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Crossing Boundaries

Lee Gardens

Ends Sunday

Three visual artists recently won fellowships from the Asian Cultural Council, beating hundreds of applicants from around the region.

New media artist Hung Keung (Hong Kong), calligrapher Joseph Wei Ligang (the mainland) and Indonesian painter Dikdik Sayahdikumullah will visit the US and spend several months in an artist-in-residence programme at various universities, art schools and museums.

Crossing Boundaries showcases the artists' differences in medium, style and content. Hung presents an interactive video art piece that explores the relationship between human beings and moving images. In Time Liquid, Navigating Images and Heavy Angels/Falling Angels, the MA degree holder from Britain's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design devised a large flat-screen TV with a mounted camera that transposes and reverses images of people standing in front of it.

The image is then pixilated into large colourful circles or triangles, which correspond to the movement of whoever stands in front. It's fun to swing your arms and watch the image move - however, the artistic impression fades as soon as you walk away.

Award-winning painting teacher Sayahdikumullah, whose works have been exhibited in Berlin, Japan and Singapore, paints street scenes from West Java's highland city of Bandung. From less than two metres away, his Downtown Series are incredibly photorealistic. Up close, the small works show the painter's mastery of light and perspective of desolate streets lined with Dutch colonial architecture. In a country with one of the world's densest populations, there's an eerie, ghost-town feeling in the works. 'I want to express the feeling of distance that I experience in modern society,' Sayahdikumullah says.

In stark contrast, Wei creates immense abstract Chinese ink on paper paintings. His calligraphy poem and interpretation of Strolling by the Lake at Dawn, written in the Song dynasty by Lu You (1125-1210), is created on a four-metre scroll. The characters are indistinguishable to people literate in Chinese, but I could feel the delicacy of the words as they race across the paper.

'Writing modern calligraphy is like a horse galloping on the grass,' says Wei. 'It's hard to slow down or stop.'

Daily, 10am-7pm, G/F the Lee Gardens, Causeway Bay. Inquiries: 2895 0407

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