Para Site Annual Auction 2019 Catalogue by Para Site

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

contents

page

live lots

artists

002

Foreword

01 02 03 04 05

Etel Adnan Lee Kit Haegue Yang Hito Steyerl Firelei Bรกez

093 094

Para Site Education Room Acknowledgements

06 07 08 09 10

Antony Gormley Tobias Rehberger Christopher K. Ho Juan Davila Tu Hongtao

11 12 13 14 15

Paul Pfeiffer Firenze Lai Anna Gaskell Antony Gormley Frog King

16 17 18 19 20

Mika Rottenberg Angela Su Joseph Beuys Peter Steinhauer Alfredo Jaar

21 22 23

Zhu Jinshi Maria Taniguchi Cui Jie

silent lots

artists

24 25

Nadim Abbas Lawrence Abu Hamdan

26 27 28 29 30

Joel Andrianomearsoa Julieta Aranda Aung Myat Htay Marius Bercea Monica Bonvicini

31 32 33 34 35

Daniel Boyd Angela Bulloch Chen Changwei Chen Qiulin Chen Wei

36 37 38 39 40

Ali Cherri Heman Chong Lubna Chowdhary Abraham Cruzvillegas Horia Damian

41 42 43 44 45

David Douard Dr. Lakra Mandy El-Sayegh Jes Fan Chitra Ganesh

46 47 48 49 50

Maria Garcia Ibanez Gauri Gill Beatriz Gonzalez Daniel Guzman Federico Herrero

51 52 53 54 55

Ho Tzu Nyen Vivian Ho Ju Ting Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Kim Suyoung

56 57

Kolkoz Lawrence Lek

58 59 60

Leung Chi Wo William Lim Candice Lin

61 62 63 64 65

Liu Yin Ma Yujiang MAP Office David Medalla & Adam Nankervis Erbossyn Meldibekov

66 67 68 69 70

Mit Jai Inn Ciprian Muresan Pak Sheung Chuen Gary-Ross Pastrana Ellen Pau

71 72 73 74 75

Eddie Peake Phan Thao-Nguyen Gala Porras-Kim Tenzing Rigdol Suh Dongwook

76 77 78 79 80

Spencer Sweeney Tang Kwok-Hin Truong Cong Tung Wang Wei Wang Sishun

81 82 83 84 85

Robin F. Williams Ming Wong Yang Shen Yee I-Lann Yeung Hok Tak

86 87 88 89 90

Trevor Yeung Zhang Yanzi Zhao Renhui Nathan Zhou Zhou Tao

Zhou Yangming

zhou

Foreword Dear Friends, We are grateful and humbled by the support we have received this year, from artists and galleries in Hong Kong and abroad, who all believe passionately in art’s future and in the need for the spaces that nurture it to continue thriving. In this difficult year, we must not forget art’s unique powers to bring communities together, to foster dialogue, and to imagine a better future. The annual auction has always been an integral source of support for Para Site, raising a large percentage of our yearly budget to ensure the continuation and development of our expansive roster of exhibitions, as well as our public and educational programmes, in Hong Kong and beyond. Thanks to the success of last year’s auction, some of the most ground-breaking, successful, and internationally recognised exhibitions to date were made possible, including the highly acclaimed major retrospective of one of Hong Kong’s major artistic figures, Ellen Pau, mounted at Para Site at the beginning of the year and An Opera for Animals, on view in spring at our home, and staged later in the summer with great success at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, as the first step in a major institutional collaboration with our partners at RAM, which will then see another exhibition realised together in Hong Kong in autumn of next year. Para Site’s presence beyond our home base in Hong Kong this year includes even more projects: the curation of the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Jogja Biennale in Indonesia entitled Sea Breeze; Chris Evans, Pak Sheung Chuen: Two Exhibitions, our attendance record-breaking exhibition from 2017 was shown this year at the Hong-gah Museum, Taipei; Koloa: Women, Art, and Textiles premiered in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, as one of the first international exhibitions to tour from the country and will be shown later this year in Hong Kong; A beast, a god, and a line continues its international tour to Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, where it will open later this month, and at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai next spring; further to this, Para Site is the partner institution for the Kathmandu Triennale 2020, planning an extensive interchange between Para Site exhibitions and this major Asian event. This stronger and broader global presence directly translates to support for the emerging generation in Hong Kong. This year we have organized an unprecedented number of exhibitions featuring young artists and curators, including Bicycle Thieves and Courses of Action, two summer exhibitions that were continuations of our support of the next generation of curators from our region in having the chance to realise their first large-scale exhibition with all the opportunities Para Site has to offer: its space, experience, and budget; a solo exhibition showcasing newly commissioned works by Hong Kong artist Chan Ka Kiu at our booth at Art Basel Hong Kong; Hard Cream, Hong Kong artist Doreen Chan’s solo exhibition in Guangzhou; among others. Currently, Café do Brasil, on view at Para Site, focuses on the works of an upcoming generation of artists working in Hong Kong and Greater China. In addition to these exhibitions, we have grown our educational platforms, including our prestigious intensive Workshop for Emerging Art Professionals (to which over 80 international talents applied this year!) where we worked with 15 curators of tomorrow from Hong Kong and abroad, held in conjunction with our annual International Conference—which was, yet again, a major event on the global art agenda, besides being a laboratory for the future of Hong Kong’s art. All of these programmes have been mediated to our diverse audiences through a record number of public programmes, and multi-lingual tours for students and members of the general public. Alongside this, we have also invited and hosted numerous art professionals in residence with Para Site, to spend time exploring and conducting research in Hong Kong to cultivate long term connections with our city, resulting in long-term cultural exchange.

These achievements would not be possible without the tremendous generosity of our patrons and supporters. All the while, Para Site has been a pioneering institution in the fair pay of artists, offering artists fees and work insurance to all its collaborators. As part of an effort to expand social protections for artists, this year, we will start covering medical insurance costs for all Hong Kong artists working for Para Site projects (including the ones working on donations for the fundraising auction), covering both the production and exhibition periods. And because we would like you to know exactly the figures behind these plans and how your support translates into our work, we are listing below a few examples of the costs that go into these projects: HK$ 3,500—artist fee for participating in one of our group exhibitions HK$ 5,000—artist medical and dental insurance coverage for half a year HK$ 10,000—electricity in the gallery for one month HK$ 20,000—sponsorship of a young professional to attend our annual workshops HK$ 50,000—production of Para Site’s booth in Art Basel featuring a young artist HK$ 70,000—production of a newly commissioned installation work HK$ 100,000—production costs for annual public programmes and events HK$ 150,000—printing of a major Para Site publication HK$ 500,000—production of a regular Para Site exhibition

We would thus like to thank again all of you for supporting us; to all the artists, galleries, and friends who have donated an unprecedented set of works, to our expanding family of Global Council Members, Founding Friends, Friends, and Associates, as well as to our Board and Advisors, who have made our past year possible. Special gratitude goes to our Auction Hotel Partner: the St. Regis, Hong Kong and to Alan Lo and André Fu; our Auction Preview Venue Partner: Soho House Hong Kong and to Akarin Gaw, our Conviviality Partners: Gelardini & Romani and Pernod Ricard, our auctioneer: Jehan Chu, and event designer Gemma Blest. We are also thankful to the following organisations for their support: Paddle8, AXA Insurance and Tap Events. Last, but certainly not least, our heartfelt and special thanks to Shane Akeroyd, Mimi Chun-Gradel, Virginia Yee, and an anonymous donor for generously hosting the auction gala.

Cosmin Costinas Executive Director and Curator Para Site

003

004

Live lots

005

Etel Adnan

LOT

Power of the sun 2017 Etching Edition 11 of 35 42.1 × 30.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–50,000 Generously donated by Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

The career of Etel Adnan (b. 1925, Lebanon) spans several decades and encompasses a wide range of media – including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books – as it does traditions and locations. Adnan writes what must be communicated through language, and paints what cannot. A student of philosophy, Adnan moved to Berkeley, California in 1955. As an active participant in Ann O’Hanlon’s Perception Workshops in Mill Valley in the 1960s, she developed her practice in dialogue with poets, experimental musicians, playwrights, and SFMOMA, at its original location in the War Memorial Veteran’s Building. Adnan’s major solo exhibitions include A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun, MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA, 2018; New Work: Etel Adnan, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA, 2018; and Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World, Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, 2016.

Live lots

Power of the sun is a recent etching by visual artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan that returns to her long-held interest in abstraction, and specifically, colour and its possibilities. For Adnan, the landscape is mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but has lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life. Adnan was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting against the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War. Informing her writing and later her artwork as well, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. Since the 1960s, she has built up a body of work that makes significant links between the image and text; Eastern and Western cultures; Modernism and contemporary art. Her work reflects a sensitive, dynamic relationship with the world, exploring questions of landscape, abstraction, colour, writing, memory and history.

LOT

Lee Kit

‘As long as it doesn’t affect me.’ 2019 Emulsion paint, acrylic, inkjet ink, and pencil on cardboard Unique 39 × 35.5 cm Estimate: H K $ 140,000–160,000 Generously donated by the artist and Massimo de Carlo

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Lee uses a range of mediums, from video/audio recordings, installations, and other mixed-media approaches, to create his art. He wants to highlight human experiences and emotions through the use of mundane activities portrayed in his work, such as in ‘As long as it doesn’t affect me.’. Lee works against his education as a traditional painter, with every piece rooted in the process of its creation rather than the outcome. The works are infused with Lee’s life and memories, collecting stains and spirit in its everyday use. These paintings are then retired and displayed as testaments to the memories they witnessed, laden with life and warmth. Lee Kit (b. 1978, Hong Kong) currently lives and works in Taipei. Recent exhibitions and projects include: Café do Brasil, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2019; Parkett at artgenève 2017, Le Grand-Saconnex,

Switzerland, 2017; Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, 2016; Lee Kit: A small sound in your head, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, 2015; You., Cattle Depot, Hong Kong, 2014; You(you)., 55TH Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2013; Every breath you take, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2012; House M, The Pavilion, Beijing, China, 2012; Henry (Have you ever been this low?), Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, 2011; 1, 2, 3, 4..., Lombard Freid Projects, New York, USA, 2011; Well, that’s just a chill., ShugoArts, Tokyo, Japan, 2010; Someone singing and calling your name, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong, 2009; Remains from several days, Mori Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2008; and ¾ suggestions for a better living, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2007. Lee received a shortlist nomination for the 2013 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and represented Hong Kong at the 55T H Venice Biennale in 2013.

Haegue Yang

LOT

Imperfections – Shabby Hunchback Dance 2010 4 C-Prints, framed Edition 1 of 5 + 2AP 66 × 204 cm Estimate: HK $ 95,000–155,000 Generously donated by the artist and Kukje Gallery

Imperfections (2010), a series of colour photographs, shows origami objects which have been created by the artist herself. Abstract in form, these geometric objects are all in different states of destruction, and by losing their geometric neutrality, they become a narrative which provides a new formal interpretation of designs famous for their perfection. This series was shown at Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, 2014; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, 2013; Modern Art Oxford, 2011; and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, 2010.

Live lots

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, South Korea) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. Yang’s practice spans a wide range of media, from paper collage to performative sculpture and large-scale multisensorial installation, often featuring everyday objects, in addition to labour-intensive woven sculptures. Articulated in her abstract visual vocabulary, her anthropomorphic sculptures often play with the notion of ‘the folk’ being a cultural idea, while also attempting to transcend it as being a mere tradition of specific cultures. Her multisensory environments suggest uncontrollable and fleeting connotations of time, place, figures, and experiences that connect us in a non-sharable field of perception.

Selected recent solo exhibitions were at South London Gallery, 2019; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2018; La Panacée-MO.CO., Montpellier, 2018; La Triennale di Milano, 2018; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2018; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2018; Kunsthaus Graz, 2017; Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2016; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2016; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2015; and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2015. Yang is Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany and recipient of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. Her works are in the collections of major institutions, including MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.

LOT

Hito Steyerl

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Sandbags/Textur II, Kharkiv 2015 UV pigment print on dibond Edition 3 of 5, with 2 AP’s 103.5 × 103.5 × 3.8 cm Estimate: HK $ 150,000–200,000 Generously donated by the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Hito Steyerl’s photographic print Sandbags/Textur II, Kharkiv contains fragments of three-dimensional images taken by Steyerl in Kharkiv, Ukraine using a widely accessible iPhone application. Thematically related to her video installation, The Tower, which investigated the relationship between the two main applications of three-dimensional rendering - military use and luxury development, the resulting images show an interweaving of war and architecture as part of the urban landscape, in this case in the form of sandbags. Utilizing UV printing technology, the images are printed repeatedly, building them up to a textural, topographical presence on the grey plane.

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Steyerl’s prolific filmmaking and writing occupy a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals, often online. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum, Basel, 2018; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2017; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2015; Artists Space, New York; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2015. Group exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2018; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2017; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; the German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014.

Firelei Báez

LOT

Untitled (Ode to Earthseed) 2019 Acrylic and ink on paper Unique 47.5 × 38 × 2.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 80,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artist and James Cohan, New York

Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The artist’s work was featured in An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2019. Her work was the subject of a recent solo exhibition at the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, and her monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, is included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line Art exhibition. Other solo exhibitions took place this year at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. She currently lives and works in New York.

Live lots

Untitled (Ode to Earthseed) by Firelei Báez features a Ciguapa figure. It belongs to an ongoing series in which the artist re-envisions these feminine-archetypal creatures who live in the high mountains of the Dominican Republic. According to Dominican mythology, ciguapas might be beautiful or horrendous depending on who encounters them, bringing darkness or light into one’s life. Báez uses this creature as a vessel to explore specific and current issues on landscape, womanhood, and race. Rendering her subjects in complex layers of pattern and imagery, New York-based artist Firelei Báez reconfigures visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. By overlapping representational motifs, Báez carries portraiture into a space where subjectivity is rooted in historical narratives as much as it can likewise become untethered by them.

LOT

Antony Gormley

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Mool 2017 Carbon and casein on paper Unique 19.1 × 27.8 cm Estimate: HK $ 130,000–160,000 Generously donated by the artist

Mool derives its name from earth or soil. Antony Gormley is widely known for his sculptures, installations and investigative drawings. He developed his work through a critical engagement with his own body and those of others to confront fundamental questions about where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. The artist on drawing: It is important to me that the substances I use to draw with are not taken for granted; lamp black, bone black, casein, linseed oil, milk, semen, blood, coffee, chicory, earth, shellac, varnish all come with their own qualities, extracted from the body of the earth, from the body of plants or from living bodies. In their reactivation, these are not innocent partners. Antony Gormley (b. 1950, UK) has had a number of solo shows at venues including Delos, Greece, 2019; Uffizi Gallery, Florence, 2019; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2019; Long Museum, Shanghai, 2017; Forte di Belvedere, Florence, 2015; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, 2014; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2012; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2011; Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2010; Hayward Gallery, London, 2007; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Malmö Konsthall, 1993; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, 1989. A major solo exhibition of his work is currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Permanent public works include the Angel of the North, Gateshead, England; Another Place, Crosby Beach, England; Exposure, Lelystad, The Netherlands; and Chord, MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany. Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a member of the Royal Academy since 2003. He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and knighted in 2014.

Tobias Rehberger

LOT

Harmony 3 2019 Watercolour on paper Unique 33.4 × 58.2 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and neugererriemschneider, Berlin

Tobias Rehberger (b. 1966, Germany) is an artist whose work across sculpture, installation, painting and architecture is characterised by transformation, chance and dialogue. From minimal interventions to large scale public sculpture, his distinctive aesthetic creates radical new experiences of our surroundings. Rehberger won the Golden Lion at the 53R D Venice Biennale for Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum weinen, 2009. Selected solo exhibitions include Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 2019; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, 2018; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2016; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2014; MACRO Museum, Rome, 2014; The Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2012; MAXXI, Rome, 2010; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2008; Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2007; Tate Liverpool, 2006; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2004; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2002. Tobias Rehberger lives and works in Frankfurt and Berlin.

Live lots

Tobias Rehberger’s Harmony 3 arises from a series of watercolours that delicately render sumptuous dishes in vivid hues, as though inviting the viewer to partake in their consumption. Yet each of these meals is interrupted by a cigarette. Seemingly an autobiographical reference (Rehberger is himself a smoker), the cigarette both alludes to the artist’s presence in the work and a social, informal eating environment. Presented within a glass-topped cuboid and surrounded by stools in Rehberger’s top floor bar-installation at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, the works were activated by visitors enjoying food and drinks in their company. The series continues the artist’s long-standing exploration of art as an immersive and active force. Art, for Rehberger, is often a site in which other activities take place and itself a functional object.

LOT

Christopher K. Ho

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

SIM Card 2019 ½" low iron glass, ¼" peach glass, ¼" clear glass, gold leaf (variegated, black variegated, green variegated, 16k pale gold, 23.75k rosenoble), yoga mats Unique 150 × 120 × 45 cm Estimate: HK $ 110,000–140,000 Generously donated by the artist

SIM Card consists of an outsized micro-SIM card made of three distinct sheets of glass, gold-leafed on five sides, sitting on two yoga mats. The work was a major component of the 2019 solo exhibition Embassy S ites at Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong, which addressed the perils and potentials of transnationalism. Ho had been thinking about proper nouns that would relate to this idea and things like sim cards, credit cards and WhatsApp emerged. SIM Card reflects on ideas of mobility and movement. Christopher K. Ho (b. 1974, Hong Kong) is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. He is known for a practice that includes object making, institution building, writing, and teaching. His multi-component projects address privilege, community, and capital, and draw equally from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly de-colonised, increasingly networked world. Recent

solo exhibitions include Embassy S ites at Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong, 2019; Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 2018; Dear John at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 2018; and CX 888, at de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, 2018. He has additionally exhibited at the Guangdong Times Museum, the Queens Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, MASSMoCA, Para Site, Storm King, and in the Incheon Biennial and the Busan Biennale, among other venues. He is a recent Rauschenberg Foundation Residency and a Davidoff Art Initiative Residency. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, YISHU, Art in America, Modern Painters, LEAP, Hyperallergic, and ArtReview. He received his BFA and BS from Cornell University and his MPhil from Columbia University.

Juan Davila

LOT

Fig. 5 2017 Oil on canvas Unique 180 × 150 cm Estimate: HK $ 300,000–500,000 Generously donated by the artist and Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art articulated questioning of the hierarchies applied to cultural material, and by extension, cultures. Davila opens up the hidden tensions that lurk beneath any official history or national mythology. His paintings critique the Australian and Latin American political systems, capitalism, the art world and sexuality.

Juan Davila (b. 1946, Chile), moved to Melbourne in 1974 and has worked between the two countries ever since. Considered as a whole, Davila’s art has produced a uniquely provocative, powerful and influential body of work. Since the early 1970s, Juan Davila has used the medium of painting to engage in debates around aesthetics, politics and sexuality, drawing on its rich and varied histories in Latin America, Australia, Europe and North America. For many years Davila has brought to high art the visual landscape of popular culture. As a visual archive, Davila’s works are not simply reflections of a society awash with images, but a carefully

Davila’s work has been included in the Sydney Biennial, 1982 and 1984; the São Paulo Biennial, 1998; and Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, 2007. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, held retrospective surveys of Davila’s work in 2006–2007. Davila participated in the 2015 8TH Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, with an exhibition of new monumental paintings. His work is included in every major museum collection in Australia, as well as significant international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Davila lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Live lots

Fig. 5 explores the alienation and aloneness of gender ambiguity. The uncertainty of the undecided. The figure appears in against a background of half night sky and half modernist composition. The intense gaze of the figure addresses the viewer and draws the viewer into the space.

