Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
contents Scan to bid on all lots
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Live Lots
Artists
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Foreword
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Samson Young 楊嘉輝 Jimmie Durham Nobuyoshi Araki 荒木經惟 Alfredo Jaar Christopher K. Ho 何恩懷
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Looking forward: 2020–22 programmes Acknowledgements
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Xue Jun 薛 珺 Analia Saban David Medalla & Adam Nankervis Frog King 蛙 王 Ashmina Ranjit
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Firenze Lai 黎清妍 Antony Gormley Hao Liang 郝 量 Charles Gaines Georg Baselitz
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Elizabeth Peyton Angel Otero Abraham Cruzvillegas Lam Tung Pang 林東鵬 Li Binyuan 厲檳源
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Isabella Ducrot William Lim 林偉而 Michael Joo Rirkrit Tiravanija Fire and Sand: 2 days in Kathmandu
Online Auction Friday, 6 November, 6 pm HKT – Thursday, 19 November, 11:30 pm HKT
Silent Lots
Artists
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Pacita Abad Pio Abad Carmen Argote Black Box Mircea Cantor
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Gordon Cheung Luke Ching Chin Wai 程展緯 Heman Chong 張奕滿 Alexandre da Cunha Iftikhar & Elizabeth Dadi Cian Dayrit Willem de Rooij Patrizio Di Massimo Izmail Efimov Etsu Egami 江上 越
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Jes Fan 范 加 Hans-Peter Feldmann Simryn Gill Dominique González-Foerster Sheela Gowda Gu Benchi 顧奔馳 Federico Herrero Ho Tzu Nyen 何子彦 Andrew Thomas Huang Hung Fai 熊 輝
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
JR Vvzela Kook 曲淵澈 Maria Laet Leung Chi Wo 梁志和 Liu Chuang 劉 窗 Lung Yuet Ching Joyce 龍悅程 Jonathan Meese Daido Moriyama 森山大道 Ciprian Mureșan Cassi Namoda
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70
Tuan Andrew Nguyen Uriel Orlow Prabhakar Pachpute Thao Nguyen Phan 潘濤阮 Antonio Pichillá Gala Porras-Kim John Pule Norberto Roldan Citra Sasmita Wing Po So 蘇詠寶
71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
Rebekka Steiger Angela Su 徐世琪 Yuk King Tan 陳玉瓊 Charwei Tsai 蔡佳葳 Howie Tsui 徐浩恩 Wai Pongyu 韋邦雨 Lawrence Weiner Brittney Leeanne Williams David Wojnarowicz Adrian Wong 王浩然
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90
Wong Hau Kwei 黃孝逵 Ming Wong 黃漢明 Nicole Wong 王思遨 John Ziqiang Wu 吳子強 Wu Wei 伍 偉 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe 薩望翁雍維 Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗 Angela Yuen 阮家儀 Lisa Yuskavage Ran Zhang
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Robert Zhao Renhui 趙仁輝 Zheng Guogu 鄭國谷 Zhong Wei 鍾 慰
Foreword Dear Friends, It is hard to put into words the profound changes that 2020 has brought, but its impact has certainly been felt, by all of us. In Hong Kong and many parts of the world, we struggle to reckon with a new order, and we have seen what we have come to know changed in its entirety. In this difficult year, we cannot help but be reminded of Para Site’s beginning as a selforganised space for artists in a period of uncertainty, in 1996 as Hong Kong prepared for its handover. It is more pertinent than ever that we remind ourselves of art’s unique power to bring communities together, to foster dialogue, and to imagine a better tomorrow. For this, we are extremely grateful and humbled by the support we have received from artists, galleries, and individuals in Hong Kong and elsewhere, who all believe passionately in art’s future and in the need for the spaces that nurture it to continue thriving. While many activities in the arts ground to a halt, Para Site has strived to provide continued access to our programmes and support for emerging talent, especially artists who have been left vulnerable by derailed plans. In May, we launched the new initiative PS Paid Studio Visits, which has supported over 40 local artists to date with a studio visit fee and one month of health insurance coverage for every virtual visit conducted with Para Site team members, and the list is only growing. We would also like to take this occasion to share the recent announcement of our establishment of a new grant for Hong Kong artists, NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour, generously supported by an anonymous donor, giving more substantial subsidy for artists to keep on with their creative practices at a crucial time when support is wanting overall. As with every year, this year’s auction will contribute to a large percentage of our budget in the forthcoming year to ensure the continuation and development of our exhibitions as well as our public and educational programmes. Even in harsh times, Para Site is proud to present our precursor exhibition to the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Garden of Six Seasons, whose production would not be possible without the success of last year’s auction. We also completed The Archive Project after two years of research and organisation, producing a coded inventory of photographs and recordings, interviews, and other valuable materials from Para Site’s extensive history of exhibitions and programmes. Free and available for public access, the online archive is a helpful overview of broader change in these tumultuous decades in Hong Kong and in the global contemporary art system. We have not been able to travel, but our exhibitions are currently on tour, extending our presence from Hong Kong to other places around the globe. Shown in our space in 2018, A beast, a god, and a line exhibited at Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, earlier this year and which recently opened at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai; also opening this month after its iterations in Nuku’alofa and Hong Kong is Koloa: Women, Art, and Technology, now on view at Artspace Aotearoa in Auckland. In a similar vein, our prestigious intensive Workshops for Emerging Art Professionals (to which over 40 international talents applied) were held entirely online this year. We worked with 13 curators and arts professionals of tomorrow from Hong Kong and abroad, providing invaluable learning and growing opportunities despite the challenges imposed by the pandemic. These participants will be invited to join our in-person workshops in Hong Kong again when the situation allows.
