Since so many of our most talented artists go West to train, it is hardly surprising that the issue of identity should become so important for many of them when they return East. The Fringe Festival dedicated an exhibition last year to the topic of what makes a Hong Kong artist different from any other experimental installation artist, or controversial sculpture from France, Canada or Britain. For Hale Man, who grew up in Britain, but whose parents are locals, things were in reverse. It was not until the events of June 4, 1989, that, as an undergraduate in London, she began to think about her Chineseness. Her curiosity led her to a brief but unsatisfactory period at the famous Hangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and then to the New Territories where she has been painting for the last two years. In China, she got to grips with traditional landscape painting and her work has not been the same since. Interestingly however, colouRED (Man's show at the Fringe from September 4 to 13) harks back to a time when China was still a romantic fantasy, and her semi-abstract works all feature the colour red, symbolising she says, bridal gowns, and the marriage between East and West she was only dimly beginning to grasp. Wenders has a story to tell Wim Wenders' 1994 release Lisbon Story never made it even to the Cine-Art, but luckily for German film fans, the Arts Centre will be screening it this week as their September First Run Film offering. The film started life as a memorial documentary for the Portuguese capital, but developed into a feature film starring one of Wenders' favourite actors, Rudiger Vogler. Vogler, a familiar face from films like Alice in the Cities stars as Philip Winter, a sound engineer who turns up in the city to help a director friend, only to find the director has disappeared leaving a strip of film. Winter spends the rest of the movie trying to work out what happened to his friend. There are many unfinished conversations about the pointlessness of life, but if you do not like that sort of thing, you would not be watching a Wenders film. A peek at an opera standard The owners of the China Oil Painting Gallery have, despite the name, decided to branch out. They hosted a successful exhibition of works by the late, great Hong Kong sculptor Antonio Mak, and this week sees the opening of a collection of prints by mainland artist Qi Mengguang. Qi is best known for large-scale landscapes. But this show is a collection of smaller prints of figures from Peking Opera. The gnomic figures owe more to the drawings by John Tenniel that Lewis Carroll used for his original edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There is something positively Tweedledum and Tweedledeeish about works like Wu Xi IV, and the Red Queen and King come to mind in the lithograph Chang Ban Po. Conrad takes mantle of farce When the Hilton closed, many of us thought we had also seen the end of that particular brand of British farce that involves double takes, ridiculous misunderstandings and a kind of comic timing best performed by actors with double-barrelled names. So what a joy it was to hear the Conrad had stepped into the breach, and that the king of the double entendre, former Goodie and regular on BBC Radio 4 gagfest shows like Give Us a Clue, Tim Brooke-Taylor, was coming. It seemed too good to be true - and it was. Alone Together, a new farce by Lawrence Roman about a middle-aged couple enjoying time alone now their children have grown up, will star Geoffrey Hutchings instead. He is a sterling actor but he never wore a Union Flag waistcoat and cohabited with two unlikely flatmates to the delight of millions of children across Britain. This is a shame as the script, according to harsh American critics who reviewed it last year, could do with a bit of comedy pedigree. Alone Together is a one-joke play, they said. As you have probably guessed already, it ends up being about Not Being Alone Together Anymore as the grown-up children all come home to live. If that is to your taste, tickets include dinner and are available for shows between September 5-15 from the Conrad.