LOT

Tu Hongtao

Large Mountain Gully 2018 Oil on canvas Unique 30 × 21cm Estimate: H K $ 100,000–150,000 Generously donated by the artist

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction In Large Mountain Gully (2018), Tu focused on the physicality of his brushstrokes and the ‘spirit of the ink’ that generally permeates paper. The formal qualities of Tu’s picture plane evoke those of Qing Dynasty painters Shi Tao and Gong Xian. His paintings have gradually metamorphosed from incorporating a mimetic Western three-dimensional space to suggesting an illusionistic ‘inward psyche’ that blurs reality and imagination. Based on sketches and photos of mountains distant, as well as close up, the present work took inspiration from Dunhuang murals, presenting massif with enrichment in detail and conciseness in structure. The artist entitled Large Mountain Gully deliberately to contrast with the relatively small scale of the composition, alluding to the moral of the Chinese verse ‘With mountain gully in one’s mind’. Tu Hongtao (b. 1976, China) explores the organically evolving relationship between image and technique through his gestural expression of landscape and abstraction. Tu was admitted to the affiliated high school of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1991. He graduated in 1999 from the China Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou with a specialisation in oil painting, and his first compositions were densely rendered Neo-Pop canvases that responded to the rapid social and environmental transformations of the era. Shifting his direction over the past decade, he has developed a unique crosscultural approach to art-making that synthesises Western oil

painting traditions with those of classical Chinese painting theory and calligraphic gesture. Inspired both by contemporary innovators Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and David Hockney and by classic Chinese masters Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang, Tu conveys his encounters with nature as interpreted through his own sensibilities of lyrical abstraction. The dynamic mountain scenes that surround Chengdu became a major inspiration in the creation of his own canvases that transcend time and space. Tu’s imagery interrupts linear narratives and employs an expansive use of space in the context of Eastern and Western visual traditions, embodying a contemporary abstract lyricism all his own. Past exhibitions include Melting Point of Desire, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017; The Landscape, Yeo Workshop, Singapore, 2016; Commentary, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2014; The Road Not Taken, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013; Labyrinth, Chinese Contemporary, New York, 2008; and Interlace, Soka Art Center, Beijing, 2007.

Paul Pfeiffer

LOT

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (17) 2004–2018 Matte C-print Edition 1 of 3 + 2 AP 204.5 × 167.5 × 7.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 300,000–500,000 Generously donated by the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, carlier | gebauer, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Galerie Perrotin

For Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series, the artist takes existing and archival images of individuals who have had a status of celebrity in history and puts them through a process of camouflage, that then becomes a process of de-contextualisation and creation of unknown reverence. Pfeiffer began with images of Marilyn Monroe and later in the series, started exploring basketball game photos.

Live lots

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, USA) grew up in the Philippines. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 and an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1994. He then participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (1997–98). In his photographs and video installations, which often have religious titles, Pfeiffer utilizes new technology to destabilize the experience of viewing, whether through the The artist on the latest evolution of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: erasure of the central athlete in sports spectacles or by splicing ‘[Images from the NBA archives] go back to the 1950s and are some scenes so as to trap figures in endless repetition. of the most striking images of sports legends, in the environment of the stadium or the arena with the crowds in the background. And so, Solo exhibitions of Pfeiffer’s work have been shown at the UCLA I’ve been selectively appropriating these images and manipulating Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, 2001; Whitney Museum of them to remove all the contextual detail—so that what remains is American Art in New York, 2002; Museum of Contemporary Art in not an absent figure but an intensified figure, by virtue of the fact Honolulu, 2003; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, 2003; that you are lacking some aspects of a context to place it in.’ Museum of Art at Middlebury College, Vermont, 2005; and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary at Kunstzone Karlsplatz Technische Universitat in Vienna, 2008. His work has also been included in major exhibitions such as Whitney Biennial, 2000; Venice Biennale, 2001; SITE Santa Fe, 2003; The Shapes of Space at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2007; and the Sydney Biennial, 2008. Pfeiffer lives and works in New York City.

LOT

Firenze Lai

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Signal 2018 Graphite Unique 31 × 41 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

In Lai’s ‘Situation Portrait’, Signal , she explores how the mind and body of a person adapt and react to different circumstances in their everyday life. Her paintings and drawings capture fragile moments from encounters between individuals and the external world. While the environment around the figures—seemingly situated in an abstract void—is almost always unclear, their poses, gestures and a strong sense of discomfort hint at more aggressive surroundings. Her works engage with the representation of subjectivity: seeking to depict interior life and psychological landscapes in utmost simplicity, drawing its viewers into the lifeworlds of individuals. Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong) has participated in Viva Arte Viva, 57T H International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 2017; The world precedes the eyes, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, 2016; Mobile M+: Moving Images, Midtown POP,

Hong Kong, 2015; Surround Audience: New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York, USA, 2015; A Hundred Years of Shame—Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2015; A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels, SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story, Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab, San Francisco, USA, 2015; The Cube Project Space, Taipei, Taiwan, 2014; Arko Art Center, Seoul, Korea, 2014; Para Site, Hong Kong, 2013; Social Factory—10TH Shanghai Biennale; Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2014. Her solo exhibitions include Turbulence, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, China, 2015; Day and Daylight, CL3, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2014; Absent-minded, Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2011; The Garden of Roundabouts, Hulahoop, Hong Kong, 2009; and The Citizens, Palace IFC, Hong Kong, 2006.

Anna Gaskell

LOT

Audition #8 2015 Vinyl paint, ink and pencil on paper Unique; 90 × 150 cm Estimate: HK $ 75,000–100,000 Generously donated by the artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne After studying art at The Chicago Art Institute, Anna Gaskell (b. 1969, USA) received her M.F.A. from Yale University. In her work, she frequently plays with ideas of the original and the fake, the real and the copy. For the series Wonder, 1995, she photographed identical twins who long for individuality; in the Rashomon-like film Erasers, 2005, twelve girls each tell their version of a single event; an argument between three children is reenacted by adults in Replayground, 2009; while Swimming Lessons, 2012, twists fact and fiction in the story of a group of evangelical teenagers. Erasers won Best Film in the Art Category at the Kunst Film Biennale in 2005; for her film, Replayground, Gaskell received the award for Best Documentary Short Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2009, and Gaskell has been the recipient of grants from NYFA, Artslink, and The Bohen Foundation in 2010. Her work is held in the permanent collections of major international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Deste Foundation, Athens; and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo.

Live lots

The work Audition #8 by Anna Gaskell is part of a series of drawings the artist created in 2014/2015 and which were exhibited at the Städtische Galerie Bremen in a dialogue exhibition between herself and artist Mia Unverzagt in 2015. Audition #8 ties in with the theme of ballet and dance, which was a central focus of the artist’s earlier works, for example in her experimental film work SPECJALNY ORSODEK SZKOLNO—WYCHOWAWCZKY BALLET (SOSW BALLET) from 2011 that revolves around the creation of discourse through movement. For the exhibition in 2015, Gaskell explained, ‘Bending my work around someone else’s ideas of how to make art immediately made me think of a dancer and their medium, their body. There is a film called ‘The Children of Theatre Street’, 1977, about the Kirov Ballet School, which is narrated by Princess Grace of Monaco. In this film, a group of judges sit and watch as the young children audition for the ballet school (which is now called the Mariinskiy). Instructors stand before the judges with the pupils, and hold their limbs, pushing, forcing, and bending their little bodies in a strange inspection of how far they can push. I’ve been carrying the images from this film around in my head for the last 13 years waiting for an opportunity to try and explain my fascination with how the genesis of a dancer is created.’

LOT

Antony Gormley

Feeling Material (Lift) 2015 Carbon and casein on paper Unique 38.5 × 27.9 cm Estimate: HK $ 200,000–300,000 Generously donated by the artist The Feeling Material drawings are the most precise mental maps, but also body diagrams. They are an attempt to evoke the body as a concentration within an energy field. They strongly relate to some sculptures where insider-like concentrations of highly wrought wire form taut cores at the centre of increasingly large orbital circuits. The artist on drawing: For me, drawing is a form of thinking. But it is also about the medium; using the intrinsic qualities of substances and liquids; a kind of oracular process that requires tuning in to the behaviour of substances as much as to the behaviour of the unconscious, like reading images in tea leaves, trying to make a map of a path of feeling, a trajectory of thought. Drawings have immediacy. In a good session, drawing can be like going for a rugged, physical adventure on a blustery day with changing conditions of light and rain. A day passed without drawing is a day lost.

Antony Gormley (b. 1950, UK) has had a number of solo shows at venues including Delos, Greece, 2019; Uffizi Gallery, Florence, 2019; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2019; Long Museum, Shanghai, 2017; Forte di Belvedere, Florence, 2015; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, 2014; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2012; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2011; Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2010; Hayward Gallery, London, 2007; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Malmö Konsthall, 1993; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, 1989. A major solo exhibition of his work is currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Permanent public works include the Angel of the North, Gateshead, England; Another Place, Crosby Beach, England; Exposure, Lelystad, The Netherlands; and Chord, MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany. Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a member of the Royal Academy since 2003. He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and knighted in 2014.

Frog King

LOT

‘Memory Love X’ - A + B 2019 Relief sculpture, mixed media—wood sticks, ropes Unique 153 × 50 × 30 cm, a set of 2 Estimate: HK $ 120,000–180,000 Generously donated by the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery

Live lots

‘Memory Love X’ - A + B celebrates the memories of life. In the past, presented here in a sculptural form, and with daily-life materials— people made knots to mark a memory, resulting in interesting art something the artist is known for. forms. In this work, Kwok draws on his own artistic vocabulary to Past exhibitions and related events include Awakenings: Art in translate these ephemeral objects into the form of a relief sculpture. Society in Asia, Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Museum of Modern (b.1947, China), also known as Frog King, Kwok Mang Ho and Contemporary Art Korea, National Gallery Singapore, 2019; Blue lives and works in Hong Kong. He is a pioneering conceptual and Container—Interlocal, Duisberg, DCKC Dusseldorf, Germany, 2018; performance artist who has been breaking boundaries in Hong Kong Frog King turns 70 experiments in ink since the 1970s, solo exhibition, and beyond since the late 1960s. Originally trained in ink painting and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2017; PMQ Formula-e Live calligraphy, he is one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artists Performance, PMQ, Hong Kong; Henderson Land Public Hoarding, H to explore the use of ink painting as a conceptual tool, incorporating Queen’s Central, Hong Kong, 2016; Asia Contemporary Art Exhibition it as both action and material into multiple-media installations and 2015, Jeonbuk Museum of Fine Art, South Korea, 2015; Taiping performances. With each of his pieces, he welcomes the viewer Tianguo, e-flux, New York, USA, 2014; MTR Public Art winner, into his conceptual utopia. Dancing Jelly Fish is in a composition Frogscape and Frogtopia Arch, Ho Man Tin Station, Hong Kong, 2013; reminiscent of traditional Chinese ink and calligraphic painting, and Frogtopia·Hongkornucopia, Hong Kong exhibition at the 54TH Venice Biennale, Italy, 2011.

LOT

Mika Rottenberg

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

m35 2011 Graphite, acrylic, colour pencil on paper Unique 30.6 × 41.2 × 2.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–80,000 Generously donated by the artist and Hauser & Wirth

m35 is a work on paper by Mika Rottenberg, devoted to a rigorous multi-media practice to explore ideas of labour and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Often using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, she seeks out locations around the world where specific systems of production and commerce are in place, such as a pearl factory in China, and a Calexico border town. Through the editing process, and with footage from sets built in her studio, Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg (b. 1967, Argentina) spent her formative years in Israel then moved to the US where she earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and followed this with an MFA at Columbia in 2004. Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

Angela Su

LOT

Anatomical Cabinet of Dr. Ruysch 2009 Ink on drafting film Unique 40 × 120 cm, set of 5 Estimate: HK $ 130,000–160,000 Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery

Angela Su (b. Hong Kong) received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts. Su’s works investigate the perception and imagery of the body, through metamorphosis, hybridity and transformation. Her pseudo-scientific drawings

often combine the precision of scientific sketches with a mythical aesthetics, challenging the audience’s visual sensation of the pleasure of pain. Her research-based projects include drawing, video, performative and installation works that focus on the interrelations between our state of being and scientific technology. In 2002, Su had her first solo exhibition De Humani Corporis Fabrica at Goethe-Institut Hong Kong. In 2019, Su was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to present a commission project in Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. She has also participated in group exhibitions including Time Test: International Video Art Research Exhibition, CAFA Art Museum, China, 2016; 17TH Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, 2010; and Hong Kong Eye, Saatchi Gallery, UK, 2012. Su currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

Live lots

Anatomical Cabinet of Dr. Ruysch refers to the Dutch botanist and anatomist from the 17th-18th century whose anatomical preparations included more than 2000 specimens. Angela Su’s drawings explore this notion of pleasure in pain through the juxtaposition of torture objects and human organs. The contrast of imageries and connotations gives Su’s works an elevated psychological intensity that challenges the audience’s sense of beauty, aesthetic standards and hidden desire. Her work draws influence from the Body without Organs, an idea introduced by Gilles Deleuze to describe a virtual body without stable structures. Here, pain is introduced to disrupt the senses, in order to free the body.

LOT

Joseph Beuys

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Samurai-Schwert (Samurai Sword) 1983 Multiple of felt and steel Edition 27 of 30 6.9 × 53.4 × 9 cm Estimate: HK $ 220,000–270,000 Generously donated by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg © Joseph Beuys Estate

Samurai Schwert [Samurai Sword] consists of a steel rod wrapped in layers of grey felt, these two materials juxtaposing ideas of conduction and insulation, obduracy and yielding, masculine and feminine. The characteristic use of felt in Beuys’s artworks is biographically linked to being shot down over the Crimea while serving on the Eastern Front in 1944. Beuys recounted being rescued by Tartars who wrapped him in insulating felt and fat— both of which would become central to his artistic vocabulary— transforming trauma into originary myth. Beuys began using felt in the 1960s, which is also when he introduced the samurai sword to symbolise his concept of Eurasia, a utopian fusion of European and Asian societies.

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986, Germany) is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20TH century. His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his ‘extended definition of art’ and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. The large range of highly symbolic mediums such as felt, fat or honey, is closely connected to his almost shamanic practice, which has been widely expressed in the field of performance and in pedagogic actions. By his unique artistic practice, Joseph Beuys has initiated numerous fascinating debates that are still relevant today. Other editions of Samurai Sword are in the collections of major institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London (as part of a vitrine); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Peter Steinhauer

LOT

West Island Flats, Hong Kong - 2009 2009 Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta paper Edition 1 of 15 92 × 114 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–80,000 Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li and the artist For more than 9 years, Peter Steinhauer called Hong Kong home. While many characterize the city as being impossibly fast-paced, money-oriented and concrete-smothered, Steinhauer’s passion compels him to visualize scenes of peacefulness and the underlying beauty of urban density. Walking through both narrow alleyways and open airs of the city, he looks for graphic elements within natural landscape, man-made structures as well as the organized chaos that make up our urban architecture.

Live lots

Peter Steinhauer (b. 1966, USA) focuses on architecture within urban landscape, natural landscape, Asian faces and man-made structure. He lived and worked in Asia for 20 years and is currently based in Washington, DC. Steinhauer is the recipient of numerous international photography awards, including a finalist for the 2014 and 2017 Lucie Awards, Ford Foundation grant for his multiyear work in Vietnam, Black and White Spider Award for Architecture, IPA and PX3 Paris awards, among others. His works have been included in Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Hong Kong and other public and private collections.

LOT

Alfredo Jaar

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Nguyen, Four Times 1992 Collage and pencil on paper Edition 16 of 24 (each print has its own unique sequence) 61 × 41 cm Estimate: HK $ 120,000–200,000 Generously donated by the artist Nguyen, Four Times is the result from Jaar’s trip to Hong Kong in the Fall of 1991 to investigate the living conditions of Vietnamese asylum seekers incarcerated there and being threatened with repatriation. During his visit to one of the refugee centres, he was followed by a little girl, Nguyen Thi Thuy, who he took five photographs of at approximately five-minute intervals. A related series, A Hundred Times Nguyen, recently featured in the Shanghai Biennale 2018, ‘Proregress’.

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, USA) lives and works in New York. Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker whose work has been shown extensively around the world. His work is often politically motivated, strategies of representation of real events, the faces of war and the globalised world. He has realised more than sixty public interventions around the world and more than fifty monographic publications about his work of art. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. Jaar received the Chilean Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 2013. Jaar’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; the MCA, in Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, in Los Angeles. Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Centre d’Art Santa Monica in Barcelona.

Zhu Jinshi

LOT

Over the Cliff 2006 Oil on canvas Unique 200cm × 250cm Estimate: HK $ 550,000–1,400,000

force of the individual. ‘Although I operate within the realm of form,’ Zhu has said, ‘my idea is to go beyond the limitations set by form and break free.’ He has also produced photographic, video, installation, and performance works.

Zhu’s solo exhibitions include Ganjiakou 303, Pearl Lam Galleries, Shanghai, China, 2018; Detached from Colour, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2016; Zhu Jinshi, Yuan Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2016; Zhu Jinshi, Blum & Poe, New York, USA, 2016; Performance in Paint: Zhu Jinshi, Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2015; and Zhu Zhu Jinshi (b.1954, China) belonged to a group of Chinese avant-garde Jinshi: Boat, a Yi Pai installation, organised by Pearl Lam Galleries artists named the Stars, which formed in 1979 to challenge aesthetic at Exchange Square, Hong Kong, 2015. Zhu Jinshi’s works have been conventions and exhibit their work publicly. The group, which collected internationally by notable public and private collections included the famous dissident artist Ai Weiwei, was granted an including Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; M+ Museum, exhibition in 1980 at Beijing’s National Gallery, a breakthrough in Hong Kong; MMCA, South Korea; Picasso Foundation, Spain; the Chinese cultural expression that helped to establish the creative Guangdong Museum of Art, China; and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada.

Live lots

Over the Cliff is a characteristic work by one of the most prominent Chinese artists, Zhu Jinshi. He is well-known for his abstract paintings whose surfaces are built up with thick, nearsculptural layers of oil paint. Resembling colourful landscapes, Zhu’s images range in palette and scale, but the artist is known to always apply his oil paint with spatulas and shovels. Producing dense lashings of colour, the artist’s method recalls the style and techniques espoused by the German Expressionists, who Zhu was profoundly influenced by during his years living in Berlin.

LOT

Maria Taniguchi

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Untitled 2019 Acrylic on canvas Unique 34 × 26.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 60,000–90,000 Generously donated by the artist Untitled is a recent work from Maria Taniguchi’s brick paintings series. Through this series, Taniguchi works and plays with the possibilities of form, engaging time and labour-intensive processes in seemingly neutral surfaces. The works in this series differ in size, but the content always remains the same. Each painting is slightly unique in its distributions of minor gradations within the grid—a result of the differing amounts of water and pigment used. These works reveal the hand of the artist and the associated connotations of labour. At a glance, the paintings may resemble the grid structures of densely populated urban spaces or sombre memorial monuments. Taniguchi resists calling the paintings meditative and instead considers them more of a record of passing time and a means of regulating her own production. Untitled has been inscribed by Taniguchi with ‘Gift to Para Site 2019.’

Maria Taniguchi (b. 1981, Philippines) won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015. Her work is held in a number of public and private collections including the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; QAGOMA, Brisbane; and the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include the 21st Biennale of Sydney, 2018; 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018; In Search of Southeast Asia, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2018; History of a vanishing present: A prologue, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, 2016; Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2016; Globale: New sensorium, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2016; The vexed contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, 2015; and the 8TH Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2015.

Cui Jie

LOT

Untitled 2017 Colour pencil on paper Unique 29.6 × 21 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Cui Jie (b. 1983, China) graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2006. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Antenna Space, Shanghai, and OCAT, Shenzhen, and her work has also been featured in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; chi K11 Art Space, Shanghai; and K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong. In 2018 she participated in An American City: Eleven Cultural Exercises, the inaugural edition of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, as well as The Marvelous Cacophony, the 57TH October Salon at the Belgrade Biennale. She now lives and works in Shanghai.

Live lots

Untitled is a study of urban public sculpture found in China during the 1980s and 90s. The sketch presents the typical sculptures portraying the uplifting imagery of the Young Pioneers of China, often found in schools and residential areas. Similar to Cui Jie’s research on urban architecture exploring the stylistic change from socialist realism to more modern and abstract aesthetics, the urban sculptures in her work present this intense change found in the arts, at the same time mirroring the ideological transformation that was taking place during the urbanisation process of China.

Silent lots

LOT

Nadim Abbas

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Tetra-safe, no splash 2013 Pool rail, glass tumblers, aquarium optimized tap water Edition 1 + 1AP Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist, with special thanks to Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Tetra-safe, no splash is from Abbas’s solo exhibition Tetraphilia which also featured as part of the 2014 Busan Biennale. The exhibition told the story of a word (tetra), not just by stringing together more words, but also with objects, images, tastes and sounds. It marked a concerted effort to move away from prescriptive meanings, subjecting the thought process to the peculiar logic of material life, as well as the avalanche of information that our contemporary age indulges in even the most trivial of things (tetra-trivia). It mingled the neurotic obsessions of the hobbyist with the floor plan of a swimming pool cum landscape garden. Abbas’s works reunited the sublime and the kitsch in sacred matrimony, as Abbas attempted to plumb the formless articulations that govern the workings of the ineffable (Tetragrammaton).

