTISTS IN THE SHOW -
Prapat Jiwarangsan (b. 1979 ) Born in Bangkok, Prapat Jiwarangsan is a multi-media artist and film-maker who graduated in 2011 with a Masters in Fine Art from The Royal College of Art, London. Taking a particular interest in history, politics and nationalism, Prapat’s recent work examines the Thai monarchy and its critical place as one of the country’s most revered but also culturally and politically problematic institutions. Prapat has exhibited in London and Thailand, his work recently featured at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in the group exhibition ‘Politics of Me’. Prapat currently works and lives in Chiangmai, Thailand.
 
Sutee Kunavichayanont (b. 1965) Sutee Kunavichayanont was born in Bangkok, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Silpakorn University in 1989, and later obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney. Sutee’s practice is noted for its layered conceptual approach as much as for its ability to engage a wide audience through participatory strategies, his desk installation History Class of 2000, and his inflated latex series, two of the Southeast Asian contemporary canon’s most famous and well-loved pieces. Thematically, his work reflects the rapid social, economic and political changes that have affected Thailand since the 1990s, the artist using his art to critically probe nationalism, power, identity, history and cultural convention in Thailand and beyond. Producing pieces in a wide variety of media, the artist mines familiar formal languages to engage the viewer in a playful examination of complex questions. Since 1986, the artist has exhibited widely in Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States. Sutee’s art is in major institutional collections including the Mori Art Museum, The Queensland Art Gallery, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, and KOC Foundation, Istanbul. As well as making art, Sutee is a curator and a lecturer at Silpakorn University. The artist works and lives in Bangkok.
 
Tawatchai Puntusawasdi (b. 1971) Tawatchai Puntusawasdi produces architectural three-dimensional sculpture in hard-wood, slate, organic fibres, and metal. In his Tilted series, ongoing since 2002, the artist plays with perception to challenge audiences’ understanding of volume and space, so prodding us to consider philosophical and spiritual questions. A student of the seminal Thai artist Montien Boonma (1953-2000), Tawatchai marshals formal elegance and grandiose scale to produce works that if cerebral, are always underpinned by pure visual seduction. Tawatchai has shown at the Venice and Sydney Biennales and has twice been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
 
Michael Shaowanasai (b. 1964) Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Michael Shaowanasai is one of Thailand’s most socially and culturally engaged artists. He works across a broad spectrum of media including performance, photography, video, film, painting, and installation. Known for his iconic cross-dressing monk Portrait of a man in habits, Michael is a versatile artist whose conceptual pieces, often text-based, are effective for their aesthetic brio and formal command. With degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), and living alternately in the United States and Thailand, Michael bridges cultures producing works that if couched in today’s Thailand, effortlessly communicate humanistic ideas to a global audience. Shaowanasai has been exhibited in Asia, Europe (Venice Biennale 2003), Australia and North America and his film and video works include The Adventure of Iron Pussy (2003), which was screened at Tokyo International Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Melbourne International Film Festival, among others. Michael Shaowanasai is represented in several institutional collections including the Singapore Art Museum.
 
Manit Sriwanichpoom (b. 1961) Manit Sriwanichpoom is one of Thailand’s leading photographic artists, as well as one of Southeast Asia’s most internationally exhibited. He is best known for his still-ongoing Pink Man series, begun in post-Asian Crisis Thailand of the late 1990s. Operating as an ironic and sometimes pathos-injected critique of consumer culture in Thailand and wider Asia, Pink Man probes Thailand’s social concerns and erased histories of recent decades. Other series, including the iconic black and white Waiting for the King (Standing & Sitting) of 2006, provide a critical examination of Thai national institutions. Manit is particularly interested in Thai history and his country’s political development of the last few decades. Appropriating others’ images as well as using his own photographs as documents, Manit has created an original body of work that reveals Thailand in all her contemporary socio-political complexity. Manit has participated in a number of prominent international exhibitions including ‘Cities on the Move’ and the 2003 Venice Biennale. He is the 2007 recipient of Japan’s prestigious Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award. Manit is represented in the Singapore Art Museum, The Queensland Art Gallery, and the KOC Foundation, Istanbul, among others. He lives and works in Bangkok.
 
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (b. 1984) is a Bangkok-based film-maker whose shorts examine themes of inclusion/ exclusion, alienation, and choice to illuminate the complexity of today’s Thailand. Sensitively shot, their protagonists’ narratives poetically framed against Thailand’s contemporary socio-political reality, Nawapol’s cinematographic essays have been included in international festivals in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. His feature film 36 won the New Currents Award at the 2012 Busan International Film Festival.
 
