One night every March, art lovers of all persuasions go from gallery to gallery with a glass of wine in one hand and a programme in the other for ArtWalk, taking in the wide variety of works that Hong Kong's commercial and independent art spaces have to offer.
It's Hong Kong's biggest annual charity art event, and this year marked its 10th anniversary, but with the next gallery crawl not taking place for another six months, what are ArtWalk aficionados to do in the interim? Now we're at the halfway point on the ArtWalk calendar, and with a profusion of exhibitions taking place outside the event's regular stomping grounds in Central and Wan Chai, the arts lovers at Going Out have put together an 'alternative ArtWalk' with the upcoming long weekend in mind.
Let's start on the south side of the island, where more than 30 works by mainland conceptual photographic artists Maleonn and Jiang Pengyi are being displayed at Blindspot Annex in Aberdeen's Po Chai Industrial Building. The photographers deal in dreamlike whimsy and the effects of urbanisation, respectively, and their Departure from Reality III: The Tender Truth exhibition is being held until October 30.
Staying in Aberdeen, head over to the Hing Wai Centre's Alisan Fine Arts gallery where new ink works on canvas and paper by acclaimed novelist, playwright and painter Gao Xingjian - who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature for Soul Mountain - will be on show until October 15.
Then it's on to the YY9 Gallery in Happy Valley for a look at long-term Hong Kong photographer Norman de Brackinghe's close-up explorations of textures, showing that surfaces are not always what they seem. The exhibition, suitably entitled Textures, ends on October 15.
Time to leave the island now and head to Kwun Tong for the Lui Chun-kwong You Are Here, I Am Not exhibition at Osage Kwun Tong in the Kian Dai Industrial Building. More than 50 fine arts graduates of Chinese University used the art of their former teacher as the starting point of a collaboration, and the impressive results can be seen until November 7.