(b. 1980, Hong Kong) is a visual artist from Hong Nadim Abbas Kong. His work explores technologies of perception, culminating in the construction of complex set pieces where objects exist in an ambiguous relationship with their own image, and bodies succumb to the seduction of space. Abbas was awarded with the Asian Cultural Council Altius Fellowship and the HK Arts Development Award (Young Artist / Visual Arts) in 2014. Past exhibitions include: Phantom Plane, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Poor Toy, VITRINE, Basel; Proregress, 12TH Shanghai Biennale; Blue Noon, Last Tango, Zurich; Clouds Forests, 7T H Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art; Camoufleur, VITRINE, London; Chimera, Antenna Space, Shanghai; The Last Vehicle, UCCA, Beijing; 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York; Unseen Existence, HK Arts Centre; Going, going, until I meet the tide, 2014 Busan Biennale; The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else, Witte de With, Rotterdam; and Tetraphilia, Third Floor Hermés, Singapore.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

LOT

Porcelain Arabic Coffee Cups 2019 Digital Print on Paper Edition 1 of 5 21 × 29.7 cm and 21 × 73.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 48,180 Generously donated by the artist

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b. 1985, Jordan) is a ‘Private Ear’.

His interest in sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background as a touring musician and facilitator of DIY music. The artist’s audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and by organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International alongside researchers from Forensic Architecture. Abu Hamdan received his PhD in 2017 from Goldsmiths College London. He lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Abu Hamdan’s solo presentations have taken place at Witte De With, Rotterdam, 2019; Tate Modern Tanks and Chisenhale Gallery, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2018; Portikus Frankfurt, 2016; Kunsthalle St Gallen, 2015; Beirut in Cairo, 2013; The Showroom, London, 2012; and Casco, Utrecht, 2012. His works are part of collections at MoMA, Guggenheim, Van Abbe Museum, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.

Silent lots

Porcelain Arabic Coffee Cups is a work from Abu Hamdan’s Earwitness Inventory, comprised of 95 custom-designed and sourced objects all derived from legal cases in which sonic evidence is contested and acoustic memories need to be retrieved—a library of objects to be used specifically as mnemonic devices. These objects encompass both sounds that have been used in his interviews with earwitnesses to facilitate re-enactments of crimes, and sounds pertaining to stories in which surprising sonic analogies emerged, such as a building collapsing into a sinkhole ‘sounding like popcorn’. Abu Hamdan elaborates on a selection of these objects with texts from which one can read transhistorical vignettes, which together represent the collection as a whole—a collection which stands for a language that we do not yet speak, a language of and between objects.

LOT

Joël Andrianomearisoa

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Geometry 2018 Textile Unique 50 × 50 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and Primae Noctis Art Gallery

Although Andrianomearisoa does not usually imagine the final form of his installations, he aims to take the viewer to an unexpected and surprising place. Constantly reinterpreted and renewed, his artworks experiment with every possibility in order to create new languages: the monochrome is continuously challenged because ‘this is when an artwork makes sense,’ he declared. Being at the same time one and a thousand colours, the omnipresent black found in Geometry is a permanent challenge. His blackness unfolds in endless nuance. ‘For me, it is a challenge. In every piece, I have to find various colours, different postures of black’. It is not just a colour, but also an attitude. Black is enthralling, sometimes disturbing, but it makes sense everywhere, giving him the freedom to deconstruct and disintegrate the structure of the work. This work focuses on the formal problems of space, light, colour and their interaction, already at the base of the works of the German artist Josef Albers, suggesting unusual parallels with the teachings of the Weimar Bauhaus, to which the practice of the fabric, however, was reserved exclusively for women. The particularity of Andrianomearisoa’s work derives, therefore, from the psychological and emotional experiences faced by the artist who gives way to strong and important historical constructivist implications.

Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. 1977, Madagascar) first trained at an art school in Madagascar and subsequently rubbed shoulders with craftsmen, which put him in touch with many renowned international designers. In 2005, he graduated from École spéciale d’architecture, in Paris. His work explores many disciplines, from fashion to design, video to photography, scenography to architecture, installations to visual arts. As a part of this first pioneering wave of contemporary Malagasy artists, he has also actively participated in the cultural and artistic development of his country (Fashion festival Manja in 1998, the Sanga dance festival in 2003, Photoana festival in 2005, personal project 30 and Presque-Songes in 2007 and 2011, Parlez-moi in 2016). Throughout Andrianomearisoa’s career, his work has been shown at institutions including Maxxi in Rome, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the Centre Pompidou in Paris among many others. In 2016, he received the Arco Madrid Audemars Piguet Prize. He participated in different Biennials like Biennial de la Habana, Cairo Biennial, Dakar Biennial and in 2019 he represented Madagascar to the 58TH International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Julieta Aranda

LOT

Has it Happened Already 2012 Silk-screen on mirror Edition 4 of 10 80 × 60 × 0.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–38,000 Generously donated by the artist Julieta Aranda’s work spans installation, video and print media, and her works are inspired by various ideas, including circulation mechanisms, science fiction, space travel, or, like Has it Happened Already, by zones of friction, politicized subjectivity through the perception and use of time, and the notion of power over the imaginary.

Silent lots

Julieta Aranda (b. 1975, Mexico) is the co-director of the online platform e-flux and has developed the projects Time/Bank, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, all of which started in the e-flux storefront in New York, and have travelled to many venues worldwide. Past exhibitions and projects include the 56TH Venice Biennale, Venice; Inhuman, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Morphing Overnight, Seventeen Gallery, London; the 8TH Berlin Biennale, Berlin; Reluctant Narrator. Narrative Practices Across Media, Berardo Museum, Lisbon; Islands Off the Shores of Asia, Para Site, Hong Kong; Attention Economy, Museumquartier, Vienna; the 12 Bienal de Cuenca, Cuenca; The International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena de Indias; and If a body meet a body, Galería OMR, Mexico City.

LOT

Aung Myat Htay

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction My Heart (Face) 2016 Bronze Edition 1 of 5 + AP 180 × 55 cm Estimate: HK $ 60,000–90,000 Generously donated by the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery My Heart (Face) is part of a series of bronze sculptures entitled My Heart, in which Aung Myat Htay transposed the motifs of ancient spiritual traditions onto three life-size figures: Ogre, God and the Face. This series of works was initiated at the end of 2007 following the “Saffron Revolution” in Myanmar when the artist was inspired by the public’s solidarity, the way they stood together as if sharing one heart. Each work in this series has the face of either a god or an ogre cut into it, representing the two psychological controllers of the mind that drive our innermost actions. Aung Myat Htay’s work takes us back to the origins of man’s duelling personas.

Aung Myat Htay (b. 1973, Myanmar) is an artist and writer as well as a former teacher at the Department of Sculpture at the University of Art and Culture, Yangon. Aung Myat Htay’s artworks deal with transparency, identity and spirituality. Htay has presented work in several regions of Asia including Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. He has participated in various residencies and exhibitions including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan; Live Art, Banglore, India; and the Koganecho Bazaar International Art Festival, Yokohama, Japan. Htay was the recipient of the ACC Grant Award in 2014 and his work was featured in Inventory I at the Asian Cultural Council.

Marius Bercea

LOT

Thoughts on Safari 2015 Mixed media on paper Unique 66 × 48.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

Thoughts on Safari is a work on paper expressing Bercea’s ongoing interest in colour and patterning. Its composition emphasises the role of larger architectural structures as historical environments, holdovers from the past that contain shifting ideologies.

Silent lots

Marius Bercea (b. 1979, Romania) is a painter. He finds his subject matter in the clash of aesthetics within the urban environment, an interest stemming from the shift he witnessed as Romania transitioned from Communism into a free market economy. Bercea broadened his focus onto the convergence of ideologies the world over, reflecting these surreal situations through studies of architecture and topography together with an application of bold colour.

Marius Bercea’s recent solo exhibitions include: Full Rotation of the Moon, Muzeulde Artă Cluj- Napoca, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2017; (On) Relatively Calm Disputes, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US, 2016; Hypernova, Blain|Southern London, UK, 2014; Concrete Gardens, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, US, 2012; Remains of Tomorrow, Blain|Southern, London, UK, 2011; and Time will Tell, Chungking Project, Los Angeles, US, 2009. Group exhibitions include: The Wanderers: Contemporary Painting from Cluj, Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York, US, 2017; SEE Art Gates: States of Reality, 17TH Art Biennial, Pancevo, Bulgaria, 2016; and The Mapmaker’s Dream, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, US, 2015.

LOT

Monica Bonvicini

Desire 2010 Digital pigment print on Hahnemühle DFA William Turner 190 g/sqm AP 5 of 5, 9 editions 64 × 80 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Desire evokes the feelings of longing and craving, but also points to the more critical entaglement of desire in the world of advertising. Bonvicini’s practise investigates the relationship between architecture, power, gender, space, surveillance, and control, creating works that question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language, and the limits and possibilities attached to the ideal of freedom. Dry-humored, direct, and imbued with historical, political and social references, Bonvicini’s art never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the sites where it is exhibited, the materials that comprise it, and the roles of spectator and creator.

Monica Bonvicini (b. 1965, Italy) has an extensive history of exhibitions, most recent of which include Homosexualität_en, LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany, 2016; Forget All Instructions, Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland, 2015; Monica Bonvicini, Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014; Disegni, König Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 2013; and Cut ’n’ Paste, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013. Her work has been featured in prominent biennales including the 2015 Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures; the 8TH Berlin Biennale in 2014; and Intense Proximité, La Triennale, Paris, in 2012. Bonvicini has received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the Biennale di Venezia, 1999; the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst, from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2005; and the Rolandpreis für Kunst for art in the public from the Foundation Bremen, Germany, 2013.

Daniel Boyd

LOT

Untitled (NAC #1) 2019 Oil, charcoal and archival glue on digital print on paper mounted to linen Unique 80.5 × 91.5 × 4 cm Estimate: HK $ 65,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Silent lots

In Untitled (NAC #1), Boyd reveals the multiple connections to landscapes and myths found in Australian history, challenging the white perspective which has been the prominent narrator of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander stories. A painted veil of archival glue dots lends itself as an alternative lens to give us access to Plato’s cave, allowing us to explore the cultural and philosophical relationships to light and dark, the ‘other’ and the ‘enlightened’. Dynamic compositions are revealed only through the hundreds of pixelated ‘lenses’ applied to the canvas. Boyd has both Aboriginal and Pacific Islander heritage and his work traces this cultural and visual ancestry in relation to the broader history of Western art. Viewers are presented with glimpses of the outside and a reflection of the inside of us. In the cave, we are faced with ourselves and we are forced to revisit our own pasts and to look to our future.

The practice of Daniel Boyd (b. 1982, Australia) is internationally recognised for its manifold engagement with the colonial history of the Australia-Pacific region. Drawing upon intermingled discourses of science, religion and aesthetics, his work reveals the complexity of perspectives through which political, cultural and personal memory is composed. Boyd is the first indigenous Australian to win the prestigious Bulgari Art Award in 2014. Boyd has been exhibiting in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia and overseas since 2005. Notable group exhibitions include A beast, a god, and a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2018; Para Site, Hong Kong, 2018; TS1, Myanmar, 2018; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2018; Mondialité, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza at the Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, 2017; All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the 56TH Venice Biennale, 2015; Moscow International Biennale for Young Arts: A Time for Dreams, Moscow, 2014; and Regarding Picasso: Contemporary Artists’ Response to His Art at the Museo Picasso, Barcelona, 2014. A major solo exhibition Daniel Boyd: Bitter Sweet was also held in his home town at Cairns Regional Gallery, Queensland in 2017. Boyd’s practice is research-intensive; during a three-month residency at the Natural History Museum, he studied the relationship between aboriginal people and the British Empire. By presenting in-depth narratives, Boyd resurfaces what has been lost to history. According to the artist, it is important for native peoples in Australia to ‘continue to create dialogue from their own perspective, to challenge the subjective history that has been created.’ Boyd lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

LOT

Angela Bulloch

Night Sky Prints: Pluto2 2008 Set of 2 pigment prints on pure cotton Hahnemühle paper Unique Each framed: 61.2 × 61.2 × 3 cm Estimate: HK $ 55,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

The work of Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Canada) spans many forms, all of which manifest a fascination with systems, patterns and rules, and the creative territory between mathematics and aesthetics. Since graduating from Goldsmiths College in 1988 as part of the ‘Freeze’ generation of young British artists, Bulloch’s work has crystallised into a number of distinct but related strands; which include Pixel Boxes, Drawing Machines, Night Skies, and more recently Stacks.

The Night Sky series illustrates Bulloch’s ongoing fascination with the human perception of space, and its susceptibility to change as new scientific insights emerge. The artist selects an area of the sky based upon the primary constellations it contains; and using an astronomy software program extrapolates the view point to a position in the universe other than Earth. From here, three dimensional maps are produced, generating views of our solar system from ordinarily unreachable positions. Each work is a rendering of a unique locus in real space, but as we could never see it. Bulloch’s work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Museum Art Architecture Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal, 2019; Simon Lee Gallery, New York, NY, 2019; Omi International Arts Center, the Fields Sculpture Park, Ghent, NY, 2016; Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, 2016; Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, UAE, 2016; Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2012; Stadtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2011; and Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 2008. Her work is represented in major institutions and private collections worldwide, including Tate, London; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Le Consortium Dijon; De Pont, Tilburg and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. She currently works and lives in Berlin, Germany.

Chen Changwei

LOT

Skull 2005 Fiberglass, lacquer Edition 1 of 3 82 × 84 × 127 cm Estimate: HK $ 80,000–100,000

Chen Changwei (b. 1973, China) graduated from the Sculpture Department at the Yunnan Arts Institute with a Bachelor’s Degree in 2000. Past exhibitions include One Hundred Years of Sculpture, City Sculpture Art Center, Shangha, 2005; Young Chinese Art, Neue Galerie Landshut, Munich, Germany, 2005; Beauty, Chen Xindong International Contemporary Art Space, Beijing, 2005; Montpellier International Biennial Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Arts, Montpellier, France, 2005; Awakening: La France Mandarine, Shanghai, Beijing, 2004; Nation, Love Knot Contemporary Art Exhibition, Eastlink, Shanghai, 2004; and Anxiety and Preservation, Nordica, Kunming, 2004. He was awarded the Prize for the Artist with the Most Potential, The First Independent Youth Image Festival, Xi’an, 2004; Prize of Excellence, National Art Exhibition, Beijing, 2002; and First Prize, The Second Exhibition of Contemporary Sculptures, Kunming, 2001.

Silent lots

Skull exemplifies Chen Changwei’s interest in iconic forms. Many of the objects Chen makes portray an irreverent manner that is by no means light-hearted. Chen knows he cannot challenge these iconic forms, what he can do is slowly subdue their power by eroding their features, rendering them less potent. He often finishes these works in a fashionable enamel gloss to distract from the traditional form. Chen looks at these iconic images through the eyes of his own generation, through a perspective that is often distant and imprecise.

LOT

Chen Qiulin

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Series of Untitled 3 2005 Photograph Edition 4 of 8 77 × 98 × 7 cm Estimate: HK $ 70,000–100,000 Generously donated by the artist In 2002, Chen Qiulin returned to her childhood town of Wanxian, Sichuan to document the landscapes and scenes, before their anticipated disappearance and destruction following the construction of Three Gorges Dam. Chen travelled back and forth between Wanxian, Yunyang, Fengjie, Wushan, and Dachang ancient towns, recording the demolition and the remaining ruins brought about by the large-scale hydroelectric project. As a farewell to the sites, she performed excerpts from the Beijing opera Farewell My Concubine in these locations. Three years later, Chen returned to the Three Gorges Dam to perform the Broken Bridge chapter from the Sichuan opera Legend of the White Snake on the container dock alongside the Yangtze River, this performance is reflected in Series of Untitled 3. Environmental alteration, modernised construction projects, and extravagant theatre, all merge in a manner that is absurd yet pointed, in these idiosyncratic and melancholic scenes.

Chen Qiulin (b. 1975, China) grew up in Chongqing Wanzhou City, which was submerged in 2003 by the Yangtze River, as a result of the Three Gorges Project. Because of the Three Gorges Project, a million residents were forced to migrate, leaving the hometown that many had lived in for generations. Chen’s well-known Migration works consider the physical and psychological impact of this programme to the city’s inhabitants. She is among China’s younger generation of artists whose works concern the social impact of China’s political and economic reforms. Chen constantly summarises and visualises the status quo along with various conflicts arising from the challenges of both modern life and the traditional value system. Chen Qiulin graduated from the Print Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. She has had solo exhibitions at the Today Art Museum, Beijing; University Art Museum, University of Albany; Max Protetch, New York; Long March Space, Beijing; Big Factory, Shanghai; and Internet Affairs, Chengdu. She has participated in numerous group shows in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; the 7T H Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea; China Power Station Part 2, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; and The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Albright-Knox Gallery and University of Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo, New York; One Hundred Names, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia; and An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. In 2007 she was awarded an Asian Cultural Council grant. Her work is in the collections of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; the Denver Art Museum; the Bohen Foundation, New York; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Chen Wei

LOT

The Bunch of Keys 2011 Archival inkjet print Edition 1 of 5 + 1 AP 60 × 45 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts

Chen Wei (b. 1980, China) has exhibited extensively throughout Asia, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Shanghai, The Contemporary Art Institute in Beijing and the 2009 Seoul International Photography Festival. He has been the focus of solo exhibitions in China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Chen’s work features in the Rubell Family Collection and in 2013 was included in their 28 Chinese group exhibition in Miami. Silent lots

The Bunch of Keys is about a father. Chen Wei’s photographs are visually enigmatic, characterised by their uncompromising technical virtuosity and the elaborate scenes he creates, which are at once cinematic, painterly and fantastical. Internationally-renowned artist Chen Wei is part of a new generation of Chinese contemporary artists using photography as an instrument to capture human encounters within a rapidly developing China. Distinct from their ‘New Wave’ predecessors who placed political and social criticism at the core of their artistic message, Chen Wei and his contemporaries focus on intellectual freedoms and the individual’s place in modern China.

LOT

Ali Cherri

Hybrid (K) 2018 Plaster clay, bamboo, dried grass, fiber, wood Unique 37 × 17 × 23.5 cm Estimate: H K $ 80,000–110,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galerie Imane Farès

Hybrid (K) is the product of a collaboration between Ali Cherri and Deven Bane using discarded sculptures and idols of gods and goddesses, dredged from a pond in Mumbai. These idols are grafted with other objects to create a new hybrid. Cherri often uses discarded fragments of sculptures, figures, and objects that might or might not have had a religious, symbolic, artistic, or cultural value in their previous lives. He grafts them onto one another, playing with the idea of the fluidity of meaning and its contextual and historical transformation. The artist is interested in destabilising the borders between human and non-human, as well as between the cultural, religious, and profane, imposed through the instruments of modern museums. The grafting method he is referring to is a horticultural technique in which tissues of plants are joined so as to continue their growth together. The advantage of grafting is the ability to induce fruitfulness without the need for completing the juvenile phase. Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Lebanon) belongs to this generation of Lebanese artists born during the Civil War and whose artistic practice was greatly marked by this unstable context. After studying Graphic Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB), he received a

Masters degree in Performing Arts from DasArts, Amsterdam in 2005. His polymorphous practice feeds upon, performance, cinema and art history. These multiple references show in his early videos, where his own body acts as a pivot in a refined aesthetic composition. Between 2005 and 2014, he focused on dissecting the geopolitical situation of the Middle East, with a highly poetical visual language. His recent projects concentrate on the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives. This thematic change is the sign of a philosophical shift. Ali Cherri still affirms a close intimacy between poetics and politics, but is now convinced that violence can be studied without being shown. Cherri lives and works in Paris and Beirut. Cherri’s work has been featured in several recent solo exhibitions including at Clark House, Bombay, India; Jönköping County Museum, Jönköping, Sweden; CAPC, Bordeaux and Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon. Recent group exhibitions include Immortality: 5TH Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ural Optical-Mechanical Plant, Ekaterinburg, Russia; An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, China and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Le vent et les oiseaux m’encouragent, Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, Hauterives, France; Gaïa, que deviens-tu?, Maison Guerlain, Paris, France; Punk Orientalism, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada; MAC International Prize, The MAC, Belfast, Dublin; Beyond Borders, Bogossian Foundation/Villa Empain, Brussels, Belgium; D’archéo d’art, quand art et archéologie se regardent, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Seine-Saint-Denis, Saint-Denis, France; Melle International Biennale of Contemporay Art, Melle, France; Léonard de Vinci, le rêve du vol, Le Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France; and But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy.

