This is Art week in Hong Kong. It is huge and it is really wonderful. There is so much good art out there and I am happy to say, the La Rondine exhibition stands up to all of it, albeit a small show, in the confines of Gallery ZZHK in Wa Lane.
Monday night rocked off with a great exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Shi Jindian in Hollywood Rd at Angela Li Contemporary Gallery. Shi Jindian is a lovely shy artist whose work probably reflects well his introverted nature. With exquisite attention to detail he twists stainless steel wire around bicycles and a motor bike, before extracting them and leaving their outer wire shape. Hanging on the wall is the remnants of an old door that he wired up and then burnt, the remains of charcoal trapped in the outer wire frame. While I appreciated the work and craftsmanship of his sculptures, I was probably more taken with his paintings that were similar to his wire work through painstakingly etched biro into paint revealing beautiful abstract forms. The works were subtle and haunting.
Tuesday night held the openings of the big galleries, the Gagosian, White Cube, Ben Brown, Hanart, and Pearl Lam. We loved the Basquiat exhibition at Gagosian. How lucky are we to see it. There were huge crowds making their way up to the seventh floor exhibition in Pedder Building, but there was no alcohol so people didn’t stay to hang in their groups talking with their backs to the artwork and therefore obscuring the vision. A clever move, because truly this was worth seeing. Basquiat is such an explorative artist. The passion and volatility of his work, scratched and scribbled and stuck and slapped on any debris or available matter, made the work excitingly free, connected to the moment, unconcerned with outcome and anyone’s opinion. Sad he died, a bit of a Jimmy Hendrix, lost in the alienation of drugs and fame, yet so much more to give – or does everything become a rehash – how many artists can re-invent themselves, once they’ve ‘made it’.
Ben Brown had two artists showing. Sculptural landscapes by Swiss artist, Vital, and portraits by Frank Auerbach. It was a good show. The sculptural landscapes are marble images found in China. We often see these little marble images in the antique markets, as this is a recognized Chinese art form, the appreciation of a found piece of marble or stone that reflects the landscape. They are like beautiful little pen and ink washes and Vital mounted his finds on the wall in strong plaster sculpted reliefs. The Frank Auerbach portraits are great. They are rich in texture and honesty, and he is an artist who deserves to be recognized for his unrelenting dedication to his art and love for the human condition. The paint is tough and dirty and the portraits are essential rather than revealing.
We also went to Hanart on the 4th Level of Pedder Building and saw the installation paintings by Qiu Zhijie. They were a lovely exploration of Chinese landscape manifested in a contemporary context along with maps, historical and geographical.
I am afraid we didn’t get off much on Pearl Lam’s exhibition of ‘The Reality of Paint’ by Zhu Jinshi. Big slabs of thick textural colour paint on canvas. It felt contrived and without love for itself. hmmm. But it is a beautiful space and we have seen some great shows here.
In the meantime, we are sitting in our exhibition and we meet a spaniard who collects African art and Chinese ceramics. A quietly passionate man, after an hour perusing our work, proclaimed our exhibition as the best he had seen in HK. He said with sincerity that we were all ‘real’ artists not concerned with gimickry and slickness, but all of us were truly expressing our truths and he felt deeply moved by the show. He thanked us for giving so much. Lovely!! I wonder sometimes why any artist who chooses such a hard road in life would compromise their work to be ‘untrue’, to be fashionable, to care what anyone thinks, when what the world truly values is the artist’s freedom to create – and they pay a lot for it as seen in the Basel Art Fair in HK this year….
Living Tuscany & Provence 
hi Michael and Shona, I hope the exhibition in HK is going well for all involved. I hope Jake, Candido, and Kevin were also successful at the event. Hope to see you back in Bagni in August!