British transgender artist David Kim Whittaker shows his thought provoking works in Hong Kong
- The 12 artworks reveal Whittaker’s own struggle with calm and conflict reflecting his own gender dysphoria
- The artist combines landscapes and abstracts inside a representation of a head
Walking around the Opera Gallery in Hong Kong’s Central district, it’s hard not to feel conflicted by the works of British artist David Kim Whittaker.
And that’s the point.
The 12 pieces on show until May, most from his “The Fear and the Stable” series and the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, reveal his struggle with calm and conflict, each piece offering a glimpse of strength and fragility and the masculine and the feminine.
In context, these states of conflict make sense, reflecting Whittaker’s gender dysphoria – a condition where one’s physical body does not match their deeper identity, a condition he says, that has greatly informed his work.
“I’m in my 50s and only recently started living with my gender dysphoria publicly, so yes, I struggled in silence for many confused years,” he says via email.