Heman Chong

LOT

Walkabout / James Vance Marshall 2011 Painting on canvas Unique 61 Ă&#x2014; 46 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000â&#x20AC;&#x201C;65,000 Generously donated by the artist and Rossi & Rossi

Silent lots

Walkabout / James Vance Marshall takes its title from a novel first published in 1959 about two American children who get lost in the Australian Outback and are helped by an Indigenous Australian who encounters them on his Walkabout. Since 2009, artist Heman Chong has simply created paintings with different book titles, as if he is redesigning each book cover. This fusion of text and painting positions the work in a transitional phase between the two. As the titles of each work references books, in which the works are not, while the paint on the canvas fluctuates between art and design. This body of work stimulates an investigation into the imbalanced relationship of text and image, books as objects, painting as design, and design as art.

Heman Chong (b. 1977, Malaysia) is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. His practice can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. He received his Masters in Communication Art & Design from The Royal College of Art, London in 2002. He lives and works on Depot Road, Singapore. He has participated in numerous international biennales including 20TH Sydney Biennale, 2016; 10TH Gwangju Biennale, 2014; Asia Pacific Triennale 7, 2012; Performa 11, 2011; Momentum 6, 2011; Manifesta 8, 2010; 2nd Singapore Biennale, 2008; SCAPE Christchurch Biennale, 2006; Busan Biennale, 2004; 10TH India Triennale, 2000; and represented Singapore in the 50TH Venice Biennale, 2003. He has recently produced a series of interconnected exhibitions located in Art Sonje Center (Never, A Dull Moment), 2015; South London Gallery (An Arm, A Leg and Other Stories), 2015; Rockbund Art Museum (Ifs, Ands, Or Buts), 2016; 72-13 (Because, the Night, 2017) and Swiss Institute (Legal Bookshop (Shanghai)), 2018.

LOT

Lubna Chowdhary

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

The Reward 2018 Ceramic Unique 50 × 85 cm Estimate: HK $ 60,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary

The Reward evokes the characteristically hybrid architecture of Asian and South Asian cities, their informal conjunctions of tradition and modernity and the rational and spiritual. The tableaux brings together multiple, overlapping or closely installed, two-dimensional forms recalling a view of a distant cityscape, an imagined world, captured in time. Lubna Chowdhary’s research and practice reveal a particular interest in the cross-fertilisation of cultures and cultural encounters. The resulting works are often metaphorical, but sometimes make reference to real objects.

Lubna Chowdhary (b. 1964, Tanzania) arrived in the north of England in 1970. Chowdhary has a BA Hons from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Masters degree in Ceramics from the Royal College of Art. Recent group exhibitions include: Towards New Canons— ceramics and contemporary art in Great Britain, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan, 2019; On the Way to the Motif. Contemporary Artists Encounter Willi Baumeister, Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese, Berlin, 2019; Kochi Biennale, Kochi, 2018-2019; Speech Acts: ReflectionImagination-Repetition, Manchester Art Gallery, 2018; Mind Forged, Frestonian Gallery, London, 2017; Windows, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, 2017. Her work is held in the following public collections: Abingdon Museum, Oxfordshire; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; The Drumcroon Arts Centre, Wigan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Leicester City Museum; Mead Gallery, Warwick; Nottingham Castle Museum; Poole Museum, Dorset; Oldham Art Gallery; and Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead. Chowdhary lives and works in London.

Abraham Cruzvillegas

LOT

The winning bidder will receive a digital image from the artist to be used as a reference. Subsequently, the mural must be produced by hand and at a scale (according to the dimensions of the wall where it will be placed) by a commercial artist. If the buyer decides to use his/her wall for other purposes, or the property is sold to a third party, the work shall be permanently destroyed by means of painting over it. Further conditions apply. Please contact Chloe Wong at chloewong@para-site.art for full details.

Primantropofilia 5 2019 Mural on wall Unique Min. height 169 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–75,000 Generously donated by the artist The artistic process of Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico) is deeply influenced by his surroundings. Rather than being defined by a particular medium, many of his projects are linked by the platform of autoconstrucción: a concept that draws from the ingenious, precarious, and collaborative building tactics implemented by the people living in Colonia Ajusco, his childhood neighbourhood in Mexico City. His work has been included on biennials such as: Honolulu, US; Sydney, Australia, 2018; Nicaragua Biennial, 2016; Sharjah Biennial 12, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2015; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012; 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, 2011; 6th Biennial Media City Seoul, Seoul, South Korea, 2010; 10th Biennial de Havana, Havana, Cuba, 2009; The 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003, among others. He is a Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris.

Silent lots

Primantropofilia 5 will be the representation of a baboon, based on a previous work on paper by Cruzvillegas, transformed into a unique mural, painted exclusively for the winning bidder’s wall. Cruzvillegas has been drawing primates for many years, at first as a therapy or as some inefficient or meditative practice, he soon started discovering amazing similarities between cynocephaly, orangutans, giant baboons, catarrhines and his own parents, brothers, aunts, grandparents and cousins. Beyond this, he developed an interest in the way in which they appeared in popular culture and also in political histories. In Mexico, cartoonists are called moneros because they draw monitos (funny characters, literally ‘little monkeys’). But also, military governors from dictatorial and coup regimes in Mexico were colloquially called gorillas, for Cruzvillegas, a great injustice to these animals.

LOT

Horia Damian

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Untitled 1976 Lithography Edition 125 + 10 AP 70.5 × 101 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galeria Plan B

From the 1970s, Horia Damian created monumental, symbolic sculptures giving them a metaphysical perspective that would distinguish them from the contemporary works of American Minimal Art. In 1975, he constructed The Hill for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Thomas Messer, the director of the Museum at that time, wrote about Damian‘s works: ‘in all of these, Damian aims for essentially the same results and all his concepts, therefore, have parallel meaning within his total oeuvre. Damian‘s art, based upon impeccable craftsmanship and an obsessive preoccupation with materials, cannot be faulted for lacking concreteness. But despite the sparseness and reductiveness of Damian’s structures, minimal and formalistic interpretations do not suffice in this case. For his explicit references are to a celestial rather than a terrestrial space, to an ideal rather than a palpable world order, and to sacral rather than temporal realities.’ The lithography was created based on the drawing (study) for The Hill, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum.

Horia Damian (b. 1922, Romania – 2012) lived and worked in Paris, France. Selected exhibitions include: Plan B, Berlin, 2019; Espace Niemeyer, Paris, 2019; The National Museum of Art, Bucharest, 2009; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, 2007; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2002, 1980; The Venice Biennale, 1993, 1942; Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992; Grand Palais, Paris, 1983; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1976; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1975; Neue Galerie, Aachen, 1974; Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1972; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1962; Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo, 1957; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1957; and Stadler Gallery, Paris, 1957.

David Douard

LOT

THEY) 2018 Sculpture, bronze, aluminum, steel Unique 40 × 30 × 19.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

David Douard (b. 1983, France) graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011. His work has been shown in many international institutions such as: KURA. c/o Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan, Italy, 2018; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2014 and 2018; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, 2015 and 2017; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany, 2016; Fridericianum, Kassel, Switzerland, 2015; Sculpture Center, New York, United States, 2014; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway, 2014; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris, France, 2012. David Douard has participated in several biennials: 12TH Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France, 2013; Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan, 2014; Asia Culture Center - Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, 2018. David Douard was in residency at The Academy of France in Rome - Villa Medici, 2017–2018. He currently lives and works in Paris, France.

Silent lots

Language is the very basis of David Douard’s work. The texts and poems he collects on the Internet are manipulated and transformed in order to become a vital flow, feeding into his sculptures. Using language as an ingredient, David Douard redefines space as hybrid and collective by injecting anonymous, chaotic, deviant, ill and frustrating poems into it. As he recreates an infected environment where the real world used to be, the fantasy brought by new digital technologies expands into these environments. THEY) is a sculpture composed of found and made materials, the most recognisable of which recalls both a Guy Fawkes mask used in uprisings around the world but also the Joker from Batman.

LOT

Dr. Lakra

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Untitled 2016 Acrylic, watercolour and pastel on vintage magazine Unique 45 × 41 × 3 cm Estimate: HK $ 75,000–100,000 Generously donated by the artist and kurimanzutto

Untitled (Ladies) combines Dr. Lakra’s fascination with tattooing and contemporary art. Lakra’s highly stylised practice is constructed out of popular images and symbols belonging to marginal and displaced groups, such as gang tattoos and prison drawings. As explained in the catalogue for Lakra’s 2010 solo show at the ICA Boston: ‘[Lakra] creates tension by altering old documents, charged with historical connotations through intentionally coarse and vulgar markings. Present nevertheless in his work are the ancient traditions of global corporal art, Mexican graphic art, popular entertainment, and art history.’ These formal concerns are encapsulated in his series of works, Untitled (Ladies) (2013-14), where the female portrait - a recurring feature throughout the history of art - is restaged with each of the five women becoming one of his tattooed muses. In these works, the female skin becomes of central interest as Lakra reworks the surface with graphic alterations.

The work of Jerónimo López Ramírez (b. 1972, Mexico), better known as Dr. Lakra, is characterised by irreverent and provocative images that transgress established norms, leaving the viewer teetering between attraction and repulsion. While he is best known for his drawings and paintings on appropriated posters, erotic magazines, and postcards, his practice encompasses mural painting, collage and sculpture. Through these different mediums he explores his interests in anthropology and ethnography, documenting his fascination with the taboos, fetishes, myths, and rituals of different cultures. An avid collector of diverse objects, Lakra views the search for materials and images as an essential aspect of his practice. His compositions combine historical references and contemporary images, incorporating quotes from popular culture and intermingling them with religious and social iconographies. The way he juxtaposes and refashions these various elements reveals a deep understanding of art history, as well as a subversive sense of humour. Dr. Lakra dismantles and subverts dominant ideologies to question what is considered civilised or barbaric, correct or incorrect, ‘high’ or ‘folk’ art. Dr. Lakra’s work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Akvarelle Museet, Skarhamm, Sweden, 2015; Hostelbro Kunstmuseum, Hostelbro, Denmark, 2012; Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico, 2011; The Drawing Center, New York, United States, 2011; The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, United States, 2010. His work is represented in major institutions and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum and the Walker Art Center. Dr. Lakra currently lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Mandy El-Sayegh

LOT

mutations in blue, white and red (stay); mutations in blue, white and red (two) 2018 Ink on acrylic and laser jet print on handmade paper Unique Diptych, each: 36.8 × 27 × 2.5 cm (framed) Estimate: HK $ 65,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Malaysia) received her BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by her MFA in painting in 2011 from the Royal College of Art, London. Selected solo exhibitions include: Cite Your Sources, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2019; Mutations In Blue, White And Red, Lehmann Maupin, New York; Mandy El-Sayegh: assembled at Tell el Ajjul, The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, 2018; Figured Ground: Meshworks, Carl Kostyal, London, 2017; Taking Part, Galerie Mihai Nicodim, Bucharest, 2016; this is a sign, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, 2016. Selected group exhibitions include: Ecologies of Darkness. Building Grounds on Shifting Sand, 2019; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, Sharjah, 2017; and Room Services, New York Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, New York, 2016. In 2017, El-Sayegh was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, London. El-Sayegh lives and works in London, England.

Silent lots

Mutations in blue, white and red is a meditation on the construction (and breakdown) of systems and uncontrolled growth. Here, the artist references her long-time fascination with and study of anatomical diagrams and drawings. Within the figures is an exploration of what it means to create code, and assign meaning to it. Mimicking DNA script/genetic codes (AUG - AUC - UCG) which are the building blocks that form our physical beings, El-Sayegh combines words and phrases borrowed from pop culture, political events, media, etc. She is interested in the interaction of bodies with the structures (political, social, economic), that contain them.

LOT

Jes Fan

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Object for object 2018 Glass, aqua-resin Unique 20 × 20 × 20 cm Estimate: HK $ 15,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist and Empty Gallery Consisting of a hand-blown orb of pigmented glass cradled by a biomorphic pedestal, Object for object echoes in miniature Fan’s recent sculptures in which organic glass shapes are supported by porous frameworks modeled from wood and aqua-resin. Inspired by Fan’s research into scholar’s rocks and their intricately carved wooden bases, Object for object uses the formal relationship between pedestal and object to explore thematics of holding, care-giving, and symbiosis whilst also challenging the arbitrary privileging of certain bodies over others. By navigating intersections of identities, Jes Fan’s work embodies the pliable space between binary categories. Fan uses materiality to understand otherness, as it relates to identity politics including gender, race, and labor.

Jes Fan (b. 1990, Canada) was raised in Hong Kong. Fan is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, Recess Art Session Residency, Bemis Center Residency, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, Pioneer Works Residency, and the John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally; selected exhibitions include Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery, London, UK; Paradox: Haptic Body in the Age of AI at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA; An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and In Search of Miss Ruthless, Para Site, Hong Kong. Fan will be participating in the Sydney Biennale and Liverpool Biennale in 2020. Fan’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, Hyperallergic, AsiaArtPacific, BOMB, and Frieze.

Chitra Ganesh

LOT

She the Question, Amnesia’s Golden Fishhook 2012 Archival lightjet print Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP 25 × 91 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

The visual vocabulary of Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975, USA) draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images. The process of automatic writing is central to her practice and emerges from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss. By layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh considers alternate narratives of sexuality and power.

Silent lots

Ganesh graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics. She earned her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been widely exhibited around the world, including at Para Site, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; PS1/MoMA, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Rubin Museum of Art, New Originally commissioned by the Gothenburg Kunsthalle, Sweden, York, NY; the Walker Art Center, New York, NY; Minneapolis, MN; the She the Question, Amnesia’s Golden Fishhook, is part of a series of 25 Asia Society, New York, NY; the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; prints that comprise a comic book called, She the Question. Inspired the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; ZKM Center for Art and by traditional Indian comics such as Amar Chitra Katha, as well Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, as Archie, Japanese Manga and a variety of contemporary graphic Turin, Italy; the Saatchi Museum, London, United Kingdom; Museum novels, the works take on a form of speculative fiction challenging of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Göteborgs Konsthall, popular narratives of sexuality and power. Gothenburg, Germany; the Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre, Gwangju, South Korea; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Arthotek Kunstverein, Göttingen, Germany; the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, India; Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Italy; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA.

LOT

María García-Ibáñez

Cradle 2016 Graphite and watercolour on Arches 300 gsm paper Unique 120 × 80 cm Estimate: H K $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist and Puerta Roja

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction The painstakingly detailed pencil drawing Cradle explores memory and intimacy through everyday iconography. García-Ibáñez examines weaving techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation within the context of a wider series called Aranda, meaning ploughed land. The promised land that García-Ibáñez’s objects speak of, is delimited and in constant expansion, thanks to the work of ploughing, weaving, looking for food and for shelter. Drawing is an essential part of María’s practice and the root of her wider body of work. It allows her to open up a propositional discourse, which surfaces in a more or less intuitive form, to explore a variety of fields, from biology to geology, sociology and history. Whilst her research demonstrates a deep intellectual concern, María’s true obsession is the creative process itself.

The work of María García-Ibáñez (b. 1978, Spain) displays a simplicity of line, purity and elegance that almost betrays the deep discourse and moral dilemmas that are embodied in her practice. María’s works reflect a reconciliation between science and aesthetics, contemporary digital techniques and traditional craftsmanship, the views of the old and the ‘new’ worlds, the anatomical construction of the human body and its soul. María lives between her native Spain and Mexico, where she currently works. She has participated in a number of cultural projects and has held solo and collective exhibitions in Asia, Europe and Mexico. As a young artist, she was recognised and broadly supported with several production grants including the residence grant for creators from Ibero-America supported by the main Cultural Councils and Foreign Affairs ministries of Spain and Mexico. María was invited to participate in Mystical Path at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey (MARCO). In 2015, her work Molecule was one of the 65 selected works—amongst 3,487 inscribed—for the XI FEMSA Bienal, one of the most recognised biennales in the Americas. Most recently, María was awarded the Basu Foundation Residency for the Arts in Kolkata, India, at Estampa Art Fair.

Gauri Gill

LOT

Untitled, from The Mark on the Wall 2016 Silver gelatin print Edition 1 of 7 39 × 51cm (framed) Estimate: HK $ 25,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist Since 1999 Gauri Gill has been visiting and working in rural Rajasthan. From this experience, Gill has created a large archive called Notes from the Desert that contains various narratives and sub-series. One sub-series is The Mark on the Wall, in which Gill documents drawings made by local artists, children and teachers in government schools in Rajasthan under the now-lapsed Leher Kaksha scheme, initiated by the state to help children learn visually from the walls in their classrooms. From the most tentative marks to those ever more sophisticated, from determined depictions of children making their way to school to individualistic expressions of nature, from maps of the village to symbols of the State, what these fragments choose to express—to represent, point to, aspire to, or impart as learning—offers revealing glimpses of the collective mind of a rural community.

Gauri Gill (b. 1970, India) earned a BFA (Applied Art) from the College of Art, New Delhi; BFA (Photography) from Parsons School of Design/ The New School, New York; and MFA (Art) from Stanford University, California. She has exhibited widely internationally, including the Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kochi Biennale; 7TH Moscow Biennale. Recent exhibitions include: A beast, a god, and a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2018; Para Site, Hong Kong, 2018; TS1, Myanmar, 2018; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2018; Traces, in dialogue with Jean Tinguely’s Mengele-Totentanz, curated by Roland Wetzel, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2018; Project 108: Gauri Gill, curated by Lucy Gallun, PS1 MoMA, New York, 2018. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography.

Silent lots

Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include her ongoing Notes from the Desert series. She has also explored human displacement and the migrant experience in The Americans and What Remains. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. In her most recent body of work, Acts of Appearance,

(2015–), the artist has worked closely with the paper mache artists of the Kokna tribe in Maharashtra, using unique masks to tell fictional stories improvised together of contemporary life in the village. Working in both black and white and colour, Gill’s work addresses the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in it, there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.

LOT

Beatriz González

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Serie Displacement recto and verso 2017 Silkscreen 4 silkscreens 21/28 , 1 silkscreen 17/28, 1 silkscreen 13/28 81 × 34.5 cm (3) / 58 × 36 cm (3) Estimate: HK $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by Casas Riegner Displacement verso and recto is a series of six silkscreens in two formats. They are part of a group of works that centres on forced displacement resulting from either political unrest or natural phenomena. These images represent people who carry their belongings on their backs, as a universal symbol, they remind us of the refugees around the world, from those who are arriving in Europe today, to the ongoing Colombian internal migration, to the Venezuelan diaspora communities. Beatriz González‘s artistic practice explores the socio-political concerns of post-modern Colombia. Closely entangled with the violent history of her generation, her works often address the tragic moments of this troubled era. While always innovative and unpredictable in terms of subject matter and artistic strategies, the depth and intensity of Gonzalez’s approach to individual and collective grief is unparalleled in contemporary art.

Beatriz González (b. 1932, Colombia) studied art at Andes University, Bogotá, 1959-1962, and engraving in the Van Beldende Kunsten Academy, Rotterdam, 1966. She is considered one of the most influential artists in Latin America, and the teacher of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. She lives and works in Bogotá. Her work was featured in the XI São Pablo Biennale, 1971; the 38TH Venice Biennale, 1978; 8TH Berlin Biennale, 2014; and Documenta 14, 2017. The artist had major retrospective exhibitions in Colombia (Museo La Tertulia, Cali 1976; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá 1984; Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín 2011); Venezuela (Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas 1994); United States (Museo El Barrio, New York 1998, PAMM and MFAH 2019); and Europe (CAPC, Bordeaux 2017; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 2018; KW Contemporary art, Berlin 2018). Her work is part of many important collections such as that of MoMA, New York; Tate, London; MFAH, Houston; and PAMM, Miami.

Daniel Guzmán

LOT

Untitled, ‘Réplicas’ from the series El hombre que debería estar muerto pero que resucitó a otra vida 2017 Pencil, conté pencil, charcoal and pastel on kraft paper Unique 62.5 × 60.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 60,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and kurimanzutto

Untitled, from the series El hombre que debería estar muerto, pero que resucitó a otra vida (2017), which translates to ‘The man who should be dead, but who was resurrected to another life’, uses graphic imagery to play with notions of immortality, death and faith systems. Through bizarre character creations, this new series humorously, yet seriously, looks at the concept of coming back to life after death. In Guzmán’s works, figures such as Darth Vader are used as visual rhetoric to demonstrate an awareness and interest in the many ways a number of fictional creations have a dying-and-rising quality, one that dies and resurrects.