All of our programmes have been mediated to a diverse audience through a record number of public events and multilingual tours for students and members of the general public. Our programmes have also pivoted to an online format to encourage ongoing education and dialogue whilst accommodating social distancing measures this year. While in many parts of the world, audience numbers have dwindled as institutions remain closed, at Para Site, our audiences have actually increased, seeing new audiences in Hong Kong crossing our doorstep for the first time, strengthening our connection to the local community. 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 artist fees and health insurance to all its collaborators. As part of an effort to expand social protections for artists, last year, we started covering medical insurance costs for all Hong Kong artists working for Para Site projects (including those 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:
$ 3,500 artist fee for participating in one of our group exhibitions 5,000 artist medical and dental insurance coverage for half a year 10,000 electricity in the gallery for one month 20,000 sponsorship of a young professional to attend our annual workshops 50,000 production of Para Site’s booth in Art Basel featuring a young artist 70,000 production of a newly commissioned installation work 100,000 production costs for annual public programmes and events 150,000 printing of a major Para Site publication 500,000 production of a regular Para Site exhibition or the entire budget for the NoExit Grant for Unpaid Artistic Labour
HK
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 recognising the need for essential support in an unprecedented year, 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 and the future bright. Special gratitude goes to our Auction Hotel Partner the St. Regis, Hong Kong; our Auction Preview Venue Partner Soho House Hong Kong and to Akarin Gaw; our Conviviality Partner Gelardini & Romani; our auctioneer Jehan Chu; and event designers Gemma Blest and Dawn Luk. We are also thankful to the following organisations for their support: Artsy, Brinks Fine Arts Services, Circle Asia, and TAPevents. Last, but certainly not least, our heartfelt and special thanks to Shane Akeroyd and Virginia Yee for generously hosting the auction gala.
Cosmin CostinaČ™
Executive Director and Curator Para Site
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LIVE LOTS Scan to bid on Live Lots
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Landschaft (1415, 19 Jan 2020, from study hall steps looking out) Landschaft (0954, 21 Jan 2020) 2020 Ink, watercolour, pencil, colour pencil and soft pastel on paper Unique 21 × 29.7 cm each Estimate: HK $ 65,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery
Samson Young 楊嘉輝
Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong ) graduated with a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong in a solo project at the Hong Kong Pavilion of the 57TH Venice Biennale. Other solo exhibitions have
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been held at the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Ryousoku-in at Kenninji Temple, Kyoto, among others. Group exhibitions include those at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Shanghai Biennale; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and documenta 14: documenta radio. He was the recipient of the BMW / Art Basel Art Journey Award, Hong Kong Arts Development Council Artist of the Year Award, Prix Ars Electronica, and the Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award. In 2020, he was awarded the inaugural Uli Sigg Prize. His works are held in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Japan; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Kadist, among others.
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These Landschaft drawings belong to a series of sound sketches he made on site at the courtyard of a zen garden when earlier this year, before COVID-19 got out of hand, the artist took an artist residency at the Ryousoku-in at the ground of Kenninji Temple—the oldest zen temple in the city of Kyoto. Multicultural paradigms, weaved into a symphony of image and sound, are at the heart of Hong Kong artist and composer, Samson Young’s practice. With a formal cross-cultural training in music composition, Young channels his attunement to melody by pushing its formalist boundaries to create innovative cross-media experiences that touch upon the recurring topics of identity, war and literature.
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Jimmie Durham
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction BLEW C SPIRIT 2020 Raised print on 300g cotton paper with glass particles and pigment Edition 30 of 30 + 10 APs 107 × 78 cm Estimate: HK $ 100,000–150,000 Generously donated by the artist
BLEW C SPIRIT is a print on heavy cotton paper, derived from an original drawing by Durham. Covering a broad range of topics in artworks as well as in essays and poetry, his production is often laced with the agility of wordplay, a dry, highly critical humor and, above all, insight. He consistently addresses the political and cultural forces that construct our contemporary discourses, the history of oppression, the futility of violence, and the powerlessness of the minorities in the world. Jimmie Durham (b.1940, USA) is an artist, poet and writer who currently lives in Europe. Durham has taken part in numerous international exhibitions such as Documenta (1992, 2012), Whitney Biennial of New York (1993, 2003, 2014), the Venice Biennial (1999,
2001, 2003, 2005, 2013), the Istanbul Biennial (1997, 2013) and many other group shows. Besides multiple solo exhibitions at different museums like ICA in London, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1993) and Madre Museum in Naples (2008, 2012), Portikus in Frankfurt (2010), Serpentine Gallery in London (2015), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) (2015), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2015), MAXXI Rome (2016), Migros Museum Zurich, retrospectives of his works were shown at MuHKA in Antwerp (2012), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009) and MAC in Marseille and Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (2003). In 2017, a retrospective covering the 70’s to today, was exhibited in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Remai Modern, Saskatoon.
