Border lines

What is drawing? For artist and curator Carol Ho Oi-yan, the medium is no longer defined as 'a work on paper' but can be anything from sculpture to installation to video. Drawing has evolved so much over the past 20 years that it offers almost limitless possibilities in contemporary art.

'Other than using paper and pencil or charcoal or crayon, artists have experimented with materials ranging from oil to soil, and it's not just how but also what they draw that has changed,' says Ho who is the curator of a new exhibition, Back to Drawing, which will open at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre tomorrow.

'These days a drawing may not even look like a drawing in the traditional sense,' she says.

A recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Compass in Hand, showcased 300 works by more than 170 artists that documented a resurgence of the medium's importance since the 1980s. The selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection showed how the definition of the art form has expanded and been altered by materials and various practices adopted by artists.

This change is also evident in Back to Drawing, which features works by nine artists from Hong Kong, Canada, England, Ireland and Italy. They are Carol Lee Mei-kuen, Stella Tang Ying-chi, Grace Tang Ying-mui, Lam Wai-kit, Barry Jacques, David Smith, Mark Pearson, Pierre Oberg and Ho.

The 'tactile qualities' of drawing and painting are present in Jacques and Smith's SAR - Some Assembly Required. The video/sound piece is part of an ongoing study of the construction work taking place on the Hong Kong harbourfront.