10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY ART BASEL HONG KONG 2016
10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY ART BASEL HONG KONG 2016 Booth 1D39 Dinh Q. Lê Huang Rui Wang Keping Frog King
Dinh Q. LĂŞ Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War Installation: 100 drawings; pencil, watercolor, ink, and oil on paper; Video; color, sound; Length: 35 min. 2012 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
DINH Q. LÊ Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War
Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (detail)
A documentary film, produced and directed in collaboration with Dinh Q. Lê, explores the lives and work of artists who were sent into the battle zones during the Vietnamese/American War, to document the war effort from the side of the North Vietnamese. Through rare and intimate interviews with these remaining soldier-artists, the film explores the surreal lives and challenges of making art inside the chaos of war. This film, along with an installation of 102 original drawings by the artists, created by Dinh Q. Lê, was premiered at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany in June 2012. Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodian border, Dinh Q. Lê immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of ten to escape the Khmer Rouge. After studying photography and media art, Lê attracted attention with his tapestries made by weaving together strips of photographs, a process inspired by traditional Vietnamese grass mat weaving. Dinh’s interest is to explore history from the stories of individuals who have undergone events whose facts have been overshadowed by “official” national and social histories. Dinh Q. Lê is one of the most successful artists in Asia today. He participated in dOCUMENTA (2013), and was the first artist from Vietnam to be offered a solo show at the MoMA (NYC) in 2010. The MORI Museum in Tokyo held a retrospective for the artist from July-October 2015.
Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (detail: still images extracted from video)
When people are being killed by bombs and bullets everyday, are we going to sit around and draw nudes? We’re going to draw naked people? Are we going to paint pretty flowers and show those things to people? We have to be heartless to do something like that. We must respond to our enemy’s brutality. We must call upon our people to rise up and fight. Seek vengeance.Take up arms!
Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (detail: still images extracted from video)
HUANG RUI
Huang Rui, White Abstraction, 1995, oil on canvas, 160 x 137 cm
Huang Rui (b. 1952, Beijing) is a true contemporary Chinese artist. He is one of the founding members of the Chinese contemporary art movement, and a founding member of the Chinese avant-garde art group the Stars, which included artists Wang Keping, Ai Weiwei, Ma Desheng and Li Shuang. In 1978, Huang Rui co- published the literary journal Today (今天), which included both the poetry and prose of such writers as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Mang Ke, Shu Ting, and Yang Lian. He left China in 1984 for Japan where he spent nearly two decades. This exhibition pulls together elements from different genres of Huang Rui’s practice. Showing works from his Japan period alongside recent paintings and sculptures we can descend deeper into the elements of his practice. Huang Rui reaches to the past in order to forge his future. Extremely well read in the Eastern philosophies, poetry and literature he never abandons elements of the past to create intellectually challenging works that are layered with meaning. At 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Central Hong Kong we explore the works of Huang Rui during this period along side some of his contemporaries in Japan during the 1980s. We are delighted that Chiba Shigeo (art critic and lecturer at Chubu University) is the academic advisor of the exhibition.
Chess: Dance of I-Ching IV 2015 oil on canvas 200 x 200 cm
Quadruple Happiness 2014 Steel and restored furniture 157.5 x 48 x 96 cm
Opposite left: Straight Circle 2015 Steel and restored furniture 179 x 46 x 55 cm Opposite right: Monkey 2015 Steel and restored furniture 127 x 46 x 58 cm
The Language Form Sculptures by Huang Rui The written word is a fundamental part of Chinese society. The practice of studying the classics was recovered in the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, and the civil service examinations which were the key to high political office until the early 20th century were based on encyclopaedic knowledge of the Chinese classics and a scholar’s command of the Chinese language. Mao’s reforms of the written language meant that post- 1949 China saw a surge in literacy, and during the Cultural Revolution, the “big character” poster became a powerful and often repressive form of political activism. China’s current caution regarding the internet, and its fear of uncontrolled speech are due in part to the enormous importance still attached to the written word. Huang Rui uses words with courage, and his words are those of an artist… In Huang Rui’s work we see the perfect expression of contemporary China, both its rupture and its continuity, both inward-looking and cosmopolitan. China’s traditions inform all of Huang Rui’s work, but without limiting it, or reducing it to a simple binomial expression of ideology or dissidence. All art is contemporary, complex and conversational, and Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu continue to converse happily with Huang Rui through his work and his words. In the reflecting pool that is Huang Rui’s mind, past and present, yin and yang, mountain and earth merge and transform themselves into words and art, and although the words move, and the wind moves, it is neither wind nor words but mind that is moving. -Excerpt from James M. Bradburne’s essay, Mind Moving, Language Form Huang Rui
WANG KEPING
Untitled 1 Couple - WK07 2005 Wood (H) 130 cm
Opposite: Maternal Love WK15 2008 Honey Locust (H) 64 x 44 x 14 cm
Chinese sculptor Wang Keping (b.1949) moved to France in 1984. His early works in China were so provocative that he was quickly slated as a dissident artist. He is one of the founding members of the STARS group of artists, a pivotal movement of artists who fought for free art expression in the late 1970s post-Mao era and organized the famed STARS Exhibition in 1979 and 1980. After leaving China his artistic language moved away from political themes and he searched to create a unique sculptural identity of simplified figuration. His women might be portrayed as erotic creatures often with voluminous bosoms or gentle maternal beings. Man, her counterpart, is often bestial in form. The geometric forms of ovals and rectangles as well as circles and squares find balance through figurative abstraction. Such forms he says have been found since primitive times and he re-interrupts them today. He speaks of Zen not as a spiritual practice but rather as a philosophy of beingmaterial versus non-material, the physical versus the spiritual, flesh versus nothingness, the yin and the yang. If any sculptor today so deftly transforms wood, it is Wang Keping. He is so in tune with each piece of wood, its knots, its grains, its characteristic of cracking, that he swiftly finds form that come to life in sinuous sculptures. Couples melt into each other, totems tower, his rounded female forms draped with ebony colored grain beg to be caressed. Early works from the STARS exhibition are now showing at the M+ Uli Sigg Collection in Hong Kong at Artistree.