Nobuyoshi Araki 荒木經惟
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Untitled (Private Photography) 1993 C-type handprint Edition of 30 101.2 × 124.2 cm Estimate: HK $ 145,000–175,000 Generously donated by Ben Brown Fine Arts
Araki’s Untitled (Private Photography) depicts a candid shot of a woman, perhaps gazing into space. The title itself suggests a very intimate moment between Araki and the woman, capturing the figure in her most natural state. In characteristically Araki style, Untitled (Private Photography) shows viewers the artist’s perception of his iconic imagery of woman. Araki’s mere act of taking pictures without prejudice is reflected through the results in this photograph: what seems like a raw shot acts like a ‘diary entry’ for the artist and his viewers, serving for both the present and the future.
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Nobuyoshi Araki (b.1940, Tokyo, Japan) is celebrated for his highly intimate and unabashedly erotic images of women, often portrayed in the ancient Japanese practice of bondage known as kinbaku. This prolific artist has photographed thousands of women in Japan, from strangers to partners, revealing a raw and unguarded intensity in them that speaks to his emotional connection with his subjects. Photographs of flowers also figure significantly in Araki’s oeuvre, which he depicts with suggestively sexual and corporeal clarity, magnifying and often colouring over the images. Araki’s output
ranges from spontaneous black-and-white snapshots documenting his daily life and encounters to technically precise, methodically staged scenes, all celebrating human connections, sensuality, and the artist’s lust for life. The irreverent artist has gained both cult status and critical acclaim around the world, and has published over 400 limited edition books of his photographs. Araki has exhibited in museums worldwide including solo exhibitions at The Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, as well as in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. His work is in major public collections such as Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto (CAMK), Japan; Deutsche Bank; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; M+, Hong Kong; Tate, London, UK; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA; and The UBS Art Collection.
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Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar, Life Magazine, March 1, 1968 1995 Three pigment prints AP 48.3 × 33.1 cm each Estimate: HK $ 250,000–350,000 Generously donated by the artist
Alfredo Jaar, Life Magazine, March 1, 1968 depicts the following sequence of events: 1. Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, head of South Vietnam’s National Police raises his snub-nose .38 revolver, points it at Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem’s right temple and pulls the trigger. 2. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams’s camera shutter clicked only once. In 1/500th of a second, Adams caught the moment the bullet crashed through the prisoner’s skull at 600 mph, distorting his face, ruffling his hair and propelling his head off centre. 3. Nguyen Van Lem tumbles to the pavement, blood spouting from his head. 4. Adams takes a few more pictures of the body and returns to the Associated Press office to drop off his film. He later recalled: ‘I thought absolutely nothing of it. I think I got some guy shooting somebody. And, uh, I went to lunch.’ 5. The picture ran on the front pages of many U.S. newspapers and fuelled the antiwar movement that helped end U.S. involvement in Vietnam. 6. ‘I think this picture was the moment that changed the war,’ said David
Hume Kennerly, a fellow Vietnam War photographer. ‘Adams’s picture was the real underbelly of violence and summary execution.… It is what war is really like.’ 7. Eddie Adams died on 18 Sep 2004, in New York City. He was 71. He was laid to rest just outside his hometown of New Kensington, Pa. According to his last wishes, he was buried with a camera. Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, USA) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010), as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). The artist has realised more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.
Christopher K. Ho 何恩懷
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Unique Estimate: HK $ 250,000–450,000 Generously donated by the artist
Teardrop
Shard
2013 Handmade watermarked paper, Color-aid (Bw-Hue), ¼-inch ‘golden dot’ antiqued mirror, ¼-inch ‘solar’ grey glass, alabaster, CNC-milled wood 112.4 × 76.2 × 23.5 cm
2013 Handmade watermarked paper, Color-aid (R-DS, Gray 8.5, Gray 9.5, Yc-Ex, Bc-T4, YGc-T1, Rw-Hue, R-Hue, Bw-Hue, B-EX), ½-inch glass, 1/4-inch grey glass, 1/2-inch bronze glass, bleached white oak 61 × 34.3 × 19.1 cm
Black Square
Open Book
2013 Handmade watermarked paper, Color-aid (Bc-T4, YGc-T1, Rw-Hue, R-Hue), ¼-inch black mirror, ¼-inch grey glass, 3/8-inch bronze glass, bleached white oak, Himalayan rock salt 92 × 92 × 22.9 cm
2020 Handmade watermarked paper, Color-aid (Yc-Ex), ¼-inch ‘graylite 14’ glass, ¼-inch cobalt glass, ebony 117 × 113 × 21.6 cm
Christopher K. Ho (b. 1974, Hong Kong) is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. His practice encompasses making, organising, writing, and teaching.