Press enquiry or to schedule interviews please contact Geraldine Cosnuau on +852 28100065 or geraldine@10chancerylanegallery.com
 
ABOUT THE CURATOR -
Iola Lenzi is a Singapore-based lecturer, critic, and researcher of contemporary Southeast Asian art. She takes a synthetic view of regional practice, her numerous exhibitions throughout Southeast Asia examining Southeast Asia’s social, cultural, and political landscape of recent decades. She is a lecturer in the Asian Art Histories MA programme of Singapore’s Lasalle-Goldsmiths College of the Arts, a contributor to international art journals and anthologies, and a regular participant in symposia on Asian art and culture. She is the author of Museums of Southeast Asia (Thames & Hudson 2005) and a regional correspondent for Asian Art, London.
 
ABOUT 10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY
Since 2001, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery explores both emerging and historically important movements in art in the Asia Pacific. Working with curators and having a strong curatorial team in house, the gallery aims to bring exhibitions that take time, research and have impact on the arts in the region with an international approach to travel exhibitions. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is committed to play a major role in documenting the development of art within the Asia pacific region by holding more survey exhibitions by country or theme of both emerging and mid-career artists, talks, forums and publishing books that bring together the individual historical context with the arts development within Asia. The gallery focuses on Asia however keeps its eye on international opportunities from the world bringing the need for international cultural appreciation to Hong Kong.
 
_
 
SUBJECTIVE TRUTH
Contemporary Art from Thailand
 
Prapat Jiwarangsan
Sutee Kunavichayanont
Tawatchai Puntusawasdi
Manit Sriwanichpoom
Michael Shaowanasai
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
 
Curated by Iola Lenzi
 
OPENING RECEPTION MAY 20
Exhibition runs until JULY 20, ,2013
 
SELECTED WORKS WILL BE SHOWN AT ART BASEL HONG KONG 2013
 
10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Central, Hong Kong
 
G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, SoHo, Central, Hong Kong
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm
+852 2810 0065

Pékin Fine Arts is proud to present Lover and Artist, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of work by Beijing-based artist Fang Lu (b. 1981, Guangzhou). The exhibition continues Fang’s collaboration with the gallery following her participation in last year’s Wong Chuk Hang Roof Video Party, a group exhibit of 16 video artists’ works curated by Carol Yinghua Lu. As the title suggests, Fang’s latest exhibition explores the surprising symmetries that exist between an individual possessed by amorous feelings and a person compelled by creative impulses.
 
Fang’s three-part multi-media installation at Pékin Fine Arts in Wong Chuk Hang includes two related video works and a new, text-based LED installation. In Automatic Happening (dual-channel video, 29’, 2010) the main character stands in a half-empty space holding an array of random objects, busying herself by assigning strange tasks to each item. She drifts from food preparation to object decorating, all to no obvious end or purpose. She works incessantly, without finishing anything, her face hidden behind the pink motorcycle helmet that protects her against risk of injury from household work. As the critic and curator Chen Tong observes, “This work does not intend to ridicule the tedious nature of housework, but attempts to blur the limits between the act of representation (artistic labor) and what is being represented (housework). Therefore the pointlessness of the action becomes the consciousness of the artist.” (Home, or Studio? Chen Tong) In Lovers Are Artists II (single channel video, 11’50”, 2012) the scene shifts to another moment in a similar space. Wearing an off-white dress, the main character has become a woman (and artist) in love. Alone, she keeps herself busy by painting and incorporating food-related materials into her art. About this persona, Fang Lu writes: “Is she a builder or a destroyer? There is no clearly defined role for her.” Continuing her exploration of this character’s interior world, Fang’s new LED installation On the Sea (2013) transforms fragments from the artist’s novel into an LED light display.
 
“In a pragmatic world like ours, anyone who allows him- or herself to fall in love is adventurous, since entering such a state means to be consumed, confused and isolated,” Fang Lu states. “This is not unlike the artist’s experience as he/she works alone in the studio. The imaginary character of ‘lover’ and the persona of ‘artist’ co-exist via absurd actions invented in my videos, so that they can interact creatively, sharing the same physical space, building experience from premeditated ‘accidents’ that happen in a lovers’ space that is also called the artist’s studio.”
 