Silent lots

The characters in Untitled, from the series El hombre que debería estar muerto, pero que resucitó a otra vida have their own lives and their own voices. They rebel against the viewer’s static gaze with cartoon-like forms that seem unfinished, in the process of becoming. The medium format of the drawings allows the viewer to absorb the totality of the composition and submerge themselves in an image that inspires fear, respect, occasional laughter; one that unfolds and comes together again between voluptuous curves, tongues, and tentacles with eyes that multiply with unbridled abundance. More than illustrating an error in cellular reproduction, for Guzmán ‘these drawings seek to represent how the universe is deformed, how matter dissolves and bends in order to recombine in front of our eyes.’

Voracious reader and incurable music lover, Daniel Guzmán (b. 1964, Mexico) digests, absorbs and recombines musical and literary references at his own discretion. His work is marked by an almost autobiographical sincerity. Comics and cartoons, song lyrics, Pre-Hispanic iconography and sensational press clippings— residue of the artist’s daily life in Mexico City and, more recently, in Guadalajara—combine and reconfigure as part of his vocabulary. Resulting from a constant, disciplined search, his drawings are guided by his hand’s intuition, which translates his references and imagination onto paper. Guzmán earned his BFA in 1993 from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City. In 2000, he was a resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. He has been the recipient of various grants and awards from the Mexican Ministry of Culture, including Sistema Nacional de Creadores, 2005); FONCA: Jóvenes Creadores, 1997; and the 1st Place from the II Concurso de Instalación Ex Teresa Arte Actual, 1996. Daniel Guzmán: Chromosome Damage, presenting one hundred of his drawings with texts by artist Gabriel Kuri; anthropologist Elizabeth Baquedano, Aztec culture specialist; and Mary Doyle, director of the Drawing Room was published to accompany his exhibition at Drawing Room, London in 2014-15. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO, USA; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, USA; BUAP, Puebla, Mexico.

LOT

Federico Herrero

Untitled 2017 Monotype Unique 50 × 40 cm each Estimate: HK $ 20,000–45,000 Generously donated by the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

Herrero’s work, Untitled, is strongly influenced by the landscape and the bright colours of San José, the city where he was born and still lives. Equally influenced by Chilean draughtsmen and painter Roberto Matta, who once described his working process as somewhere between intuition and improvisation, Herrero began to create a coherent visual output – an image world in which the landscape and geometric structures, the organic and the architectural are conceptually and materially combined into one. Not only working on canvas, he also paints on walls, façades, playgrounds and city sidewalks, thus critically reflecting on modern life between the built and the natural.

Federico Herrero (b. 1978, Costa Rica) is one of today’s leading Central American artists. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Young Artists at the 2001 Venice Biennial and represented Latin America at the Biennial in 2009. He has widely exhibited internationally at the MCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; 21ST Century Art Museum, Tokyo; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His current and upcoming institutional exhibitions are at the MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporâneo de Niterói, Niterói, 2019; Museo Nacional de Costa Rica, San José, 2020; and Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal, 2021.

Ho Tzu Nyen

LOT

4 × 4—Episodes of Singapore Art 2005 4 short films, approx. 20 mins each Edition 7 of 100 Estimate: HK $ 10,000–20,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery

In an attempt to shift the practice of art from the manufacture of objects to the production of ‘discursive events’, Ho Tzu Nyen wrote and directed four short films that narrated key junctures in the development of art in Singapore. The result is 4×4—Episodes of Singapore Art, 2005, a series of four documentaries on native artists that aired on Singapore Television. Episode 1: Cheong Soo Pieng: A Dream of Tropical Life Episode 2: Cheo Chai Hiang: A Thousand Singapore Rivers Episode 3: Tang Da Wu, The Most Radical Gesture Episode 4: Lim Tzay Chuen: The Invisible Artwork

A plethora of historical references dramatised by musical scores and allegorical lighting make up the pillars of Ho Tzu Nyen’s (b. 1976, Singapore) complex practice that primarily constitutes video and installation. Features in their own right, each work unravels unspoken layers of Southeast Asian histories whilst equally pointing to our own personal unknowns. Permeating Ho’s work is a pervasive sense of ambiguity, theatricality and unease, augmented by a series of deliberate literary, art historical and musical references.

Silent lots

Ho Tzu Nyen has been widely exhibited with solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, 2018; The Guggenheim, Bilbao, 2015; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2012; and Artspace, Sydney, Australia, 2011, amongst others. He also represented Singapore at the 54TH Venice Biennale, 2011. Recent group exhibitions include An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong. Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE, 2019. He has participated in numerous international film festivals including Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, 2012; and the 41ST Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes International Film Festival in France, 2009. He was an Artist-in-Residency at the DAAD, Berlin, from 2015 to 2016, and the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2012 to 2015.

LOT

Vivian Ho

Animal Farm—Based on a True Story 2014 Oil on canvas Unique 80 × 150cm Estimate: HK $ 65,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist

In this series, Vivian Ho refers to the quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm—‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ One of Ho’s earliest series, Animal Farm—Based on a True Story represents the artist’s explorations of a Hong Kong identity using differences between Western and Chinese aesthetics as a tool. When studying art in a small town in Connecticut, USA, Ho missed both the atmosphere and the flavour of the fresh fish, meat, and organs on display in the stalls found abundantly throughout Hong Kong. From photos taken in Hong Kong wet markets, she transliterates the colourful scenes of entrails and dismemberment onto the canvas, creating vanitas born from local knowledge and daily life. In this series, she paints portraits of animal limbs differentiated into clear categories just as they appear in the market. By doing so, she reflects on the objectification and instrumentalisation of the animal in human society.

Vivian Ho (b. 1990, Hong Kong) graduated from Wesleyan University (studio art) and has been active in the Art and Design scene ever since. Her focus is on figurative oil paintings that consistently deal with the ‘ugly’ and the ‘beautiful’ behind animal consumption. For her, true beauty lies in authenticity that includes elements of the grotesque at the same time. She has held multiple solo and group exhibitions in Hong Kong and overseas. Her works are currently in the collections of M+ Museum, the Valmont Foundation, Nishiji Collection and Copelouzos Family Art Museum and were recently featured in An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Museum of Art in Shanghai.

Ju Ting

LOT

Pearl 071318 2018 Acrylic on board Unique 31 × 31 × 3 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galerie Urs Meile

Working on the Pearl series with the skill and precision of an engraver, Ju Ting cuts through the paint, and shovels up fine strings from the surface to partially reveal what lies beneath. Pearl 071318 displays the results of this process, creating a work that is twodimensional with a sculptural appearance. Permeating the depth of multiple layers of acrylic paint, a tactile visual synesthesia is created.

Silent lots

Ju Ting (b. 1983, China) graduated from the Printmaking Department with a BA in 2007, and with a master’s degree in 2013. She lives and works in Beijing. Her solo shows include: Ju Ting, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2018; Peeling an Onion, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Xi’an, China, 2017; Color Has the Answer, YISHU 8, Beijing, China, 2013. Recent group exhibitions include: Extended Ground, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2017; The First Exhibition of Young Artists at the National Art Museum of China, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 2016; A New Generation of Chinese Women Artists, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA, 2016; Painting as Strait Gate: Post-80s Artists Invitation Exhibition, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2016; It’s Not Right But it’s Okay, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2015. In 2013, she was awarded the YISHU 8 China Prize. In the same year, she received The Recognition Award of the CAFA Graduation Works Exhibition. Her works are collected by numerous museums and public collections, such as National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.

LOT

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

The House of Dreams 2005 Silkscreen print Edition 16 of 20 + AP 52 × 71.5 cm

MANAS 2007 Silkscreen print 8 of 10 + AP 37 × 47 cm

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Estimate: HK $ 30,000–80,000 Generously donated by the artists

The utopian city of Manas is a model that reconstructs a city that used to exist in northern Tibet (of course, it existed in the imagination of the authors who are captivated by the legend of the land of Shambhala). This city existed on two levels—on the level of the banal, everyday life that is occurring on the earth, and on the level of contact with a more sublime world, primarily, with the cosmos. This contact arose when the inhabitants of the city had ascended to the peaks of the 8 mountains that formed a ring surrounding the city. There are various objects located on each of these peaks, and by entering into them one could acquire cosmic energy, one could enter into contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, wind up in gardens of paradise. Each of the mountains had its own special meaning. In the centre of the city there was a deep circular cavity with perfectly round edges that was filled with water. But the unique thing about ‘Manas’ was not just these 8 mountains and the crater, but the fact that there was an exact identical city that was clearly discernible during certain days of the year, only this one hovered in the sky. The ‘earthy’ Manas was an exact copy of the ‘heavenly’ Manas.

Since the early 1990s, Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933, Soviet Union) and Emilia Kabokov (b. 1945, Soviet Union) have collaborated to make complex installations that combine references to history, art, literature and philosophy. Much of their work has revolved around the creation of elaborate fictional characters and situations, with an interest in storytelling and fantasy underpinning their work. Recent solo exhibitions include Quotations, Sprovieri Gallery, London, UK, 2018; Music De Chamber, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France, 2018; and Ilya & Emilia Kabakov. Not Everybody Will Be Take Into The Future, Tate Modern, London, London, UK, 2017. Recent group exhibitions include An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019; The Avatars. The Artist and His Double, Musée D’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Toulouse, France, 2018; and The Flight, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France, 2018.

Kim Suyoung

LOT

Both Sides 2011 Oil on canvas Unique 72.7 × 60.6 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and One and J. Gallery Both Sides is characteristic of Suyoung Kim’s paintings which predominantly focus on high-rise buildings, closing in on their facades over time to create works that scrutinise the geometric elements of architecture as well as broader conceptual frameworks. Kim’s work often explores the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract while experimenting with the idea of representation.

While Kim Suyoung (b. 1971, South Korea) emphasises the geometric elements of buildings, the works are unique in their lack of proper perspective, the flatness and the focus on material properties of paint. In recent works, traces of psychological or emotional depictions of relationship are also embodied in these forms.

Silent lots

Kim has held solo exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul (2018, 2013, 2011, 2008); 4tk004 Sewoon Plaza, Seoul, South Korea (2017); Kumho Museum of Art Seoul (2007); Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul (2004) and Galerie Ricarda Fox, Essen-Werden (2002) among others. Her work has also been exhibited at Seoul Museum of Art (2011); Busan Museum of Modern Art (2005); Space CAN Beijing (2014); and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2003) among others, and is in the collections of SeMA; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and Artist Pension Trust Collection, New York.

LOT

Kolkoz

L’origine des mondes 2011 Wood, gold, dye, paint Unique 165 × 231 × 10 cm Estimate: HK $ 180,000–220,000 Generously donated by the artists and Perrotin

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction L’origine des mondes is a painting re-imagined as sculpture— composites of different picture frames embedded together. Kolkoz created this work for their exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2011. Curated by Jérôme Sans, the exhibition explored the concept of parallax: visual displacement and the divergent orientations produced by looking at the same object from different points of view. Kolkoz says, ‘We are presenting paintings without paint, in which titles are the sole figurative element. These kinetic forms are generated by the exclusive use of framed frames and lines that re-shape two-dimensional paintings, in the style of the Italian Renaissance and its obsession with mathematical perspective. For us, highly influenced by 3D computer images, this relationship in the birth of technical representation both fascinates us and serves as a phantom echo of reality.’

Working under the moniker ‘Kolkoz’ since the early 1990s, French duo Samuel Boutruche (b. 1972, France) and Benjamin Moreau (b. 1973, France) explore the intersection of the real and the virtual, crafting complex installations and playful public interventions. Whether they are working with sculpture, drawings, installations, performance art, or video games, or even manning the turntables as DJs, Kolkoz employs wit and humour to unite seemingly discordant artworks and explore the boundaries between the real and the virtual. Major presentations have been held at Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2011; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, 2011; Grand Palais, Paris, 2011; and Musée des Beaux Arts de Mulhouse, France, 2007. The two artists live and work in Paris.

Lawrence Lek

AIDOL

LOT

- Movie Poster

2019 C-type print on aluminium Edition 6 + 2 AP 84cm × 59.4 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist and Sadie Coles HQ

Lawrence Lek (b.1982, Germany) lives and works in London. Lek uses computer-generated imagery and advanced technologies such as VR to develop digital environments described by the artist as ‘threedimensional collages of found objects and situations’. He creates site-specific virtual worlds using gaming software, 3D animation, installation and performance. By rendering real places within fictional scenarios, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality. , Sadie Coles HQ, London His recent projects include: AIDOL and in An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland; 2065, K11 Art Space, Hong Kong (2018); Nøtel, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2018); Play Station, Art Night and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017); The New Normal, UCCA, Beijing (2017); Glasgow International, Tramway, Glasgow (2016); SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2016); Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Missed Connections, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf (2016); Secret Surface, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016). He studied at Trinity College, University of Cambridge; the Architectural Association, London, and the Cooper Union, New York. Lek received the 2017 Jerwood/FVU Award and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award. Lawrence Lek lives and works in London, England.

Silent lots

A 3D-rendered movie poster from AIDOL, Lawrence Lek’s first feature-length film, the trailer for which was shown in An Opera for Animals at Para Site, followed by its feature-length display at Rockbund Art Museum as part of the exhibition. AIDOL features a score written and orchestrated by the artist, this computergenerated fantasy tells the story of a fading superstar, Diva, who enlists an aspiring AI songwriter to mount a comeback performance at the 2065 eSports Olympic finale. Set in a smokeand-mirrors realm of fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and artificial intelligence. Fame—in all its allure and emptiness—is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering.

LOT

Leung Chi Wo

Untitled (Hong Kong Standard, June 16, 1996) (

, 1996 6 16 )

2014 Laser engraving on aluminium sheet, hand-folded Edition 2 of 8 57.3 × 36.6 cm Estimate: H K $ 15,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Untitled (Hong Kong Standard, June 16, 1996) ( , 1996 6 16 ) by Leung Chi Wo is a monument to the only Hong Kong daily news front-page covering one of the most serious terrorist attacks after the Cold War at the end of the century, and the death of one of the greatest Jazz singers side-by-side, a year before the change of sovereignty of Hong Kong. Leung Chi Wo (b. 1968, Hong Kong) has a reflective practice that combines historical exploration with conceptual inquiry within a contemporary urban landscape. Versed in a range of mediums, he is concerned with the undetermined relationship between conception, perception and understanding, especially in relation to site and history.

In 1996, Leung Chi Wo co-founded the Para/Site art space in Hong Kong. Having earned his MFA in 1997 from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he was granted a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to reside in New York from 1999 to 2000. In 2001, he exhibited in Hong Kong’s first participation in the Venice Biennale. Leung’s recent exhibitions include EVA International—Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019), Thailand Biennale in Krabi (2018), Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Japan (2018), and a solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2018). Leung now teaches in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.

William Lim

LOT

West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre 2019 Colour pencil and inkjet print on paper Unique 26.7 × 66 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist

This work is a hand-coloured architectural drawing based on an installation Lim did for the West Kowloon Cultural District in 2013. The process of hand colouring architectural drawings brings the artist back to the time when he was a student and is a representation of an idea and a concept. Renderings and drawings become a pure medium for communication to replace words and verbal descriptions.

As Founder and Managing Director of CL3 Architects Ltd. (CL3), William Lim (b. 1957, Hong Kong) brings over 20 years of experience to his projects. An acclaimed architect and artist, William graduated from Cornell University and has spent the past two decades at the forefront of architecture, culture and art.

Silent lots

Lim is active in the arts with a focus on public art. Throughout his career, he has held several solo exhibitions showcasing his public art installations, most notably the Lantern Wonderland 2003 & 2011, Venice Biennale’s International Architectural Exhibition in 2006 & 2010, as well as Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in 2007, 2009 and 2017. His works have been exhibited in Hong Kong, Chengdu, the United States and Holland. More recently, his signature piece, West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre, was awarded the Grand Award and Special Award for Culture in Design for Asia Award in 2013.

LOT

Candice Lin

Staged Opium Den 2019 Fermented milk and pigment on paper Unique 14 × 23 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–45,000 Generously donated by the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction The artist depicts a touristic view of a staged opium den made from fermented milk paint. Lin’s works mine material and non-human histories, tracing their intersections with imperial conquest and historical figures, whose stories point out the fallacies and inequities in our inherited ideas around race, gender, or human exceptionalism. Staged Opium Den directly references the trope of the opium den—a space that was shaped by Orientalist conceptions of Asianness as both alluring and illicit, and that still serves as dubious inspiration for hotel bars in New York’s Chinatown.

Candice Lin (b. 1979, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Her recent solo exhibitions include the exhibition cycle A Hard White Body at Bétonsalon, Paris; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, as well as solo exhibitions at Gasworks, London; 18th Street Art Center, Los Angeles; and Human Resources, Los Angeles. Lin has been included in prominent recent group exhibitions including An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; the 2018 Taipei Biennale; the 2018 Athens Biennale; Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; Sharjah Biennial 2017, Beirut; and SculptureCenter, New York. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018) and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). In 2018 she was appointed to the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles Department of Art.

Liu Yin

LOT

Criminal 2015 Pencil, watercolour, acrylic on paper Unique 78.7 × 109.2 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery

In the work Criminal , artist Liu Yin imagines a criminal invited to a TV show and then attempts to extrapolate his thought process: How does he feel? Does he want to escape? What world is his own making, and what shores of what imaginary realms?

Silent lots

Liu Yin (b. 1984, China) uses and modifies found images in her drawings as a way to examine the tremendous amount of visual information that has long been part of our lives, the intrusiveness of this data has now risen to historic heights thanks to the pervasiveness of smartphones. Her experiments with news images, an important means to visually record and disseminate what is happening around us, constitutes a raw database that makes visual critique and research possible. With her saccharine colour palette and her signature manga-style sparkly eyes, Liu starts the conversation of transforming idealized fantasy into the cruellest reminder of our own ability to ruin perfection.

Liu Yin is a graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Art. Her darkly humorous works have been exhibited at Observation Society, Guangzhou; Taikang Space, Beijing; Wiessensee School of Art, Berlin; Adele C Gallery, Rome, and the Ecole Régionale des Beaux Arts, Besançon, France. Her work can also be found on the cover of ), which is printed monthly in the artist-published zine Fong Fo ( Guangzhou. She lives and works in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

LOT

Ma Yujiang

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Aug 7, 1942 – Sep 2, 1943, Guadalcanal Campaign, Solomon Islands 2014 Digital print Edition 1 of 5 + 2AP 160 × 120 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist, with special thanks to Pearl Lam Galleries Aug 7, 1942 – Sep 2, 1943, Guadalcanal Campaign, Solomon Islands forms part of the series Cang Mang, inspired by Taiwanese poet Chou Meng-tieh (1921–2014) who described his experience of cang mang, an ambiguous phrase whose meaning touches on notions of vastness and boundlessness and feeling lost and uncertain. For Chou, the moment he experienced cang mang was in 1948, when he ‘[looked] out onto the Taiwan Strait from Kaohsiung Port, as he landed in Taiwan with the youth army, as a result of the civil war. In this series, Ma selects images of war and removes any sign of the battles or subjects that took place, creating an entirely new scene.

Ma Yujiang (b. 1988, China) is a contemporary artist who graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and who now lives and works in Hong Kong. Ma is best known for his series How Heavy is the Night, focused on the plight of so-called ‘McRefugees’. In exploring the relationship between art and life through a social practice, Ma’s work is at once poetic and human, and is often inspired by life and death, the passage of time, geographic transformation, and political upheaval. He work can be seen regularly in Mingpao Sunday. Major solo exhibitions include: How Heavy is the Night, Foo Tak Building, Hong Kong, 2018; New Position, Art Cologne, Germany, 2016; Cang Mang, PearLam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2015; Related to me, Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing, 2012.

MAP Office

LOT

The Book of Waves 2018 250 hand drawings on computer screen inspired by Ha Bun Shu by Mori Yuzan, 1917. Single channel HD video, sound, 2 min. Loop. Edition 3 of 7 Box: 28.4 × 17.6 cm Estimate: HK $ 100,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artists MAP Office (est. 1996, Hong Kong) is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (b. 1966, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (b. 1969, France). Their projects have been exhibited in major international art, design and architecture events including: Milan Triennale, 2019; 1ST Thailand Biennale, 2018; Guangzhou Image Triennial, 2017; 6TH Yokohama Triennale, 2017; 4TH Lisbon Architecture Triennale, 2016; Ullens Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing, 2013; 7TH Asia Pacific Triennial, 2012; 1ST Kiev Biennale, 2012; 6TH Curitiba Art Biennale, 2011; 7TH , 11TH , 12TH and 16TH Venice Architecture Biennale 2000, 2008, 2010 and 2018.