He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly de-colonised, increasingly networked world. Recent solo shows include Embassy S_ites at Tomorrow Maybe, Hong Kong (2019); Dear John at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2019); Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace at the Bronx Museum (2018); and CX 888 at de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong (2018). His multi-component projects have been exhibited at Asia Society Hong Kong, UCCA Beijing, Para Site, the Guangdong Times Museum, the Queens Museum, MASSMoCA, Storm King, and in the Incheon Biennial and the Busan Biennale. He is currently at work on a project for Finland that will be part of the first major art exchange between Hong Kong and Helsinki for 2021. His work has been featured in The New York Times, South China Morning Post, Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, LEAP, Hyperallergic, BOMB, Art Asia Pacific, Ocula, Yishu, RanDian, and ArtReview.
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Four of eight unique works from the 2013 solo exhibition Desmoiselles d’Avignon, these hybrid sculpture-coffee tables are made of handmade watermarked paper and Color-aid held between glass sheets, which in turn rest on hewn alabaster. On top is a CNC-milled fragment of wood. The exhibition Desmoiselles d’Avignon, named after Picasso’s 1907 seminal work, playfully envisioned modern painting through the eyes of a future class of refined Chinese princelings in the year 2063, after Western abstraction had become a fetish. Here, abstraction is the primitive Other—as African masks once were to Picasso— and the West’s aesthetic principles stand as naïve beliefs of a backwards culture that has yet to catch up with globalisation.
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Xue Jun 薛 珺
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Scarification of the Earth-Body Series N°13 地球的跡年 #13
2006 Oil on Canvas Unique 145 × 200 cm Estimate: HK $ 120,000–150,000 Generously donated by Hanart TZ Gallery
In Xue Jun’s Scarification of the Earth-Body Series N°13《地球的跡
年 #13》is part of a series of oil paintings of famous architectural
sites that are not only the main subject, they are also the only element. Despite depicting iconic structures such as Tiananmen, the Beijing Railway Station, the Military Museum, and the Roman Coliseum, these are not in any way landscape paintings: there is no setting, no surrounding environment. Neither are there any of the fundamental structural elements usually found in architectural paintings--no sense of interior or exterior perspective, no doors or windows. The artist provides us only with the basic, familiar silhouette of these structures: but beyond this, there is no other element to give us a sense of concreteness or solidity.
The work of Xue Jun (b.1975, Hebei, China) has been extensively exhibited internationally. Recent solo shows include: Rift - Xue Jun’s Paintings, AYE Gallery, Beijing, China, 2017; A moment of rain - Xue Jun, Star Gallery, Beijing, China, 2016; Xue Jun Solo Exhibition, Eastation Gallery, Beijing, China, 2011; and Microwave Museum Civilization History, 318studio, Beijing China, 2010. The artist has also participated in group shows including Domain - Xue Jun and Mei Wanting, Hongkun Museum of Fine Art, Beijing, China, 2014; Chinese Independant Art: Voice of the unseen, Venice, Italy, 2013; Midsummer Group Exhibition, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2011; and China Box, China section of Prague Biennale 4, Prague, Cezch Republic, 2009, among others.
Analia Saban
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Distressed Canvas Circuit Board (with Component Rubbings and Punctures) #8 2019 Linen on circuit board on panel Unique 33.3 × 30.8 × 5.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 120,000–140,000 Generously donated by the artist and Sprüth Magers
Analia Saban (b.1980 Buenos Aires, Argentina) received her MFA in 2005 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied with John Baldessari, and lives in Los Angeles. Saban’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper are deeply engaged with the basic tools of art-making: While she uses traditional
materials, she completely rethinks the concept of what an artwork physically entails. She regularly brings together opposing ideas into one work: painting and sculpture, two and three dimensions, digital and analogue, industrial and handmade. Saban’s work remains in dialogue with the legacies of minimalism and conceptual art, and at the same time deconstructs artistic conventions, introducing elements of craft, design, and everyday materials into her varied objects. Solo exhibitions include those at Modern Art Museum Fort Worth (2019), Qiao Space, Shanghai (2017–18), Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2016) and Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2014). Recent group exhibitions include those at Clark Art Institute, Williamstown (2020), Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2019), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (both 2016–17), Rubell Family Collection and Contemporary Art Foundation, Miami (2015–16), The National Museum, Oslo (2014–15), Kiosk, Ghent (2015), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), Centre d’art contemporain de Fribourg, Switzerland (2012–13), and MARCO Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Spain (2012). Her work has also been featured at Art Safiental 2018: Horizontal-Vertical (2018), NGV Triennial at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017–18) and the first Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012).
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In Distressed Canvas Circuit Board (with Component Rubbings and Punctures) #8 (2019), Saban envelopes a circuit board with canvas, then uses rubbing and frottage techniques that allow its batteries, resistors and transistors to emerge mysteriously from behind the linen encasement. The work’s simple materials and form invoke modern movements such as Arte Povera, while also subverting the tradition of paint-on-canvas to create an enigmatic object that hovers between painting and sculpture and marries art, technology and the digital age. Analia Saban’s works regularly turn onto its head our concept of what a painting, sculpture or drawing entails. The artist has recently mined the history of computing and its connection to weaving—the woven linen canvas being a ubiquitous element in the history of art, and the fact that 20TH -century punch-card technologies drew from similar processes used in the weaving industry for centuries—in a body of work that often incorporates actual computer circuit boards.