Standing Woman 1 WK15 2010 Yew H 73 x 21 x 17 cm
Trois Lignes WK15 2010 Red wood 88 x 48 x 3 cm
FROG KING
“Art is Life. Life is Art” - Frog King Frog King (a.k.a Kwok Mang-ho, b.1947) is a conceptual and performance artist who has been breaking boundaries in Hong Kong and beyond since the late 1960s. Originally trained in ink painting and calligraphy in the studio of New Ink Painting master Lui Shou Kwan, he is one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artists to explore the use of ink painting as a conceptual tool, incorporating it as both action and material into multiple-media installations and performances. Frog King’s unique blend of Eastern and Western philosophies result in a multi-dimensional hybridity that is steeped in traditional training. Inspired by the world around him, Frog King’s creations and performances are not bound by artistic formalities; the audience, artist, artwork and daily life are one. Through the philosophy of “Art is Life. Life is Art”, Frog King uses everything as source material. His signature “sandwich font” switches back and forth between English and Chinese in clever ensembles that alternate between irony and parody. Frogtopia is a vibrant, unique, colourful and quintessentially Frog King space. He is a master of connecting people and cultures through the thread of levity and joyful explosions of laughter. Since 1967, Frog King’s art and performances have been presented at over 3000 exhibitions and art events worldwide, including for his project for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Recently, Hong Kong’s M+ Museum for Live Art invited Frog King to recreate his 1979 “Plastic Bag Project.”
Frog Kindness 2015 Mixed media on canvas 180 x 120 cm
Frog King Frog Couple 15 March 1985, NYC ink on paper 19.6 x 25.4 cm
Frog King Dance 10 July 1985, NYC Ink on paper 20.2 x 11.2 cm
Intersections: Huang Rui and Japanese Art in the 1980s (installation view)
Shapeshifting: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia (installation view)
Upcoming exhibition: CAROL LEE MEI KUEN
Carol Lee Mei Kuen (installation view at OCAT Xi’an, 2015)
About the gallery Since 2001, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery has explored both emerging and historically important movements in art in the Asia Pacific. Working with curators and with a strong curatorial team in-house, the gallery aims to deliver exhibitions that take time, research and have an impact on the arts in the region, as well as promoting Asian art internationally. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is committed to playing a major role in documenting the development of art within the Asia Pacific region by consistently holding survey exhibitions by country or theme of both emerging and mid-career artists, talks, forums and publishing books that bring together the individual historical context of the artists with the development of the arts within Asia. The gallery focuses on Asia, however, keeps its eye on international opportunities around the world, bringing international cultural appreciation to Hong Kong. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery opened its 10 Chancery Lane Art Projects in 2008. Contact Us
Katie de Tilly Gallery Owner katie@10chancerylanegallery.com +852 9802 4337 Geraldine Cosnuau Business Development and Sales Executive gerladine@10chancerylanegallery.com +852 5192 2345 Bo Kim Business Development and Sales Executive bo@10chancerylanegallery.com +852 9710 4392 Sophie Giles Gallery Manager sophie@10chancerylanegallery.com +852 9687 0172 10 Chancery Lane Gallery G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, Soho, Central, Hong Kong info@10chancerylanegallery.com +852 2810 0065
Publications
Wang Keping 2008
Huang Rui, Space
Huang Rui Language Form
Huang Rui Huang Rui The Stars’ Times 1977-1984 Space Structure, 1983-1986
Coming soon
Other publications
Frog King Totem 2016
Dinh Q. Lê Memory for Tomorrow, Mori Art Museum