Add wind, then water: Hong Kong artists at Art Basel

Lately, Hong Kong artists have been charting new courses for their work, fuelled, in part, by cultural and political shifts happening locally, regionally, and worldwide. That confluence comes together in Transcend into Knots, an installation by Kong Chun Hei being presented by TKG+ at Art Basel in Hong Kong that considers conditions of confinement, isolation, and surveillance at a time when governments are enacting policies of quarantine and containment. The gallery booth will transform into a hospital consulting room complete with medical screens made from decorative multicolored triangular flags and walls covered in drawings depicting an entangled mass of electric cable.

Kong is among a generation of Hong Kong artists whose multidisciplinary practices articulate the surrealness of the city as a world at a crossroads. This includes Sarah Lai, whose painting Monica (2018) at the Blindspot Gallery booth takes a film still of iconic Hong Kong actress Chingmy Yau in 1992's Naked Killer as its source. First exhibited through CHAT (Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile) at The Mills, Monica is part of a larger installation that evokes the retail architecture of Hong Kong as a famed 'Mall City', referencing decades-old display and fabrication techniques and their relation to personal and collective narratives.

Themes of memory and fabrication also frame the work of Flowers Gallery artist Movana Chen, who finds ways to indicate new material and subjective realities through her self-described genre of 'KNITerature', which turns printed matter, from all sorts of books to maps, into textiles that form the basis of her sculptures, installations, and performances. Likewise, Andrew Luk will share new work plus Haunted Salvaged (2020) with de Sarthe, a holdover from the canceled edition of Art Basel Hong Kong in 2020, consisting of a large-scale mobile of rough coral-like clumps of layered magenta and pink polystyrene and melded sea glass gathered from Hong Kong beaches.

Trevor Yeung similarly incorporates everyday materials into works that demonstrate an interest in merging biology with technology. Newly adapted nightlights from Yeung’s ongoing Night Mushroom Colon series will go on view at Blindspot Gallery’s booth, where Lam Tung Pang will exhibit windswept flowers rendered in acrylic and charcoal on plywood in Meaningless no. 12 (2020), typical of the artist’s capacity to deftly represent the effect of human inhabitation on the environment. Recently, Lam’s introduction of performative as well as site- and time-based elements in his work has resulted in larger conceptual installations. For his 2021 performance Coated in Kowloon at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, he traced the raindrops from a typical Hong Kong storm onto the building’s windows in permanent black ink pen, thus transforming what would have otherwise remained a temporary wash into a public display.

As changings of the guard go, continuity is key, but those like Lam with ties to Chinese ink art have long broken with tradition. Be it Tsang Tsou Choi, the self-proclaimed 'King of Kowloon,' who reclaimed colonial Hong Kong though stylized graffiti over its infrastructure, or Frog King, showing with 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, who, following his landmark site activations in China in the late-1970s, has continued bringing the gestural qualities of Chinese characters to life by dressing and performing in public as his trademark amphibian 'character'.

Emergent artistic strategies among a younger generation translate the urban experience through a cacophony rather than a distillation of media, where strict command over form gives way to exploratory modes in meeting the moment, often with increased concentration on how the body configures to spaces under realignment - physical, political, psychological, or otherwise. Take Oscar Yik Long Chan’s The Bridge (2020), which comes as a teaser before his solo exhibition at Gallery EXIT this fall, and expands on his established lexicon of shadowy figurative depictions that spawn a sense of dread. Whereas Chan’s past source material made use of Chinese 'ghost' culture, this painting references documentation of an early 1900s hypnosis performance, in a scene that draws out a latent anxiety grounded in reality.

Art Basel Hong Kong will run from May 19–23 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, as well as online on www.artbasel.com/hong-kong.

Top image: Frog King (Kwok Mang-ho), Frog Spring Brings Prosperity (detail), 2019. Courtesy of the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.