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David Medalla & Adam Nankervis
Portraits: Tatlin’s Tower, A Conversation with the Cosmos, Gung Hay Fat Hau Choy, Mondrian in Excelsis, New Gold Dawn, The Fairy Mountain, Zeitgeist 2017–2019 Ink jet on Murakumo Kozo paper Edition 1 of 3 80 × 60 cm each Estimate: H K $ 250,000–350,000 Generously donated by Adam Nankervis & another vacant space
About this series of intimate portraits of legendary artist David Medalla by his husband and collaborator, artist Adam Nankervis, the author wrote: ‘This series is but a fraction of actions documented with Dave whilst I took care of him on the road for two years as his only carer, before arriving in Manila. Dave’s initial stroke in November 2016 left him largely paralysed. After bringing him home to Berlin to care for him, the ritual of the daily masks began, as an attempt of mine to keep our collaboration alive. As his body was partially paralysed with no sensation, he loved the touching whilst I moved elements about his face, a temporary creative immersion beyond his pain. It continued whilst on the road after the Venice Biennale, in Venice and throughout Italy, in many cities and hotels, and then coming home to Berlin, after the prognosis of doctors in England which I refused to share. Therefore I created masks daily for multifarious reasons, as a biography, an autobiography, a record and a homage to past actions with the Mondrian Fan Club, and then something more intimate, a document of the moment, a spellbinding action within our friendship. An intimacy both physical and higher. I also saw it as an act of defiance—to create beauty over what, at times, seemed to me a transcendence of our ongoing life’s dilemma together. At points a Damocles of futility. They have over time become a tactile ritual where I create masks in an act of defiance of the betrayal of illness, a healing, and a triumph of our shared experience in something that had, like lightning, made all fall dark. It is a study in love, and a defiance using beauty as a tool to trick the eclipse.’ 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. Important group exhibitions featuring the artist’s work include An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019; How Art Became Active: 1960 to Now at Tate Modern, 2016; Other Primary Structures at The Jewish Museum, New York, 2014; Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789-2013, Tate Liverpool, 2013–14; Thresholds, TRAFO, Szczecin, 2013; Une exposition parlée, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2013; and Migrations, Tate Britain, London, 2012. Adam Nankervis (b.1965, Australia) is an artist and curator who has infused social, conceptual and experimental practice in his lived-in nomadic museum, museum MAN, and his ongoing project ‘another vacant space.’. His immersion into the experimentation of social sculptural forms and aesthetic collisions are a trademark of his art. His ongoing project ‘another vacant space.’ has re-manifested 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.
Frog King 蛙 王
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Deep-Fried Shrimps & Egg Bento 2020 Ink and mixed media on screen Unique 170 × 180 cm Estimate: HK $ 350,000–550,000 Generously donated by the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
Deep-Fried Shrimps & Egg Bento draws inspiration from ancient oracle bone scripts, combining graffiti, ‘sandwich font’, calligraphy, and original drawings. It is at once improvisational and emotional.
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Kwok Mang Ho 郭孟浩 (b.1947, Guangdong, China), also known as Frog King, lives and works in Hong Kong. He is a pioneering conceptual and performance artist who has been breaking boundaries in Hong Kong and beyond since the late 1960s. Originally trained in ink painting and calligraphy, he is one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artists to explore the use of ink painting as a conceptual tool, incorporating it as both action and material into multiple-media installations and performances. With each of his pieces, he welcomes the viewer into his conceptual
utopia. Past exhibitions and related events include Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, National Gallery Singapore, 2019; Blue Container - Interlocal, Duisberg, DCKC Dusseldorf, Germany, 2018; Frog King turns 70 experiments in ink since the 1970s, solo exhibition, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2017; PMQ Formula-e Live Performance, PMQ, Hong Kong; Henderson Land Public Hoarding, H Queen’s Central, Hong Kong, 2016; Asia Contemporary Art Exhibition 2015, Jeonbuk Museum of Fine Art, South Korea, 2015; Taiping Tianguo, e-flux, New York, USA, 2014; MTR Public Art winner, Frogscape and Frogtopia Arch, Ho Man Tin Station, Hong Kong, 2013; and Frogtopia·Hongkornucopia, Hong Kong exhibition at the 54TH Venice Biennale, Italy, 2011.
