Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition revisits the 1980s and 90s, when artists felt more free
- ‘New Horizons: Ways of Seeing Hong Kong Art in the 80s and 90s’ traces a line between art created in that era and contemporary artists’ work
- Participating artists recall a time when there were fewer grants and sponsorships available, but artists felt free to experiment more than today
The first artwork that visitors encounter in a new show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art is both old and new, which is fitting for an exhibition that traces a line between the art of the late 20th century and the art of today.
Choi Yan-chi’s Butterfly Dream as Smoke (2021) is adapted from Light and Shade, her own work from 1985 which she made for Hong Kong’s first exhibition of installation art. The original was a diaphanous fabric partition that sectioned off a corner of the Pao Galleries at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Wan Chai, a demarcation made more substantial by the abstract paintings projected onto it.
The new work shown in “New Horizons: Ways of Seeing Hong Kong art in the 80s and 90s” is made with similar materials, and evokes the ephemeral quality of the original and its blurring of the boundary between the artwork and its surroundings.
Since the exhibition is on the fifth floor of the recently renovated Hong Kong Museum of Art in Tsim Sha Tsui, those surroundings include windows that offer a view of the Hong Kong Island skyline. It is as if the city itself is projected onto the partitions that the artist has arranged in the shape of a question mark.
A recording of The Sound of Silence plays softly, the opening lines of the 1960s song printed onto one of the fabric screens (not projected this time, but the effects are similar).
Next to it are panels with excerpts from a 2014 column in the Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao with a title borrowed from Mao Zedong’s revolutionary poem Dying Sun Like Blood. It was written by Keung Kwok-yuen, the paper’s highly respected executive chief editor until his controversial dismissal in 2016.