Yang Jiechang
King of Canton
15 May–18 June 2012
Hanart TZ Gallery
407 Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street, Central
Hong Kong
Feng Mengbo
Gulammohammed Sheikh
and Xu Jiang
ART HK12
Booth 1B07
17–20 May 2012
A Tribute to Hong Kong Masters
Luis Chan (1905–1995), Irene Chou (1924–2011),
Gaylord Chan (b. 1925), Liu Kuo-Sung (b. 1932),
Chu Hing-Wah (b. 1935), Wucius Wong (b. 1936),
and Leung Kui-Ting (b. 1945)
19 May–21 July 2012
Hanart Square
2/f, Mai On Building, 19 Kung Yip Street
Kwai Chung, Hong Kong
Yang Jiechang
King of Canton
“The Pearl River Delta has always been blessed with weather conducive to good crops, thereby making it the agricultural foundation of the Chinese continent. As the old saying goes, ‘the best is found at the bottom.’ Here, emperors or kings have never been lacking: 2,200 years ago King of Nanyue was sent to Dayu Mountain by the First Emperor of Qin. In the final years of the Song Dynasty, city Zhaoqing served as national capital for sixty years. In the past two centuries the Canton region has produced even more successive kings and persons of prominence: There is the Heavenly King of the Taiping Rebellion; Dr Sun Yat-sen, ‘Father’ of the National Republic; graffiti calligrapher ‘King of Kowloon’; Bruce Lee the ‘King of Kung Fu’; etc. Canton (Guangdong) has not been short of kings, but we have yet to find a ‘King of Canton.’ Now is the time for Hong Kong to fill this gap.”
–Yang Jiechang, Paris, Spring 2012
Feng Mengbo, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Xu Jiang
ARTHK12 (Booth 1B07)
FENG Mengbo‘s new video game-console Long March: Restart (Arcade Version) (2012). This game-arcade version of the artist’s celebrated Long March, featuring battles of the People’s Liberation Army across China and beyond, is a refined development from the 25 meter-wall size version inaugurated in 2008. The game-console is accompanied by 3 stereo prints Bridge, Street, and Gate newly created in 2012.
Feng’s 18 meter, 10-panel landscape on canvas is a unique digital painting made with classical tempera base. It was created for Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in 2008, and is exhibited for the first time in Asia.
Gulammohammed Sheikh is an artist, writer, and educationist. As a painter of more than five decades he has pioneered an engagement with historical forbears and a social and political investment in art practice. In Sheikh’s work, audience is invited to walk through his cities and float above their streets. Such as his sculpture Weather Vane: Incredible India / Vibrant Gujarat, City of Statues (2011) and Partition (2011). The Alphabet Stories (2004), is an artist version of the traditional portable shrine inspired by Rajasthan itinerant storytellers.
In Xu Jiang‘s Great Shanghai: Old Bund (2000) and Great Shanghai: Viewing the East (2002), sites of historical memory and connotation of “ruin” transport them to a realm beyond the reach of time, where they become both a repository of culture and a burden of history. Within the scope of the view they also constitute a vision of history, an ideology of time. The artist’s epic imagination foments visions of a comparably epic scale; still images of a history silenced by the shock of its own ravages, or calmed by the healing muse of time.
Wine Sponsor: Corney & Barrow (Independent Wine Merchants, established 1780).