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Ashmina Ranjit
Hair Warp Travel Through Strand of Universe 2020 Charcoal & pastel on lokta paper Unique 187 × 113.5 × 4.5 framed Estimate: HK $ 80,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artist
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction In the series Hair Warp - Travel Through Strand of Universe, human hair is treated as a sacred element that connects womanhood and ‘all phenomena beyond the sky’ (Ranjit). In the paintings, the sinuous hair strands morph constantly into different braids, swirls, and landscapes, emitting a mysterious force of life, as they ‘flow, fly, dance, celebrate, shout, and echo in the night sky’ (Ranjit). When Ashmina Ranjit (b.1966, Kathmandu, Nepal) was young she looked at the clouds. She looked because she wanted to be free. Her nanny told her: stop looking at the clouds, women aren’t free like clouds, it will only make you sad. No, Ashmina said. And she kept watching, searching, hoping for that freedom. For years, because of this, Ashmina wanted to be a pilot, so she could be among the clouds. But because she was surrounded by artists in her family, she ended up at art school. To her surprise, she liked art. She became passionate about painting. She painted the subjects that interested her the most: women. She mastered painting and drawing. The medium wasn’t enough to express in the context of what she was searching for. She desired to move forward and be truly herself, not like the masters of the past. She was not looking for the medium, she was looking for what would
truly express her voice. And on that path she explored different mediums unawarely; installation, space, time, sound and video. Then she added her body. When she first performed, she didn’t realize she was performing. But, there she was, within her work. Her art was activism: concerning her community, her life, her country and the world as a whole. Performances represented what was important to her: women, society, identity, environment and politics. And, within the social, political context of Nepal, her artivism allowed her to constantly redefine the notion of art, reposition the role of women and question human rights’ and the State. Today, Ashmina is performing, she is leading workshops, and she is connecting community members by creating an environment for Nepali and international artists at her art hub LASANAA / NexUs. She is creating outside medium; sometimes it’s the sky she expresses in, sometimes the streets, sometimes the air. And now, looking back, her desire to fly wasn’t physical. It was spiritual. She wanted to fly among the clouds because it is who she is and who she wants to be. Select exhibitions include: Redefining Kathmandu Valley, Live Art Hub, Maitri Marg, Nepal, 2012; Self-Portrait, KCAC, Kathmandu Contemporary Art Center, Nepal, 2012; Khulla Dhoka, the Royal Over-seas League, St James, UK, 2009; Farewell to Post-Colonialism, The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2018.
Firenze Lai 黎清妍
This work is accompanied by a special set of terms and conditions with the artist and gallery related to future sales. For more information, please contact jacqueline@para-site.art
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Sky and Spine 背景
2018 Copper etching Unique impression of state III 11.8 × 8.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 55,000–75,000 Generously donated by the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
Firenze Lai’s (b. 1984, Hong Kong) recent solo exhibitions include White balance, MAMC+ , Saint-Étienne, 2019; and Turbulence, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2015. She has participated in international exhibitions and biennials including: Bicycle Thieves, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2019; Contagious City: Far Away, Too Close, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2019; A World in a Grain of Sand, Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, 2018; Viva Arte Viva, the 57T H Venice Biennale, 2017; Surround Audience: New Museum Triennial, New York, 2015; Social Factory – 10TH Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, 2014; and A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels, SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2013, among others.
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As with many of Lai’s works, Sky and Spine《背景》captures 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.
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Antony Gormley
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
HOLD V 2020 Hare’s Blood on Paper Unique 38 × 28 cm Estimate: HK $ 350,000–550,000 Generously donated by the artist
About HOLD V, Antony Gormley says, ‘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 the medium 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 is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental
questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Antony Gormley has had a number of solo shows at venues including The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (2012); 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). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands), 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.
Hao Liang 郝 量
This work is accompanied by a special set of terms and conditions with the artist and gallery related to future sales. For more information, please contact jacqueline@para-site.art
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Tao Shu · Autumn Thoughts - Twilight 套數·秋思—暮色
2020 Tracing paper, pencil, colored pencil Unique 89 × 45 × 3 cm Estimate: HK $ 425,000–500,000 Generously donated by the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
Hao Liang (b. 1983, Chengdu, China) studied at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and received a bachelor and a master of fine arts in Chinese painting. He lives and works in Beijing. His recent solo exhibition Hao Liang: Circular Pond was held at Aurora Museum in Shanghai in 2019. Three solo projects were held in 2016 reflecting different approaches of Hao Liang’s artistic practices and research process, including: Hao Liang: The Virtuous Being at Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou; Hao Liang: Eight Views of Xiaoxiang at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Hao Liang: Aura as part of BACA Projects 2016 at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Hao Liang has participated in international exhibitions and biennales including: Viva Arte Viva, 57TH Venice Biennale, 2017; Streams and Mountains without End: Landscape Traditions of China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017; Collection of Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2017; Bentu, Chinese artists at a time of turbulence and transformation, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2016, among others.
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Tao Shu · Autumn Thoughts - Twilight《套數·秋思—暮色》is a working sketch of a new painting series by Hao Liang. From choreographing his imagination in the past, the artist starts to document and reflect through real life on his canvas. Hao Liang fuses tightly the exercise of his own perception and the practice in Chinese ink painting. Not only does he dig into the investigations of the ontology of Chinese ink painting within its history, but he also experiences the reconstruction of surreal narratives from the survival of the present time. For Hao Liang, the painting surface is not simply a material vehicle embodying space and time, but a medium for contemplations of such; the process of practicing Chinese painting, is more than a journey that unites painting technique and life experience, it is also a reflection on the individual exploration of one’s relationship with the world. The unique world view constructed through Chinese ink paintings enables him to traverse and reflect upon the past and future, while speculating time and space, perceiving and measuring anew the position of human itself within history and the universe.