As M+ Curator and critic Pauline Yao writes: “This crafty layering of improvisation, performance and documentation lends Fang’s practice overlapping qualities that neither can be nor wish to be fully resolved. In this context we can only continually witness the ways in which the body is a conduit for movement and gesture, and how the camera works as a tool of interpretation—recording, revealing, showing what we know but at the same time subsuming it within the murky sea of our surrounding reality.” (Fang Lu – Between the Staged and the Unstaged, Pauline Yao).
 
Fang Lu (b. 1981, Guangzhou) received her MFA from the New Genres department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Space Station, Beijing (2010) and the Borges Libreria Institute of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou (2011). Recent group exhibitions include ON/OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013), Art is Not a System, Not a World: the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012) and the 1st CAFAM Future Exhibition, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2012).

NOT VITAL: Landscapes
22 May– 10 August 2013
Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong, is pleased to present NOT VITAL: Landscapes, an exhibition of the Swiss-born artist’s most recent sculptures, primarily created in China. This is the first time Vital’s works will be shown in depth in Hong Kong. Landscapes will run concurrently with the exhibition FRANK AUERBACH: Portraits at the gallery, both opening during Art Basel Hong Kong.
The exhibition presents three major bodies of sculptural work by the artist: the ‘Lotus’, ‘Cow Dung’ and ‘Dali marble’ sculptural-relief series. Since 2007, Vital has been creating sculptural iterations of the lotus, a tropical flower revered throughout history for its divine beauty and symbolic potency, referenced in Greek mythology, ancient Hinduism and Buddhism. Vital has monumentalized the form in reflective stainless steel, creating unique hand-chased lotus flowers that lean against walls or stand freely outdoors. This surreal distortion is a common trope for the artist, who presents organic forms using unexpected and incongruous materials, instilling the works and the objects they represent with new meaning. The exhibition will bring together three new ‘Lotus’ works, each over 3 metres tall.
Vital leads a nomadic existence, living and working throughout the year between Brazil, Chile, China, Niger and Switzerland. Wherever he resides, he aims to build a deep connection with the land and the people. During a visit to Nepal in 1990, Vital was approached by a man whose son had suffered burns by getting too close to a fire, which is typically made by burning cow dung as wood is too scarce there. Vital brought the boy to a hospital and there befriended a doctor who informed him that many of the children in the hospital suffered burns for the same reason and that the hospital desperately needed a burn unit. Moved by this encounter, Vital left Nepal inspired to help, which resulted in his ‘Cow Dung’ project. He began casting 1000 unique pieces of cow dung in bronze and donated the proceeds to build the burn unit at the Nepalese hospital, and has continued the project to now work on building a school in Agadez, Niger. He recognizes the irony that while cow dung is coveted as fuel in poorer parts of the world it is discarded in wealthier nations. He is now selling it in bronze to those who would typically reject it in order to help those who value it.
In 2009, Vital established a studio in Caochangdi in Beijing, a renowned art district since Ai Weiwei first moved to the area in 2000. Vital works in a high-ceilinged, windowless studio with dramatic skylights, often with the assistance of local studio hands who are adept in the near-obsolete craft of hand-chasing. Vital sources and is inspired by materials from the region, recently discovering Dali stone from the Yunnan province in Southwest China, a marble renowned for its natural striations in milky tones of black and white that are highly suggestive of ethereal landscapes. Vital selects slabs of the marble and sets them in irregular, three-dimensional frames of handmade plaster. This is reflected in the titles of the works: Glacier, Seascape, Mountains and Vadret, the Swedish word for weather. The works are sculptural reliefs, mounted to the wall yet jutting out at irregular and warped angles.
NOTES TO THE EDITOR
Not Vital was born in 1948 in Sent, Switzerland. He studied in Paris and Rome before moving to New York in 1974. He currently works and lives in Sent, Switzerland; Agadez, Niger; NotOna, Chile (a private island owned by the artist), and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Vital’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Ullens Centre of Contemporary Art, Beijing; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria; Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; The Arts Club of Chicago; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; and the 49th Venice Biennale. Vital recently won the International Award for Public Art, founded by the magazines Public Art China and Public Art Review.
For further press information and enquires please contact:
Ben Brown Fine Arts 301 Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street +852 2522 9600 Central Hong Kong Tiffany@benbrownfinearts.com Liz@benbrownfinearts.com
Monday to Saturday, 11am - 7pm