Defining Urban Life Karin Weber Gallery For a small exhibition, this show is nothing if not ambitious in its title. It comprises the work of just two European artists - Adam Maygar and Tina Buchholtz - and a Singaporean known as Dyn. Magyar engages most directly with his subject, the city, with horizontally elongated black and white time-exposure photographs of Hong Kong street scenes in a series entitled Urban Flow (below). Don't think boring blurry lights, Magyar's images are quite unlike any you may have seen before. Using a camera of his own invention with a scanner at the rear and connected to a laptop to shoot scenes for up to three hours at a time, Magyar eschews tools such as Photoshop to process what he captures through his own software. The results are parades of people and vehicles, all travelling in the same direction as if drawn by some invisible force, stretched, compressed, frozen in time and decontextualised against a backdrop of stripes somewhat like the blur of speed in a photo shot from a high-speed train. There's a complex interplay of velocity with inertia in his exploration of the city's rhythm, the background stripes even resembling the lines of musical manuscript as people, buses and taxis function as ciphers marking the tempo. Buchholtz's meditative abstract paintings are a world away from Magyar's survey of the streets, although they share Magyar's linearity. Buchholtz painstakingly applies acrylic with a spatula to fill each canvas, yielding Elevator, a multi-hued cascade of vertical lines that seems to wash over the viewer, and the straw-like diptych Dialogue. It's harder to see what Dyn's two pieces in the show bring to the exhibition. As an examination of the city, Defining Urban Life lives up to its title in a fairly modest fashion, but it points a way forward. Until Sept 30. G/F, 20 Aberdeen St, Central. Inquiries: 2544 5004