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Charles Gaines
Numbers and Trees: Tiergarten Print Series, #1 2018 Silkscreen on Rives BFK paper AP 8 of 10, Ed. 25 + 10 APs 99 × 74.5 cm Estimate: H K $ 38,000–68,000 Generously donated by the artist
Charles Gaines’s methodical approach is seen here with this special limited-edition print, emerging from his Numbers and Trees series which began in 1987. Images of trees have figured prominently in Charles Gaines’s practice since the mid-1970s. Gaines first began plotting their forms through systems of numbered grids in the series Walnut Tree Orchard (1975–2014). It was at this time Gaines became interested in systems and the cataloguing of ordinary objects, using the tree as his universally recognisable symbol. Like many conceptual artists of his generation, he dissociated art from its conventional engagement with emotion and intuition. Through this detailed, rigorous process, he distanced the subject of his work from the systems applied to it, raising questions about the objectivity of data and its signifying of fixed, immutable fact.
A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, the body of work of Charles Gaines (b.1944, Charleston, SC, USA) engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Charles Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the California Institute of Arts faculty since 1989. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and around the world, most notably a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont CA, as well as a museum survey of his Gridwork at The Studio Museum, Harlem NY, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA. His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and The New Cosmopolitanism (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). In 2019, Gaines received the 60T H Edward MacDowell Medal.
Georg Baselitz
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Schlafende Hunde 1998–99 Line etching, dry point, and aquatint Edition 9 of 20 84.9 × 63.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–65,000 Generously donated by the artist and Gagosian
Schlafende Hunde, like Baselitz’s other work, confronts the very limits of colour, material, and composition. This, combined with his compulsive reference to self, produces an everexpanding body of work in dialogue with precedents, including his own. Throughout his career, Baselitz has unceasingly revisited particular motifs. This consistent subject matter forms an anchor within a turbulent progression of painterly experimentation.
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German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Georg Baselitz (b.1938, Deutschbaselitz, Germany) is a pioneering NeoExpressionist who rejected abstraction in favor of recognizable subject matter, deliberately employing a raw style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey direct emotion. Embracing the German Expressionism that had been denounced by the Nazis, Baselitz returned the human
figure to a central position in painting. Select solo exhibitions include Georg Baselitz: Years Later, Gagosian, Hong Kong, 2020; Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany, 2020; Georg Baselitz: Time, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Berlin, Germany, 2019; Estate con Baselitz - Incisioni 1964–2015, Galleria Oreste Bellinzona, Milan, Italy, 2019; Corpus Baselitz, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France, 2018, among others. Select group exhibitions include Visions of the Self: Rembrandt and Now, Gagosian in participation with English Heritage, Grosvenor Hill, London, England, 2019; Counterpoint: Selections from the Peter Marino Collection, Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY, 2018; A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now: 1981–2018, Almine Rech Gallery, New York, NY, 2018, among many others. Georg Baselitz lives and works between Ammersee, Germany; Basel, Switzerland; Imperia, Italy; and Salzburg, Austria.
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Elizabeth Peyton
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Julian 2005 55-colour hand-printed ukiyo-e woodcut Edition 21 of 45 42.4 × 32.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 95,000–120,000 Generously donated by neugerriemschneider
Julian is a print made by Elizabeth Peyton in 2006 depicting American musician Julian Casablancas, best known for being the lead singer for rock band The Strokes. Peyton works with painting, drawing, and printmaking and is best known for her captivating portraits of friends, celebrities, and historical figures. Peyton’s distinct style is characterised by immediacy and modulated surfaces. The artist is inspired by the works of modernists such as Flaubert, Sargent, Balzac, and Delacroix. Elizabeth Peyton (b.1965, Danbury, CT, USA) is a leading Contemporary Figurative painter, best known for her portraits of celebrities and musicians. Peyton grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. She displayed an early disposition towards portraiture—frequently painting her
friends depicted as protagonists from books in her work—while attending school. After graduation, Peyton worked several jobs, but was slow to receive recognition of her work, holding only one solo exhibition in six years. In 1993, her second solo exhibition, which featured images of famous historical and literary figures, opened to great critical acclaim. Her later portraits of rock stars and celebrities have been hailed for their expert use of colour and design, and for their evocative, descriptive qualities. Recent works depict her friends and close relationships, as well as prominent figures from art and cultural circles. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and more recently at UCCA in Beijing. She currently lives and works in Long Island, NY.
