City captures creative spirit

The roaring success of Art HK over the past five years has not only raised Hong Kong's reputation as the arts hub of Asia, but also challenged local galleries to compete on a higher level. Not content with simple offerings of one or more artists in their booths at the four-day fair, some have also taken art outside the main hall, giving VIP guests and avid art collectors startlingly new experiences. FEAST Projects Headed by Philippe Koutouzis, FEAST Projects is a relative newcomer to Hong Kong, and operates from an industrial space in Ap Lei Chau. Koutouzis purchased a second raw ground-floor space, a former garage that affords him almost 3,000 sq ft to showcase performance art, dance and music as well as art. The inaugural performance tomorrow is FIVE - HONG KONG, by American Rashaad Newsome. Cocktails and a DJ party will be held before and after the performance. VIPs are treated to transport from the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre to the venue, with buses leaving between 6.30pm and 7.15pm from Expo Drive. FIVE introduces and explores the five elements of the 'vogue' dance form: hands, duck walking, cat walk, floor performance and dip spins. 'I view these performances as drawings, with the dancers acting as my pen, creating lines, shapes, landscapes and an array of narratives,' Newsome says. The performance is adapted for Hong Kong, and features a dynamic composition of local musicians playing Chinese instruments, renowned opera singer Stefanos Koroneos, distinguished rapper SCANZ and several New York-based vogue dancers, all co-ordinated by Newsome. 'Rashaad's energy encompasses the whole spectrum of art, and it produces mixed feelings,' Koutouzis says. 'His work is a mash-up of many elements to make something entirely new.' Amelia Johnson Gallery Another innovative gallery with international and local points of view, Amelia Johnson Gallery (AJG) features Australian artist Sally Smart and her ongoing project, In Her Nature. The 14-metre installation titled The Log Dance, is Smart's subversion of the idea of the construction of feminine identity, involving cutting, collage, photo-montage, stitching and pinning, all of which have historical associations with the traditional activities of women. The gallery has also collaborated with Art HK in the exhibition of the work of Tang Kwok-hin, a rising star of the Hong Kong art scene, in the Clipper Lounge of the event's official hotel, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, until May 26. The exhibition, 'I Call You Nancy', is a project based on the life of the artist's fictitious sister, and consists primarily of Tang's signature collages and two sound and video works. Tang weaves 25 years of 'memories' to build a life for a sister he never knew. Tang's work is highly reflective of old Hong Kong. 'A patron, who has eaten breakfast at the Clipper Lounge every day for 40 years, called to say how moved he was by the art, and the era of Hong Kong that it evoked,' Johnson says. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery On a more sombre note, the well-established 10 Chancery Lane Gallery presents Erasure, by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. L?, and co-curated by Zoe Butt and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The work is an interactive sculptural and video installation that draws on issues concerning refugees and asylum seekers. Dinh Q. L? is considered by international experts as one of Vietnam's most significant contemporary artists. As part of Art HK 12, the gallery is also showing Dinh's work and Carol Lee Mei-kuen's Threads of Luminosity at the Art East Island annexe spaces in Chai Wan. The gallery's owner, Katie de Tilly, says she was 'so moved' when she first saw Erasure in Australia. 'The crashing boats and the ships burning were captivating, but not as much as the 'ocean' of 100,000 photos that lay on the floor,' she says. 'Photos of so many families, and where have they gone?' De Tilly recalls visiting the Vietnamese refugee camps on High Island in 1995. 'I remember seeing the faces, particularly of the teenagers, who never knew any other life but those barbed-wire fences,' she says. 'Their family photos might be on the floor of Erasure.' Sin Sin Fine Art Although a local gallery, Sin Sin surprises collectors and art lovers with a wide range of artists. For Art HK 12, the gallery is featuring 'Earthly Evocations : Indonesian Art Now', a solo exhibition by Jumaldi Alfi in the Asia One solo show section, as well as works by 11 Indonesian artists. 'Alfi is one of the top 10 artists in Indonesia and is a very spiritual, sensual artist,' says gallery owner Man Sin-sin. The artist first came to national attention in the mid-1990s as one of the founding members of the influential Jendela Art Group. Using a code of images from the natural world, including stones, skulls and cactuses, Afli creates intimate and mysterious paintings. Saamlung A relative newcomer to the Hong Kong scene, Saamlung will exhibit two young artists in Art HK's Art Futures section, which focuses on young galleries and emerging art. Projects by Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas and Canadian counterpart Jon Rafman are 'examples of how we feature emerging and mid-career artists [who] demonstrate the post-internet world and the way art circulates in the art world today', says the gallery's Robin Peckham. 'Nadim's work is intensely personal and reflects his own experiences. Jon, who has had four solo shows this year, works with production technology, packaging, wrapping and custom carpet printing. He has created a 'habitable' corner of the booth, but covered it with textured paint, reducing the environment to one skin.' Abbas says: 'You might describe my recent output as a series of ruminations on the fascinating ambiguity of images representing things that cannot be seen with the naked eye - either because it is too dangerous, too far away, or too small. This includes a whole host of predominantly scientific or documentary imagery, such as television footage from the Chernobyl disaster, images from Nasa space explorations, and microscopic images of viruses and bacteria. Using these images as a reference point, I have constructed a kind of imaginary archive of photographs, GIF animations, drawings and objects. Here, the scale of things becomes confused; a bacteriophage might resemble a space station, or a pebble a planet.' Rafman considers himself an artist of 'prosumer' materiality, exploring ideas of outsourcing and fabrication through their application to often absurd situations, including the retooling of various forms of consumer technology and entertainment to bring about a collision between amateur digital culture and high modernist art history. Galerie du Monde This Central gallery is showcasing a Chinese conceptual artist, Qin Chong, at the fair with Past-Future. The exhibitions of his work at the gallery (until June 12) and the Art HK booth will feature magnificent new artworks in ink on Xuan paper, oil on canvas, sculpture and installations. They include a large-scale installation at the fair titled Past-Future and made of rolled paper tubes that are burnt at the edges then arranged on earth. The resulting ashes refer to the past, while the varied sizes of the cylindrical paper creations stand for different time lengths representing the future. Through this work, the artist expresses his ideas about the balance between destruction and reconstruction, death and rebirth.