Silent lots

Inspired by Kyoto artist Mori Yuzan, The Book of Waves propose an animated selection of waves and ripples from ancient representations of sea movement. Designed as a guidebook for Japanese craftsmen, the book was conceived as an inventory of original illustrations of waves in nihonga style from masters of the Edo and Meiji periods. The hand-drawn animation fills the gap between drawings to propose new relations and flows between the various ocean conditions. Water currents and turbulence at sea exemplify today the effects of climate change, sea level rise, and increasingly more violent typhoons. The sound of waves was recorded along Shek O and Big Wave Bay in the weeks following tropical Typhoon Mangkhut.

LOT

David Medalla & Adam Nankervis

Mondrian Fan Club Summer Collection 2019 Handwoven poncho on looms in Baguio Philippines, 2019 Edition 3 of 25 162 × 162 cm Estimate: HK $ 15,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artists and another vacant space, Berlin

David Medalla and Adam Nankervis were commissioned for a Summer Collection based on their first collaboration as Mondrian Fan Club, on Fire Island 1992, an impromptu photograph taken on the beach of Fire Island, where Adam resided. A limited edition of twenty five ponchos, handwoven on looms in Baguio, Philippines, by a dedicated collaboration of local crafts(wo)man, as well as an edition of twenty five beach trunks were made with a diagonal line of primary colours, in accordance with the performance, the philosophical argument between van Doesburg and Mondrian on the meaning of the vertical/horizontal vs. the diagonal.

David Medalla (b. 1942, Philippines) is a Filipino international artist. His work ranges from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation and performance. He lives and works in London and Berlin. In New York, David met the American actor James Dean and the Filipino poet José Garcia Villa who encouraged Medalla’s early interest in painting. Medalla’s work was the subject of the solo exhibition Anywhere in the World, curated by Guy Brett, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 2005. His work was included in the Harald Szeemann–curated exhibitions Weiss auf Weiss, 1966, and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, 1969, at the Bern Kunsthalle, and in dOCUMENTA 5, Kassel, 1972. In this impromptu performance, Nankervis on the beach of Fire Island Important group exhibitions featuring the artist’s work include An attempted to form the diagonal in Mondrian swimwear. Being so Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, cold on an early morning dawn on the beach of Fire Island, Nankervis Shanghai, 2019; How Art Became Active: 1960 to Now at Tate Modern, failed to get an erection, thus David Medalla divined Mondrian in 2016; Other Primary Structures at The Jewish Museum, New York, theory, vertical and horizontal triumphed. Therefore the title of the 2014; Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789-2013, impromptu performance, Mondrian in Excelsis. Tate Liverpool, 2013–14; Thresholds, TRAFO, Szczecin, 2013; Une exposition parlée, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2013; and Migrations, Tate At this time, in NYC 1992, Medalla and Nankervis had joined with Britain, London, 2012. ActUp, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in NYC and globally. They drew on the joys of homoeroticism, in celebration of love during a Adam Nankervis (b.1965, Australia) is an artist and curator who has time of a dark veiled pall that lay over the city, the island and beyond. infused social, conceptual and experimental practice in his lived-in It was part aesthetic and joyful, in part, art and shamanistic ritual nomadic museum, museum MAN, and his ongoing project ‘another as defiance. In all, the beauty of Mondrian, art as a second nature, vacant space.’. His immersion into the experimentation of social observed by Medalla and Nankervis as emphasised in Mondrian’s sculptural forms and aesthetic collisions are a trademark of his practice, immersed in the being of nature itself. Tenuous nature, and art. His ongoing project ‘another vacant space.’ has re-manifested nature in all its manifestations. in Berlin Wedding 2011, since being founded in an abandoned shoe shop on Mercer Street, New York, in 1992. The project focuses on the re-emergence of the hidden in subject, content and theory, the ephemeral, exploring the art of creative destruction and reconstruction inviting contemporary artists and the historical. His curatorial practice is infused within his own projects, and singularly, Johannesburg Biennale 1997, curated by Okwui Enwezor and Gerardo Meesquera; LIFE/LIVE, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville Paris, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist; Los Angeles Biennale 2001, curated by Koan Baysa; Museum MAN/ Blurprint of The Senses Liverpool Biennale, 2004/2006; aFoundation and Arts Council England; Centro Cultural Palacio de la Moneda, Santiago, Chile; A Spires Embers, Arsenal, Kiev, 2009, ‘iIsolation’, Izolyatsia Donetsk, Luba Mikhailova, Ukraine, 2010; Dumbo Arts Center, New York, 2012; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2015; Fondacion Joan Miro, 2017; and Venice Biennale 57, 2017.

Erbossyn Meldibekov

LOT

Game 2017 Handmade Rubik’s cubes with four colours (red, black, green and white) and Braille Edition 1 of 6 6 cubes, each 6 × 6 × 6 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Rossi & Rossi

Game is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colours—red, green and white, referencing the colours of the Afghan flag. Providing a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original 19TH -century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan). Game explores Afghanistan’s current position as a centrepiece of the longstanding War on Terror, masking both the US and British interests.

Erbossyn Meldibekov (b. 1964, Kazakhstan) graduated from the Almaty Theatre and Art Institute. Through drawing, installation, painting, photography and video, his practice explores the role of visual culture in the dissemination of power in Post-Soviet Central Asia, following the region’s independence from Russian imperialism in 1991. For more than two decades he has created a unique practice that critiques the role of architecture, monumentality and values systems in the public domain. His practice reveals the region’s complex position, which exists at the intersection of Stalin’s totalitarian regime, the shadow of heroes of the epic past, and an ongoing legacy of the ‘Great Game’ implicating neighbouring Afghanistan’s historical and current role in the stability of the region. Silent lots

He has exhibited internationally, with recent notable exhibitions including Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum, Suwon I’Park Museum of Art, Suwon, Korea, 2018; Eternal Return, A. Kasteev Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2015; the 6TH Moscow Biennale, 2015; Grammar Of Freedom / Five Lessons: Works From Arteast 2000+ Collection, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2015; 9TH Gwangju Biennale, 2012, and the Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011 and 2015. Meldibekov lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

LOT

Mit Jai Inn

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Untitled #SH-2

Considered a pioneer of Thai contemporary art, Mit Jai Inn (b. 1960, Thailand) is famous for his variegated abstract paintings and is especially adept at decorating the canvas with neon colour dots. His palette may seem feathery, but in fact, it poses a stark contrast to the power found in the actual works. Mit often invites the viewer to interact with his work. His love for the nation also drives him to actively engage in society with his art. Just as the country itself uses different colours to signify different political factions, the various colours Mit uses can be seen as a metaphor for the factions in the country or the different levels of social class. In particular, the Untitled #SH-2 exemplifies Mit Jai Inn’s ability to defy conventional paintings displayed in the form of a flag refer to the Flag of Thailand, boundaries of painting, he enacts multiple histories and treatments while the congruously arranged palette projects the harmonious of the medium through a physically rigorous and repetitive labour utopia Mit longs for. In the meantime, both sides of his paintings are cycle of mixing, applying, overlaying and eroding pigment. Mit’s bestowed with different structures and can be displayed in various largely solitary studio practise is rooted in perception, with relational ways, symbolising Mit’s distinct and undetermined responses to the intentions. Emerging in Berlin and Vienna in the late 1980s, Mit began present social issues. a vocabulary of serial forms intended to counter aspects of formal painting and its market and exhibition frameworks at the time. Trained as a Buddhist monk before turning to art, Mit Jai Inn Mit’s paintings were unstretched and unframed, mostly two-sided, studied painting at Silpakorn University, Bangkok and the University touchable works that populated public spaces and galleries alike. of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has since found international Embedded in Mit’s painted forms are reactions to aesthetic, social critical success with exhibitions at TKG+ Taipei; Sundaram Tagore and political histories. These include divisions between so-called Gallery, New York; and Saatchi Gallery, London; ARDNT, Berlin + ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ canonical painting, the sacred-secular Vienna; Singapore Art Museum; Mori Museum, Tokyo; and the 21st intimacy of colour, the shifting political states of Thailand, and Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island, Australia among others. Public site-specific reflections dedicated to the nations, spaces, hosts and collections include Singapore Art Museum, Auckland Art Gallery, New publics of his works. Zealand, and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. 2018 Oil on canvas Unique 130 × 114 cm Estimate: HK $ 90,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artist and TKG+ Taipei

Ciprian Muresan

LOT

Untitled (after Matthias Gruenewald) 2014 Aquatint etching on paper from a chocolate printing block Edition 3 24.7 × 20 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and Plan B Cluj, Berlin Ciprian Muresan, (b. 1977, Romania), lives and works in Cluj. Solo exhibitions include: Ciprian Muresan, S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent, 2019; Incorrigible Believers, Plan B, Berlin, 2018; Art Club 22: Ciprian Muresan, Accademia di Francia a Roma – Villa Medici, Rome, 2018; Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese, Rome, 2016; Your survival is guaranteed by treaty, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2015; All that work for nothing! That’s what I try to do all the time!, Plan B, Berlin, 2013; Tate Modern, London, 2012, (with Anna Molska); Contemporary Art Center, Geneva, 2012; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, 2011; and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2010. Group exhibitions include: Geta Bratescu, Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Muresan, Serban Savu, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, 2019; An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2019; Ciprian Muresan and Serban Savu, L’entretien infini, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2018; The World on Paper, Deutsche Bank Collection, Berlin, 2018; Viva Arte Viva, 57TH Venice Biennale, 2017; New presentation of works from the collection, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2016; Six Lines of Flight, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2012; The Seductiveness of the Interval, the Romanian Pavilion at the 53R D Venice Biennale, 2009; and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York, 2009.

Silent lots

The conceptual practice of Ciprian Muresan explores the relation between art and social history in drawings and sculptures that act as a plural questioning of the notions of value and authorship. Over the last years, Ciprian Muresan’s work has been revolving around the idea of reconstructing and deconstructing, erasing and rewriting iconic symbols of Western visual culture. This visual reservoir acts as an enormous accumulation of historical layers and images that the artist takes as raw material for his personal reading, as in Untitled (after Matthias Gruenewald). A growing strand in Muresan’s output is constituted by labourintensive copying exercises. Superposing, for instance, on a single sheet all the reproductions from an art publication, the drawings result in divergent directions: an almost devout relation to the great masters, but also the invention of an opaque space of over-layered images, where past-present equations become warped and dissonant. Never employed as an instrument of direct notation, drawing functions for Muresan in equations that unfold this mode of production in an ampler reflection, to do with visibility and loss, historical suspension, and forms in which the past is retrieved or confabulated.

Pak Sheung Chuen

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Sleeping on the bed where Mr. Lam Wing Kei slept before

LOT

2019 Photograph Edition 11 of 21 36 × 48 cm Estimate: HK $ 6,000–15,000 Generously donated by the artist

Sleeping on the bed where Mr. Lam Wing Kei slept before , Room 8315, Shaoguan Hao Jing Hotel, 2019-4-25. In this photograph, the artist visited a hotel that Causeway Bay bookseller Lam Wing-kee, had stayed in. Pak has engaged himself in an in-depth conversation with Lam Wing Kei and has made several works related to the disappearances from Causeway Bay Books that took place at the end of 2015. Owing to a cascade of events after five staff members of the bookstore went missing and were detained in China, Lam Wing Kei, the owner of the bookstore, was compelled to raise funds to reopen the bookstore in Taiwan. The funds were withdrawn a few months later, nevertheless, postponing the re-opening of the bookstore indefinitely.

Pak Sheung Chuen (b. 1977, China) lives and works in Hong Kong. Pak’s practise often deals with and reflects upon the contradicting absurdity and ordinariness of everyday life in a poetic and humorous nature, thus creating a critical yet poignant sentiment for its viewers. Pak has exhibited his work internationally, at the Taipei Biennial in 2010 and 2012, Liverpool Biennial 2012, Biennale Cuvee 10 in 2010, 3RD Yokohama Triennial in 2008, 3R D Guangzhou Triennial in 2008 and 6T H Busan Biennale in 2006. He represented Hong Kong at the 53R D Venice Biennale in 2009. Recent exhibitions and projects include: The Mulberry Forest Becoming Ocean, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany, 2017; Pak Sheung Chuen: That Light, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, China, 2016; Mobile M+: Live Art, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, Hong Kong, 2015; simple life is interesting!, Klein Sun Gallery, New York, USA, 2014; Killing 3000: Reviewing The Movie From Pak Sheung Chuen’s Perspective, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2012; and Making (Perfect) World at the Hong Kong Pavilion, 53R D Venice Biennale, Italy, 2009.

Gary-Ross Pastrana

LOT

155-06.25.2018, 156-06.26.2018 2018 Collage (magazine pages) Unique 29.69 × 21.01 cm (unframed) Estimate: HK $ 20,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist and Silverlens Gallery 155-06.25.2018, 156-06.26.2018 by Gary Ross Pastrana are paper collages from cut-up magazines. These are part of an ongoing series in which the artist makes one collage a day. Pastrana’s collagemaking started in the summer of 1999 while he was in the Fine Arts Program of the University of the Philippines training under Roberto Chabet. This work took on a serial form in 2017. This body of work is a major part of Pastrana’s practice. The titles of the works are their respective numbers in the series, hyphenated with the date they were completed.

The practice of Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Philippines) has been one of the most persistent in terms of investigating the real relationship between ideas and objects. Coiled or folded photographs, his woven tales from pictures found online, the sawed-off parts of a boat shipped to another gallery, his shirt tied into a pole to commensurate a flag, these are the slightest of turns Pastrana has his objects make to create a new meaning.

Silent lots

Pastrana received his Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of the Philippines, where he was awarded the Dominador Castaneda Award for Best Thesis. He has gained considerable experience and exposure within the region, with residency programmes in Bandung, Kyoto and Bangkok and most recently at the Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore. Pastrana is a recipient of the CCP Thirteen Artists Award in 2006. He has shown at the Singapore Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and was part of An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; the 2012 New Museum Triennial, New York, USA; and the 2008 Busan Biennale, South Korea. In 2004, he co-founded Future Prospects art space and has since continually organised exhibitions in Manila and abroad.

LOT

Ellen Pau

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

The Emblem 2003 Lightbox 1 of 10 + 1 AP 22.5 × 28.5 x 8 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist

The Emblem is the result of a trip the artist made to the housing ) in Kennedy Town in 2003 to estate, Kwun Lung Lau ( research camouflage and patterns for invisibility. The idea sprang from the disputed number of people who went to the streets to protest against National Security Bill 2003 (Basic Law Article 23). Later, photos from the protest became the visual foundation of Pau’s video work. One of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists, Pau’s works seek to re-evaluate one’s relationship with the city, as well as to interrogate the role that technology plays in mediating or whitewashing historical violence. These remnants of historical violence are also visible in Pau’s efforts to connect her evaluation of gender issues with Hong Kong’s civil politics, transforming the female body into a battlefield for subjective awareness, while exploring and debating the truthfulness of machine-produced images.

Ellen Pau (b. 1961, Hong Kong) studied Diagnostic Radiography in Hong Kong Polytechnic. She made her first Super 8 short Film The Glove, while working as an intern in the Phoenix Cine Club. After graduation, Ellen worked in a hospital as a registered radiographer. Besides medical imaging and images, Ellen produced artist video with Zuni Icosahedron, an avant-garde theatre group that was founded by Danny Yung. Her first video artwork the disenchantment of statue was filmed at the installation from a group of young Hong Kong artists/designers titled Assemblage. In 1986 she co-found the media artist collectives, Videotage and Microwave New Media Art Festival in 1996. Her works range from experimental film, video installation, MTV and performance. Her video works were presented at the Venice Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, among others. As Ellen always finds inspiration from technology of the visible and the media of the visceral, she went to study Visual Culture at Chinese University of Hong Kong and graduated with a master’s degree in 2008, the same year she curated the Museum of Art Hong Kong’s first digital art exhibition, Digit@logue. Ellen is also an instrumental figure in promoting new media art in Hong Kong. Since the formation of Videotage, Ellen had curated over 100 video/media art programmes for both local and international audiences such as for Microwave, Oi!, ISEA, Transmedial, and Goethe Institute. A major retrospective, Ellen Pau: What About Home Affairs? was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong in 2018.

Eddie Peake

LOT

Autoritratto Sei 2018 Oil on board Unique 40 × 30 × 2.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 85,000–120,000 Generously donated by IEs Collection

Autoritratto Sei is from a new series of paintings, with the titles taking the Italian term for self-portrait autoritratto, showing Peake playing with different identities and states of mind. The energetic, vibrantly coloured panels frame fragmented and dissected features that allude to a volatile and manic mental state. The varied artistic vocabulary of Eddie Peake (b. 1981, UK) encompasses performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. Peake’s main focus lies in the lapses and voids inherent in the process of translating between verbal language and nonverbal modes of communication. It is in the discrepancy between words and any other language, say, images, emotions, bodily movements or sounds, that his art is located. Peake’s work is an often-energetic spectacle in which the absurd and the erotic each find a place, and in which the artist plays a central role.

He has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at White Cube, London, 2018; Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2015; and Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK, 2013. Selected group exhibitions include Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2018; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2017; Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2017; Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, 2016; Fondazione Memmo, Rome, 2015; Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2013; and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, 2012. His performance projects include the Fiorucci Art Trust Volcano Extravaganza, Naples and Stromboli, 2017; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2014; Performa13, New York, 2013; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2012; The Tanks at Tate Modern, London in conjunction with the Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2012; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2012; and Cell Project Space, London, 2012. Silent lots

LOT

Phan Thao-Nguyen

Escalating August 2018 Watercolour on natural silk Unique 65 × 55 × 5 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Escalating August is a painting from the series ‘Dream of March and August’. The name is derived from the Vietnamese idiom, as simple and direct as it is: ‘March and August’. In the lunar calendar, these are the poorest months of the year, when the new harvest is not yet ready and the rice and other food saved from previous seasons have already run out. March and August is a tenuous time in which farmers have to borrow money, rice and find other work to sustain their living. March and August are also the names of the protagonists in the paintings. March and August are siblings. However, August died during the famine of 1945 when, under Japanese occupation, Vietnamese farmers were forced to grow jute instead of rice to aid the war effort. August became a hungry ghost, and while March looks in vain for the memories of his sister, they somehow meet in a dream-like world, impossible to reconcile with reality.

Through literature, philosophy and daily life, Thao Nguyen Phan (b. 1987, Vietnam) observes ambiguous issues in social convention, history and tradition. An honours graduate from Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts in 2009, four years later Phan received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Today, in addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she has joined forces with artist Tru’o’ng Công Tùng and curator Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Tr̀ân to form Art Labor. This collective explores crossdisciplinary practices and develops art projects that will benefit the local community. Thao Nguyen Phan is expanding her ‘theatrical fields’, including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. Phan has exhibited widely in Southeast Asia and is a 2016–2017 Rolex Protégée, mentored by internationally acclaimed, New York-based performance and video artist, Joan Jonas. Recent solo exhibitions include: Poetic Amnesia, Rolex Arts Weekend, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2018. Group exhibitions include: Where the Sea Remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, USA, 2019; Sharjah Art Biennale 14, 2019; Constructing Mythologies, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019; A beast, a god, and a line, Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1, Yangon, Myanmar and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland, 2018.

Gala Porras-Kim

LOT

Future artifacts after west Mexico ceramics: Los Angeles Index, 5 2017 Unglazed ceramics, GPS tracker Unique 30.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles

Future artifacts after west Mexico ceramics: Los Angeles Index, 5 is part of a series of six clay sculptures created by the artist, using shapes commonly found in Mexican Colima ceramics, each outfitted with a GPS tracking device. Unlike the artefacts on which they are based, Porras-Kim’s ceramics will continuously generate information as to location/movement, hardwiring the importance of precise data into both historical accuracy and responsible cultural stewardship.

Gala Porras-Kim’s work investigates the process of learning about the social and political contexts that influence the representation of language and history. Her research-based practise aims to consider how intangible things such as sounds, language, and history have been represented through different methodologies in the fields of linguistics, history and conservation.

Silent lots

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Colombia) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from CalArts. Awards include the Artadia in 2017, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2016, Creative Capital and Tiffany Foundation in 2015. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2019, featured in An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai in 2019, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Seoul Museum of Art in 2017, and Hammer Museum in 2016.

LOT

Tenzing Rigdol

Unhealed 2010 Chromogenic colour print Unique 71 × 63.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Rossi & Rossi

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Unhealed draws attention to Rigdol’s Chinese ‘brothers and sisters’ with the intention of initiating the process of healing. As acupuncture is considered a traditional Chinese method for treating ailments, Rigdol used acupuncture needles to mark the regions and dates of major uprisings and mass protests as a means of encouraging dialogue and to start the recovery process. Millions of Tibetans have died in those protests.

Tenzing Rigdol (b. 1982, Nepal) is a contemporary Tibetan artist whose work ranges from painting, sculpture, drawing and collage, to digital, video installation, performance art and site-specific pieces. His paintings are the products of collective influences and interpretations of age-old traditions; they often capture the ongoing issues of human conflicts and have strong political undertones—for him, politics is an unavoidable element in his art. He has been widely exhibited internationally. In 2011 his widely reported Our Land, Our People involved the covert transportation of 20 tons of soil out of Tibet, through Nepal, to Dharamsala. There, displaced Tibetans were given the opportunity to walk on their home soil once again. The journey to smuggle the soil across three borders is documented in Bringing Tibet Home, a documentary directed by Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, that was awarded the Young European Jury Award (Prix du Jury de Junes Européens) at the 27th edition of FIPA (International Festival of Audiovisual Programmes). Recent exhibitions include: Tenzing Rigdol: My World Is In Your Blindspot at Emmanuel Gallery, Colorado, USA and Tibet House, New York, USA, 2019; and Dialogue at Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong, 2019. His artworks are included in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and the World Museum in Liverpool amongst others.

Dongwook Suh

LOT

Hwajie 2013 Oil on canvas Unique 90.9 × 65.1 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and One and J. Gallery

Hwajie is part of a portrait series marked by the presence of the camera flash, the individuals in these paintings can sometimes recall anxious wild animals caught in the glare of car headlights. This method of depicting individuals by flashlight in a rather cold perspective was designed to maintain some distance from the subjects, not falling into the trap of warm sentimentality, while also illustrating the individual’s introverted and contemplative character.

Silent lots

Suh received his BFA from Hongik University and his MFA from the Ecole National Superiuere d’Art Paris-Cergy. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Video, Vide & O at Arko Art Center, Cinematic Montage at the Seoul Museum of Art, Cine Forum at Seoul National University Museum of Art, as well as group shows at Cite International des Arts, Mongin Art Center, Seomi & Tuus Gallery, Ssangssangmadang and Passage de Retz under The works of Dongwook Suh (b. 1974, South Korea) in painting and the curatorial direction of Michel Nuridsany. Suh has held video have a symbiotic relationship and are explorations of temporal solo shows at Gallery Loop, Gallery Mille Plateaux (Paris), shifts and memory. The portrayal of subjects waiting for salvation and the Gallery of the Cite International des Arts, One and in the past intersects with moments in the present in ways that do J. Gallery, and at Noblesse Collection, 2019. not obviously correspond. Because of this ongoing and incomplete interaction, new stories develop as reflected in Suh’s film and the continuation of unfinished narratives in accompanying paintings.

LOT

Spencer Sweeney

Untitled 2018 Acrylic, marker, and tape on vellum Unique 61 × 45.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–70,000 Generously donated by Gagosian

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Untitled is part of a new series of works that jumps between different styles with an irreverent resistance to strict categorisation. Self-portraiture, which Sweeney has equated to ‘working as your own analyst’, has been a persistent genre within his work. In both abstract and figurative modes, he weaves between recognisable human consciousness and expression. While Sweeney paints himself from photographs and mirrors, other personalities and influences of indeterminate gender and style begin to pervade his self-depictions. The artist appears as a social creature, subject to the influence of others, as well as to the forces of environment and lifestyle.

Spencer Sweeney (b. 1973, USA) lives and works in New York. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Recent solo exhibitions include Viva Las Vegas, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2017. Performances include Hey, You Never Know, 1998, curated by Carol Greene and Kenny Schacter at LaGuardia Place, New York; and CrissCross: Some Young New Yorkers 3, MoMA PS1, New York, 1999. Group shows include That Was Then, This Is Now, MoMA PS1, New York, 2008; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. In 2015, Kiito-San (New York) published Spencer Sweeney, a retrospective monograph featuring interviews with fellow artists and cultural figures from Sweeney’s many circles.

Tang Kwok-Hin

LOT

Papa I 2019 Charcoal on paper Unique 29.7 × 21 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist

Tang Kwok Hin (b. 1983, Hong Kong) is a mixed media artist, independent curator, and writer based in Hong Kong. He takes his native background as a point of departure for his work to explore his own origins of existence and intimate aesthetics, inseparably connected to the course and experiences of his life. In his view, art is about selecting and underscoring something in a complete sentence: to remove is to emphasise what remains. His acts of disfigurement usually result in more figurative meanings than they rub away. In his symbolic collages Tang is particularly concerned with combinations of daily things and the meanings they produce. He is interested in questioning the objects of human development, interrogating the existence, rationale and usage of such ordinary items as the table and chair. Papa I reflects Tang Kwok-Hin’s interest in appropriating and reconstructing daily and personal contexts to narrate hidden stories in our daily lives, dealing with growth, inheritance, freedom, capitalism, consumerism, nature, politics, norms, etc., to express concerns towards humans and their surroundings.

Silent lots

He received his Master of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008 and Bachelor of Arts (major in Fine Arts) in 2006. He previously participated in la Biennale di Venezia: 15TH International Architecture Exhibition at the Hong Kong Pavilion, 7T H Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 15TH WRO Media Art Biennale, and the Hong Kong Contemporary Biennial Award 2009. He has also exhibited in Ice Palace, Miami, USA; Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany; Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia; Museum Bärengasse, Switzerland; Esplanade, Singapore; Singapore Art Museum; Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines; Busan Cinema Center, South Korea; Hong Kong Museum of Art; Hong Kong Heritage Museum; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; and Kuandu Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

LOT

Tru’o’ng Công Tùng

Sketching the land of memory 2010 Gouache No. 10–14 from a series of 24 paintings 19.5 × 26.8 cm each Estimate: HK $ 30,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist

The paintings from Sketching the land of memory are the modest size of the red card, the official paperwork for land ownership in Vietnam. They derive from personal memory, as well as a collective memory, of many farming families, including the artist’s own, in the central highlands. These farmers had to pledge the red cards of their houses and their land to the bank or the creditors due to the dropping coffee and pepper prices. Tru’o’ng sketches out this abstract idea of land ownership, using gouache, a kind of pigment close to the pigment of red soil. Territories that used to be the rainforests or indigenous land were transformed into rectangular lots purchased by hard-working farmers and were in turn bought by corporations, creating an endless cycle of ownership.

Tru’o’ng Công Tùng (b. 1986, Vietnam) grew up in Dak Lak among various ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2010, majoring in lacquer painting. With research interests in science, cosmology and philosophy, Tru’o’ng Công Tùng works with a range of media, including video, installation, painting and found objects, which reflect personal contemplations on the cultural and geopolitical shifts of modernisation, as embodied in the morphing ecology, belief or mythology of a piece of land. He is also a member of Art Labor (founded in 2012), a collective working between visual art and social/life sciences to produce alternative non-formal knowledge via artistic and cultural activities in various public contexts and locales.

Wang Wei

LOT

Natural History 4 (Mountain Site) 2016 Ink jet printed on archival paper, mounted on aluminium plates Edition 1 of 5 + 1 AP 100 × 66.7 cm (1 portrait, 1 landscape) Estimate: HK $ 50,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery

These two images show the corner of a mosaic surface inspired by a pattern commonly found in housing developments in Chang’An Township, Guangdong Province, that Wang Wei ‘grafted’ onto the existing landscape of an abandoned quarry at Lao Mountain, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China, June 2016. The surrounding quarry remained untouched, offering the disorienting illusion of an endless mosaic floor buried beneath the hills.

Silent lots

Wang Wei graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. Wang Wei’s work has been exhibited the Thailand Biennale, 2018; The 2N D Yinchuan Biennale, China, 2018; California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, USA, 2017; The 2N D CAFAM Biennale, Beijing, 2014; Pavilion of China at the 12TH International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, 2010; Shenzhen Hongkong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, China, 2009; The Real Thing: Contemporary Art From China, Tate Liverpool, 2007; Foreign Wang Wei (b. 1972, China) is a multidisciplinary installation artist Objects, Kunsthalle Wien Project Space , Austria, 2007; Beyond: The who looks at how the navigation of physical spaces can inform us Second Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China, 2005; about our own lived reality. Through modifying existing architectural A Second Sight: International Biennale of Contemporary Art, National structures with subtle, surprising additions or appropriating stylised Gallery in Prague, 2005; Between Past and Future: New Photography features from disparate sources, Wang Wei has developed a powerful and Video from China, International Center of Photography, New York, practice around interventions that aim to disrupt human perceptions 2004; The 1ST Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China, of space while opening a dialogue about construction, labour and 2002; Post-sense Sensibility: Bodies and Delusion, Beijing, China, ways of seeing. 1999. Wang Wei lives and works in Beijing.

LOT

Wang Sishun

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Apocalypse 16.1.19 2016 Bronze sculpture Edition 2 of 6 30 × 23 × 17 cm Estimate: HK $ 115,000–135,000 Generously donated by the artist and Long March Space The sculpture series Apocalypse includes stones from all over the world including Russia, France, Italy, and China that the artist chose personally based on their resemblance to human portraits. The stones are made up of different sizes, shapes, colours and textures. It seems as though they bridge identities, race and origin, embodying lives from the past and the future. All of them have distinct dispositions: some of them possess spirits that are wholesome, while others are maleficent; some are divine, while others are grotesque. All of these lives and characters that the stones embody come together to create a world of both conflict and harmony.

Wang Sishun (b. 1979, China) lives and works in Beijing. Wang’s installations and sculptures are a product of a Dada-inspired de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation of objects. The project Apocalypse surrounds the artist’s collection of stone formations that resemble familiar portraits from all over the world. Recent exhibitions and projects include Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Land of the Lustrous, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, Hebei, China; The 2N D Yinchuan Biennale: Starting from the Desert—Ecologies on the Edge, MOCA Yinchuan, China; Echigo–Tsumari Art Triennale 2018, Echigo-Tsumari Region, Japan; Apocalypse, Long March Space, Beijing, China; A Beautiful Disorder, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, U.K.; The Shadow Never Lies, Shanghai 21ST Century Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Truth, New Galerie, Paris, France; Madein Gallery, Shanghai, China; The invisible hand: curating as gesture, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China, Harmonious Society, Asia Triennial, Manchester, U.K., 2014.

Robin F. Williams

LOT

Stop Signs 2017 Archival pigment print Edition 17 of 25 45.7 × 45.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and PPOW, New York Stop Signs exemplifies Robin F. Williams’s interest in challenging systemic conventions of representation in both art history and commercial advertising, as well as recent market impulses, Williams refers to her women as ‘zombie nudes’— figures that are sentient, yet ambiguously generated. Her work humorously updates outdated art historical depictions of women and femininity while simultaneously exemplifying Williams’s technical mastery of a medium that has long been defined by male authorship and female subjection.

Silent lots

Robin F. Williams (b. 1984, USA) utilises a variety of techniques, including oil, airbrush, and the staining of raw canvas, to create figurative paintings that are at once puzzling and familiar. In her review of Williams’s 2017 exhibition Your Good Taste is Showing, Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote: ‘These paintings are timely, but they are also enigmatic, off-putting and out there in rewarding ways.’

Williams holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. and has been honoured as the Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. She has held solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, NY; Bard College at Simmon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA; Space 414, New York, NY; and Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Hole, New York, NY; ARTspace, New York, NY; P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, NY; New Museum Los Gatos, Los Gatos, CA; Driscoll Babcock, New York, NY; Gallery Poulson Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark; Sargent’s Daughter, New York, NY; BravinLee Programs, New York, NY; Wassaic Projects, Wassaic, NY; Texas Contemporary, Houston, TX; EXPO Chicago, Chicago, IL; Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI; CSUF Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, CA; Like the Spice Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY; Grand Central Art Center, New York, NY; Space 414, Brooklyn, NY; Jack the Pelican Presents, New York, NY; L.A. Art House, Los Angeles, CA; Jack the Pelican Presents, Miami, FL; Minna Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Lineage Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; ISB Gallery, Providence, RI.

LOT

Ming Wong

I’m Not The Only One 2019 Collage 34 × 82.5 × 3.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist

I’m Not The Only One was made during the artist’s visit to Hong Kong during the first week of October (the Golden Week) in the days following the 70TH anniversary of the CCP, using materials he found in Hong Kong (old books, magazines, and stickers from the protests) to create this work that acts as a diary entry to memorialise the intense reactions he felt during his visit to Hong Kong in the tumultuous days of that week.

Recent exhibitions and projects include: An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2019; A beast, a god and a line, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2018; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, 2018; DRAG: Self-portraits and Body Politics, Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery, London, 2018; Long Green Lizards, Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, 2018; Whose Land Have I Lit On Now?, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2018; Ambiguously Yours: Gender in Hong Kong Popular Culture, M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) has strong theatrical interests in the 2017; Windows on The World Part 2, 20TH Sydney Biennale, Sydney, intersection of sci-fi and traditional Chinese culture, particularly 2016; Frieze Film Commission, Frieze London, 2016; Time Test, CAFA Cantonese opera. Wong uses this speculative association to tackle Museum, Beijing, 2016; and Aku Akan Bertahan / I Will Survive, 8TH issues such as Chinese modernity, the role of popular culture in Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2015–2016. building national identities. His works often assemble languages and Wong represented Singapore in the 53R D Venice Biennale and was personalities to create their own ‘World Cinema’. awarded Special Mention for his presentation.

Yang Shen

LOT

An Afternoon with the Mammoth 2012 Acrylic on canvas Unique 50 × 60 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist Yang Shen (b. 1973, China) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1996 and has worked as a freelance artist since 2006. Revealing a keen sense of the absurd, Yang’s canvases depict uncanny events taking place in public spaces, including gardens, parks and plazas. His work recently featured in An Opera for Animals at Para Site, Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai and has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in China, South Korea and the United States. Yang Shen lives and works in Beijing. Silent lots

Created in 2012, An Afternoon with the Mammoth depicts a surreal scene where a little girl looks at a mammoth in a zoo. Part of a larger series of paintings, the works show characters and elements from comics, low budget sci-fi films, zoos, and socialist urban landscape in endless accidental encounters and clashes, becoming dreamscapes or even nightmares. Yang’s background in both formal art training and in game design play a role in instilling his pictorial world with curious characters and plots. Through the use of socialist-realist illustration and typefaces, he creates an absurd but familiar reality imbued with historical memory.

LOT

Yee I-Lann

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Tikar/Meja (Mat/Table) 2019 Bajau Sama DiLaut pandanus tepo weave, commercial chemical dye, matt sealant Unique 79 × 105 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–80,000 Generously donated by the artist and Silverlens

Tikar/Meja (Mat/Table) was made for a large-scale installation to be shown at Silverlens Gallery in Manila opening next month, as part of Yee’s upcoming solo show with weaving assistance from Roziah Jalalid. The forthcoming exhibition will consist of 60 of these Bajau Sama DiLaut tepo mats featuring table silhouettes. Every single mat pattern and every table silhouette is unique. These mats are woven by a community of Bajau Sama DiLaut indigenous semi-nomadic stateless women on Pulau Omadal in the Sulu Sea near Semporna, Sabah. Yee has been working with this community for the past 18 months to make these works. The table is a recurring motif in Yee’s recent work addressing colonial/neocolonial powers and what she regards as the ‘violence of administration’.

Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Malaysia) lives and works in Kuala Lumpur. Her primarily photomedia-based practice speculates on issues of culture, power and the role of historical memory in our social experience. I-Lann also works as a production designer for feature films. Recent group exhibitions include An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai 2019; Through Rose-Coloured Glasses, NorthPark Center, Dallas, USA, 2019; Halal Haram; Fundraiser for Sisters In Islam, Cult Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2018; and Shared Coordinates 2018, The Arts House, Singapore, 2018.

Yeung Hok Tak

LOT

Homo erectus 2017 Acrylic on canvas Unique 45.7 × 35.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 15,000–25,000 Generously donated by the artist and Gallery Exit

Homo erectus is characteristic of Yeung’s paintings that present his sense of humour through tiny figures and urban landscapes. In his works, there is always a sense of sadness lurking beneath the humorous surface: In a place so densely populated there remains almost no room for intimacy, and where life is further restricted by oppressive social norms, sex becomes an act of desperation and protest. Hong Kong’s skyline, a looming presence in some of Yeung’s paintings, deepens the feeling of helplessness.

Silent lots

Yeung Hok Tak (b. 1970, Hong Kong) began his professional comics career in 1998 with his first publication in Cockroach Quarterly comic magazine and his solo graphic novel How Blue was my Valley in 2002. From 2004 onward, his comic section ‘Biu Tung Wa Jap’ and ‘Cool Blooded Theatre’ had been published every week and later in books for six issues. In 2013, Yeung was invited to a group exhibition at Foil gallery in Kyoto, Japan. In 2016, he participated in his second solo exhibition The harbour at the Harbour City Gallery and a group exhibition To Each, his zone in Gallery EXIT Hong Kong in 2017.

LOT

Trevor Yeung

Portrait of a Brazilian Aussie 2018 Archival inkjet print Edition 1 of 3 60 × 40 cm Estimate: H K $ 35,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction Chrysophyllum imperiale, pictured in Portrait of a Brazilian Aussie , is endemic to the Atlantic Forest ecoregion of eastern Brazil, native to the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro. Most of its habitat has been erased by urbanisation and urban sprawl. An imposing specimen tree in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, was planted by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh in 1868. Seeds from this plant have been sent to Rio de Janeiro to facilitate recovery of the species there. Yeung finds this tree, a young tree which is a bit taller than the artist, growing on a lawn away from other trees, facing the harbour, and well protected by fences. Different from plants grown in a greenhouse, which are fragile and ill-adapted to their new environment, Chrysophyllum imperiale is like someone who has already fully adapted to a city but remains aloof.

Trevor Yeung Pui Hang (b. 1988, China) graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Yeung’s practise uses botanic ecology, horticulture, photography and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations towards human relationships. Yeung draws inspiration from intimate and personal experiences, culminating in works that range from image-based works to large-scale installations. Obsessed with structures and systems, he creates different scales of systems which allow him to exert control upon living beings, including plants, animals, as well as spectators. Yeung has participated in biennials and exhibitions including the 15T H Biennale de Lyon, France, 2019; An Opera for Animals, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2019; After Nature, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, China, 2018-2019; Cruising Pavilion at the 16T H International Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2018; the 38T H EVA International Biennale, Limerick, Ireland, 2018; and the 4T H Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2018. His work is collected by Kadist Art Foundation and M+, Hong Kong. Yeung currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

Zhang Yanzi

LOT

Soaring 2016 Ink on paper and gauze bandages Unique 50 × 50 cm Estimate: HK $ 65,000–95,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galerie Ora-Ora

Soaring is part of a series of eight paintings by Zhang Yanzi, which marks a continuation of her previous Remedy collection. One can envision Zhang’s art is not restricted by Chinese traditions. Through various ink experimentations, her artistic language becomes more diversified and differentiates her from others. It is a surprise to see how Zhang ingeniously incorporates gauze bandages as a medium in her recent creations. The artistic expression and implication Zhang wishes to convey through the chosen media provides an intriguing contrast for viewers. The layers of gauze bandages appear indistinctly on the artwork, creating depths and intensity on the surface, leaving viewers an ingenious visual of phenomenal Eastern aesthetics that are beyond description—hazy, reclusive and velvety. In addition, these eight artworks are named after poems written by great poets and musicians in the past.

Zhang Yanzi (b. 1967, China) invites us to consider how medicine cures the body and how art may attempt to cure the mind. Dialogue with psychiatrists demonstrates how this theory is being put into practice in the treatment of those with psychological conditions, with some positive effects. Zhang’s work invites us to take part in a healing journey and to feel how art may be the starting point for a calm mind, and for a sense of inner peace.

Silent lots

Zhang’s work can be seen at the National Art Museum of China, the Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum, the CAFA Art Museum, L’Universita degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale,’ the Audemars Piguet Museum, and M+ in Hong Kong, among others. Her recent exhibitions include Essence: Zhang Yanzi Solo Exhibition at Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences (2016); The Antidote: Zhang Yanzi’s Exhibition at 5art, Guangzhou (2015); The Remedy included in Insights, Art Basel Hong Kong (2015); The Remedy: Solo Show of Zhang Yanzi at PAN, Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli (2014); Blooming Season and Solace of Art, solo show at Shanghai Reflex Art (2014); The Remedy, solo show at Today Art Museum (2013); Walk While Stepping on the Gauze—Solo Exhibition of Zhang Yanzi, Shanghai Art Museum (2010). Zhang’s work The Remedy was awarded the Best Artwork of 2013 LuXun Culture Awards. In 2018, she held two six-month solo shows in the UK, one at the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath, and the other at the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland.

LOT

Zhao Renhui

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Natural History, Noise Amplification 2018 Archival digital print in frame Edition 1 of 5 + 1 AP 40 × 60 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and ShanghART Gallery

Natural History, Noise Amplification is part of ‘With Nature and a Camera’, on-going research by the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ) on men’s interaction with nature in urban cities. As our cities continue to grow, many animal species have to choose to abandon their changing habitats and adapt to new situations. In Japan, wild animals are often found in specific theme parks and spaces that have been created specifically for their existence and our enjoyment. In Singapore, Asian Toads are making the most of their new situation by using city storm drains to amplify their mating calls. Civet cats use these same drains and overhead electrical wires to move across the city to expand their territory.

Visual artist Robert Zhao Renhui (b. 1983, Singapore) works mainly with photography but often adopts a multidisciplinary approach by presenting images together with documents and objects. His recent exhibitions include the Taipei Biennale 2018, Asia Pacific Triennial 2018, Yinchuan Biennale 2018, Moscow Biennale 2017, Jakarta Biennale 2017, Sydney Biennale 2016, Arles Discovery Prize 2015, Daegu Photo Biennale 2014, Moscow International Biennale of Young Art 2014, PhotoIreland 2014, Singapore Biennale 2013, and President’s Young Talents 2013. He has exhibited in Lodz Fotofestiwal, Photoespana, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Format Festival, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; CCP, Melbourne; Seoul Arts Center, South Korea; GoEun Museum of Photography, South Korea and Shanghart, Shanghai. He was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2017.

Nathan Zhou

zhou

LOT

Back to the Outer Space 2018 Acrylic on canvas Unique 60 × 80 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist and AIKE The work of Nathan Zhou (b. 1980, China) have been exhibited at Sifang Art Museum, chi K11 Art Museum, Power Station of Art, MOCA, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai Himalayas Museum and SNAP. His selected solo exhibitions include Nathan Zhou: Just Hang Out, Breathe, Till I Die, chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, China, 2019; STREET DOG, AIKE, Shanghai, 2018; Star Fires, Players Win The Beautiful New World 1984, Paper Wonder, Xiamen, 2018; Ghost Dog: The Way of The Lofi King, Tabula Rasa gallery, Beijing, 2017; Henri Chinaski’s Short Stories Collection, AIKE, Shanghai, 2016; and Jericho, Shanghai V Space, Shanghai, 2016. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.

Silent lots

Back to the Outer Space is characteristic of the artistic practice of Nathan Zhou, based on depicting the individual world, where reality and illusion interweave, through an intuitive but also loaded painting language. Using graffiti and collage as primary techniques he infuses his works with the powerful appearance of a personal diary. Deciduous topics, captivating images, narrative chronicles and the artist’s unique language are all united through this method, creating fulfilling and inspiring tensions, that echo in his works, analogous to the repeated syncopation found in jazz music.

Zhou Tao

Para Site 2019 Annual Auction

Winter North Summer South No. 1

LOT

2018 Inkjet print on paper Edition 1 of 3 63.3 × 120 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

In Winter North Summer South glints of the sun oscillate on the mountain top, buildings with nowhere to hide are captured on ‘Red’ as soon as they appear. The wind is cold and frosty while the reeds are burying the dead bear who died because of a difficult delivery. The parasites of ice and crystals in the Gobi desert die with the moon and flourish with the sun. At the same time, the zhuge orchids (Orychophragmus violaceus) quietly emerge in the concave wind shelter off of the north hill… Here, the past and future muddle, the seasons cease, locations become blurred, but the observing ‘perspective’ provided by ‘Red’ can still be felt.

Zhou Tao in renown for finding visual and narrative materials for his arresting film works in the places and communities he encounters, and the narration of the film is often developed from the accumulation of the encountered moments. There is no single entry to the practice of Zhou Tao, through often subtle and humorous interactions with people, things, actions, locations and situations, Zhou’s videos invite us to experience the multiple trajectories of reality—what he once called the ‘folding scenario’ or the ‘zone with folds’. Although all of his footage captures actual scenes, the poetics of Zhou’s visual narratives dissolve the division between fact and fiction. For him, the use of moving image is not a deliberate choice of artistic language or medium, instead, the operation of the camera is a way of being that blends itself with everyday life. Zhou Tao (b. 1976, China) studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and received a bachelor of fine arts in oil painting in 2001 and a master of fine arts in mixed-media studies in 2006. Zhou currently lives in Guangzhou. Zhou Tao has participated in international exhibitions and biennials, including: Viva Arte Viva, 57TH International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2017; Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah, 2017; Tales of Our Time, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2016; APT8, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 2015; Social Factory - 10TH Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, 2014; and The 5TH Auckland Triennial: If you were to live here…, Auckland, 2013. His recent solo exhibitions include Zhou Tao: The Ridge in a Bronze Mirror, Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2019; Green Sun, an exhibition by Zhou Tao, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok, 2014.

Zhou Yangming

LOT

20130215 2013 Acrylic on canvas Unique 28 × 26 cm Estimate: HK $ 90,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries 20130215 is characteristic of the Zhou’s works which are based on line and space, each of which is reflective of his ideas and thought process at the time of production. By drawing and painting line after line, Zhou effects a colourful surface that displays significant training of both hand and mind. Zhou is mainly influenced by three principles: Taoism, non-action, emptiness and naturalness. Painting is a transformative activity that presents the ideas of dao as well as documents his meditations and practices.

Silent lots

Zhou Yangming (b. 1971, China) is one of the most distinctive abstract artists working in China. In 1996, Zhou joined Xu Beihong’s studio at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing to improve his artistic practice. Later, he moved to Songzhuang artist village in Beijing and was subsequently involved in several exhibitions dedicated to the area. Zhou firmly believes that art starts with the expression of sensation and ends with the depth of discipline and self-cultivation. Thus, to him, art is the process of achieving the concept of spiritual infinity. Zhou Yangming has exhibited in Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and the United States. His work is collected by major institutions including National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; TEDA Contemporary Art Museum, Tianjin, China; and Thomas Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany.

Neo Rauch

LOT

Das Lichtlein 2017 Two-colour lithograph on Hahnemühle Alt Worms paper Edition 31 of 35, 10 AP, 4 PP, 1 HC 67 × 54.9 × 3 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and David Zwirner

As Rauch notes, ‘It’s not easy for me to make prints; I find the medium enormously challenging, and I tremble before each and every stone. A three-by-five meter canvas is just a playground for me...Compared to lithography stone which never attains the size of a tabletop, the sense of freedom you get in front of a canvas is far greater.’ The title of the present work means ‘little light’ in German. Neo Rauch (b. 1960, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig. Rauch’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions internationally. Neo Rauch—Works from 2008 to 2019, Palazzo Pitti in Florence, 2019; Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden was, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, and The Drawing Center, New York, 2019; Neo Rauch: The Obsession of the Demiurge, BOZAR—Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013. Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Silent lots

Neo Rauch’s paintings are characterised by their distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction. As can be found in Das Lichtlein, his enigmatic compositions employ an eccentric iconography of human characters, animals, and hybrid forms within familiar-looking but imaginary settings. While Rauch begins each work without a preconceived idea of the finished result, there is a uniquely recognisable, visual coherence to his oeuvre. Paintings often display palettes of strong, complementary colours, and recurrent subjects include the seamless integration of organic and non-organic elements as well as references to the creative process, music, and manual labour. The artist’s treatment of scale is deliberately arbitrary and non-perspectival, and often seems to allude to different time zones or planes of existence. As with his paintings on canvas, Rauch’s works on paper—including paintings, drawings, and prints—serve as equal ground for his symbolically laden narratives to play out. Lithographic prints in particular are integral to the artist’s practice, constituting a major part of his artistic production since 1993.

naming rights Para Site Education Room

The Education Room has been an integral addition to Para Site’s programmes, as well as its physical space, since the institution’s move to the new Quarry Bay venue in 2015. The Education Room is in constant transformation to accommodate new and interesting ideas, interventions, and discussion! Most recently, Para Site has added to this room a series of small display exhibitions from our Archive Project. Over the coming months, it will continuously feature new aspects of Para Site’s archive from the past 24 years, showcasing yet another aspect of our special place in the history of the development of Hong Kong’s art institutions. This space has housed several public events including panel discussions, perfomances, case studies, book launches, and rather spontaneously, karaoke! This is a unique opportunity to obtain the naming rights, a contribution that will go a long way towards sustaining the Education Room as an essential platform for Para Site’s influential educational programmes. In return for your support, Para Site is delighted to provide: • Display of your preferred name above the entrance to the Education Room, prominantly visible within the exhibition space itself • First access to programmes hosted in the Education Room • Invitation to Para Site patron-exclusive events • Invitation to our Annual Fundraising Auction Gala • 15% discount on all limited editions • 1 free copy of Para Site publications From 2017–2019 the Education Room has been named after Antonio Mak Hin-Yeung (1951–1994), one of the most prominent figures belonging to an exciting generation of young artists who challenged the art establishment and contributed to the development of a new, unprecedented alternative art scene in Hong Kong in the 1980s. An excellent artist in his own right, Mak also championed new modes of artistic debate and display as a core instigator of the Rooftop Studio and the Out of Context exhibition, both of which were important forerunners of new art spaces including E-Zone and Quart Society in 1990. In spite of their very ephemeral nature, all of these activities laid the groundwork for the independent art space movement in the 1990s including the establishment of Para Site.

093

acknowledgements artists

Nadim Abbas Lawrence Abu Hamdan Etel Adnan Joël Andrianomearisoa Julieta Aranda Aung Myat Htay Firelei Báez Marius Bercea Joseph Beuys Monica Bonvicini Daniel Boyd Angela Bulloch Chen Changwei Chen Qiulin Chen Wei Ali Cherri Heman Chong Lubna Chowdhary Abraham Cruzvillegas Cui Jie Horia Damian Juan Davila David Douard Dr. Lakra Mandy El-Sayegh Jes Fan Frog King Chitra Ganesh María García-Ibáñez Anna Gaskell Gauri Gill Antony Gormley Beatriz González Daniel Guzmán Federico Herrero Christopher K. Ho Ho Tzu Nyen Vivian Ho Alfredo Jaar Ju Ting Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Kim Suyoung Kolkoz Firenze Lai Lee Kit

094

galleries

Lawrence Lek Leung Chi Wo William Lim Candice Lin Liu Yin Ma Yujiang MAP Office David Medalla and Adam Nankervis Erbossyn Meldibekov Mit Jai Inn Ciprian Muresan Pak Sheung Chuen Ellen Pau Eddie Peake Paul Pfeiffer Phan Thao-Nguyen Gala Porras-Kim Tobias Rehberger Tenzing Rigdol Mika Rottenberg Peter Steinhauer Hito Steyerl Angela Su Suh Dongwook Spencer Sweeney Tang Kwok-hin Maria Taniguchi Tru’o’ng Công Tùng Tu Hongtao Wang Sishun Wang Wei Robin F. Williams Ming Wong Haegue Yang Yang Shen Yee I-Lann Yeung Hok Tak Trevor Yeung Zhang Yanzi Zhao Renhui zhou Nathan Zhou Zhou Tao Zhou Yangming Zhu Jinshi

10 Chancery Lane Gallery 10 Aike Andrew Kreps Gallery another vacant space. Ben Brown Fine Arts Blindspot Gallery carlier | gebauer Casas Riegner Commonwealth and Council Contemporary by Angela Li Edouard Malingue Gallery Empty Gallery François Ghebaly Gallery Gagosian Gallery Galeria Plan B Galerie Chantal Crousel Galerie Gisela Capitain Galerie Imane Farès Galerie Lelong Galerie Ora-Ora Galerie Perrotin Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Galerie Urs Meile Gallery Exit Gallery Wendi Norris Hauser & Wirth James Cohan Jhaveri Contemporary Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art Kukje Gallery kurimanzutto Lehmann Maupin Levy Gorvy Long March Space MDC Massimo de Carlo Metro Pictures Neugerriemschneider One and J. Gallery Paula Cooper Gallery Pearl Lam Galleries P·P·O·W Gallery Primae Noctis Art Gallery Puerta Roja Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Rossi & Rossi Sadie Coles HQ ShangART Gallery Sies + Höke SILVERLENS Simon Lee Gallery Thomas Dane Gallery Tina Keng Gallery Vitamin Creative Space VG Bild-Kunst

Para Site would like to thank the following individuals and organisations who have made this year’s auction possible:

With special gratitude to our Gala Hosts: Shane Akeroyd Mimi Chun-Gradel Virginia Yee And those who wish to remain anonymous

Adriana Alvarez-Nichol Meene An Thomas Arsac Sarah Bencic Gemma Blest Jennifer Brennan Ben Brown Vivian Chan Juliana Chan Elvina Chan Johnson Chang Tsong-Zung Stephen Cheng Maggie Cheung Jennifer Chiang Stephanie Chik Karina Chiu Edgar Chu Jehan Chu Mimi Chun-Gradel Alexie Cox Mark Cumming Massimo de Carlo Katie de Tilly Kurt Evans Michael Fan Regina Fiorito Charles Fong Yvonne Fong André Fu Joanna Fung Akarin Gaw Lisa Geddes François Ghebaly Vanessa Guoi Karine Haimo Mike He Amanda Hon Hu Fang Ken Hui South Ho IEs Collection Amrita and Priya Jhaveri Andrew Judd

Lorraine Kiang Charles Kim Charlotte JY Kim Andrew Kreps Jose Kuri Joyce Kwok Pearl Lam Arman Lam Megan Lan Alan Lau Alexander Lau Simon Lee Jessica Leung Angela Li Danqing Li Angela Li Ying Yue Li Aimee Lin Eugenie Liu Alan Y Lo Isa Lorenzo Yudan Luo Mihaela Lutea Raymond Mak Edouard Malingue Monica Manzutto Primo Marella Urs Meile Rene Meile Sarah Moog Liz Mulholland Etsuko Nakajima Tim Neuger Angela Ng Nadia Ng Wendy Olsoff Silvia Perego Steven Perez Mihai Pop Burkhard Riemschneider Rachel Rillo Kalli Rolfe Raimondo Romani

Fabio Rossi Mary Sabbatino Katherine Schaeffer Sorana Serban Ashley Shen William Shung Nick Simunovic Paola Sinisterra Bim So Laurent Sola Bo Young Song Amy Suen Niklas Svennung Howl Sze Anthony Tao Kelly Teo Sylvie Tiao The Office as a Project Shasha Tittmann Lihsin Tsai Odetti Tse Ella Tse Henrietta Tsui Gan Uyeda Jessica Vandenbrand Phoebe Wan Adrian Wang Jing Wang Keiko Wang Wang Wenjing Tanya Watia Bing Wei Nick Buckley Wood Shelly Wu Jian Yang Seoyeon Yang Nick Yu Evonne Jiawei Yuan Laura Zhang Zhang Wei Laura Zhou Margaret Zwilling

Auction Venue Partner:

Convivialité Partners:

Auction powered by:

Technology Partner:

Communications Partner:

Insured by:

Auction Preview Partner:

095

Global Council

Founding Friends

Shane Akeroyd Jehan Chu & Nydia Zhang Inna & Tucker Highfield Vanessa Ying Xu Virginia Yee

Mimi Brown and Alp Ercil Burger Collection, Hong Kong Stephen Cheng CMBB Cultural Organization Patricia Crockett David Zwirner Gallery A. Gaw Mimi and Chris Gradel IEs Collection Alan Lau Wendy Lee James Lie Edouard and Lorraine Malingue Stefan Rihs Nick and Melanie Simunovic SUNPRIDE FOUNDATION Honus Tandijon

Friends

Associates

Nick and Cordula Adamus-Voegtle Christine and James Boyle Rachel Catanach and David Boyce Lawrence Chu Jane DeBevoise William Lim, CL3 Lisson Gallery Dr. Ingrid Lok Elaine W. Ng and Fabio Rossi Kiri Sinclair Andres Vejarano & Kee Foong Bonnie & Darrin Woo Yan Du

Stefano Del Vecchio Jane Lombard Gallery Bernhard and Cordula Kotanko Ada Lam and Michael Au Alfred Lam Ocula Paul Richert-Garcia Silverlens Paola Sinisterra & Ignacio Garcia Axel Vervoordt Gallery

096

If you would like more information on Para Siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s patron programme, please contact: Para Site Claire Shea claire@para-site.art

Board of Directors

Para Site Team

Alan Lau Ka Ming chair

Cosmin Costinas

Jehan Pei Chung Chu co-vice chair

Claire Shea

Mimi Chun Mei-Lor co-vice chair

Qu Chang

Bonnie Chan Woo Tak Chi treasurer

Anqi Li

Sara Wong Chi Hang Secretary

Fanny Chan

Nick Adamus

Celia Ho

Executive Director / Curator Deputy Director Curator Curator Of Education And Public Programmes Project Manager / Assistant Curator Project Manager / Assistant Curator

Shane Akeroyd Kurt Chan Yuk Keung Alan Y Lo

Joyce Mak Project Manager / Assistant Curator Chloe Wong Development Manager

Mina Park Jason Chen

Communications Manager Jenny Tam Gallery Manager

097

100

Shame on Unpaid Exploitation! A Letter Well-Received A letter, authored anonymously, was received in mid-August during an exhibition called Bicycle Thieves, curated by Hanlu Zhang at Para Site that ran between 29 June to 1 September 2019. Hanlu Zhang found it on the exhibit’s table and passed it to the Hong Kong Artist Union (HKAU) to follow up on. After discussing the contents of the letter we (HKAU) decided to share it on our Facebook page on 11th August 2019. On 27th October 2019 we decided to translate it into English and share it for the first time in this publication, so as to illuminate its source, see power and give it agency across ‘all major arts and cultural institutions.’

(artist fee), , ,

? ,

, ?

!!!

* :( Shame on unpaid exploitation!* To the Hong Kong Artist Union: Would you please stand up for establishing a standard artist fee? Would you also please issue an open letter to all major arts and cultural institutions to set a reasonable artist fee to prevent unpaid exploitation of arts and cultural practitioners? Major arts and cultural institutions have been exploiting their interns in the form of unpaid commitments and jobs below the statutory minimum wage. Such exploitations, albeit legal, are highly unethical. Would the Hong Kong Artist Union issue an open letter to all major arts and cultural institutions to demand a minimum wage for their interns? In addition, would the Hong Kong Artist Union reach out to interns of all major arts and cultural institutions and organize a strike? Thank you!!!

The letter above is concise and direct. To paraphrase an inspiring artist and to elaborate, can we see this gesture of translating and publishing as a form of direct action? The gesture allows actors (like yourselves, those attending the Para Site Fundraising Gala Dinner 2019, reading this Gala publication and/or in minor and major arts and cultural institutions) to use your reflexive position to promote an ethical and equitable arts world and market—that goes beyond unprofessionalism, malpractice, overtime, and if at all, the pittance that is Hong Kong’s statutory minimum wage of HKD $34.50 per hour. One of the Hong Kong Artist Union’s roles is to amplify voices like those aforementioned. Regarding an intern strike, may we first gather more insights from current/former interns and those with firsthand knowledge? We hope that the original letter and our open letter is well-received and resonates into tangible action in your own institutions and workplaces, and even in your daily life. Amidst tumultuous times, and to be continued,

Hong Kong Artist Union 28 October 2019

P.S. To the person(s) who wrote the letter, thank you for contacting us. If you are comfortable to share more, please contact us.

101

contact

Para Site 22/F and G/F Wing Wah Industrial Building 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay Hong Kong Wed–Sun, 12–7 pm Closed on Monday, Tuesday, and Public Holidays +852 2517 4620 info@para-site.art facebook/instagram: parasite.hk wechat: parasitehongkong para-site.art

Catalogue designed and typeset by Jian Yang