Angel Otero
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Untitled 2017 Oil paint and fabric collaged on paper Unique 50.2 × 40.6 × 3.8 cm (framed) Estimate: HK $ 120,000–160,000 Generously donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London
In Untitled, Angel Otero employs various methods of collage and explores the potential for abstraction to meaningfully engage memory and identity using line, form, and colour. Through a methodically innovative process, the artist paints representationally onto large sheets of glass, scrapes the partially dried oil paint from the surface, and then reassembles the resulting ‘skins’ into multi-layered compositions. In this way, the paint itself emerges as a crucial conceptual component, mobilising ideas of chance, conveyance, and aesthetic vernacular, while the images and themes it visualises become fragments or parts of a history energised by the material. Much of Otero’s early work was directly influenced by personal memories based on photographs and other family memorabilia combined with the gestures of painters such as Nicolas Poussin, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning. Instead of representing his life through art, he archives moments within it through a constant negotiation between lived experience and art historical references.
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Angel Otero (b.1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his process-based paintings, collages, and sculptural works that venerate the inherent qualities of his material of choice—oil paint. Otero received his MFA in 2009 and his BFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organised at Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2019);
Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY (2017); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2016); Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (2015); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2013); and Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC (2012). Select groups exhibitions and biennials featuring his work include The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2019); Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2019); Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Surface Area, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016); Nexo / Nexus: Latin American Connections in the Midwest, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2016); Fusion: Art of the 21ST Century, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2014); 6TH Prague Biennale (2013); El Museo Bienal The [S] Files, Queens International 2012: Three Points Make a Triangle, Queens Museum, New York, NY (2012); and El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2011), among others. Otero is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts. His work is in numerous public and private collections including the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; DePaul University Museum, Chicago, IL; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; UBS Art Collection, Chicago, IL; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.
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Abraham Cruzvillegas
Be Water, My Friend 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 2019 Glass, paper, rice, plastic, ink, stainless steel, and snakeskin Unique Dimensions variable Estimate: H K $ 200,000–400,000 Generously donated by the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York
Based on Molotov cocktails, Be Water, My Friend is a series of works that attempts to resemble an extreme situation of material awareness and political unrest, using what could be understood as local, in a global context. These works were produced during Cruzvillegas’s residency at Para Site last year. He arrived on 1 July 2019, HKSAR establishment day which saw Hong Kong’s largest protest of over two million participants. During Cruzvillegas’s time in Hong Kong, he stayed in Sheung Wan, in close proximity to the demonstrations of social unrest happening throughout the city. Abraham Cruzvillegas (b.1968, Mexico City, Mexico) is an active member of the Intergalactic Taoist Tai Chi Society, and Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, in Paris. For the past years, he has created a body of research under the title autoconstrucción or ‘self-construction’, which involves some simultaneous ‘autodestrucción’, ‘reconstrucción’ and ‘autoconfusión’. His work has been included in exhibitions such as Hi, How are you, Gonzo?, The Contemporary Austin (2019) and The Aspen Art Museum (2019); Honolulu Biennial (2019);
Autorreconstrucción: Detritus, MUCA Campus, Mexico City, (2018); Autorreconstrucción: Social Tissue, Kunsthaus Zürich (2018); Sydney Biennial (2018); Ginza Maison Hermès: Le Forum, Tokyo (2017); Nicaragua Biennial (2016); Empty Lot, Tate Modern, London (2015); Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015); Abraham Cruzvillegas: Autoconstrucción, Museo Jumex, Mexico City and Museo Amparo, Puebla (2014); The Autoconstrucción Suites, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014) and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); Self Builder’s Groove, Final Project for the Berliner Künstlerprogramm residency, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Berlin (2011); 12TH Istanbul Biennial (2011); 6TH Biennial Media City Seoul (2010); The Film, REDCAT CalArts’ downtown center for contemporary arts (2009); 10T H Biennial de Havana (2009); Autoconstrucción: The Soundtrack, CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2008); The 50TH Venice Biennale (2003), among others. Harvard University Press published in 2016 The Logic of Disorder, his collected writings, edited by Dr Robin Greely. A Spanish edition was published in 2015 by Sexto Piso as La voluntad de los objetos.
Lam Tung Pang 林東鵬
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Effaced 1 磨减一
2014 Solvent ink on rice paper mounted on canvas Unique 118 × 238 cm Estimate: HK $ 330,000–410,000 Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Effaced 1《磨減一》is an enlarged Hong Kong dollar bill in onehundred-dollar denomination issued by Bank of China (Hong Kong) Ltd. in 2010. Banknotes always feature iconic cityscapes, natural wonders, great people, and symbols of sovereignty—it is at once the metonymy of power, the placeholder of value, and the daily circulation of identity. This hundred-dollar bill displays the iconic panorama overlooking Victoria Harbour and the Lion Rock. The artist laboriously rubs, sands and scrapes the surface of the print, creating the feel of a used banknote that has been under circulation for a long time. The concept of erasure comes from the speculation that if Hong Kong continues to change, the Hong Kong dollar bill will cease to exist.
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Lam Tung Pang (b.1978, Hong Kong) shares the same experience with other Hong Kong artists who grew up in the 1990s, whose coming-of-age coincides with drastic social changes, a result of his homeland’s decolonisation from constitutional monarchy and new allegiance to China in a short span of time. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound, and video, Lam’s playful practice arises from a curious
imagination that recombines traditional iconography and vernacular elements, innovating with a myriad of found objects and images to form new practices that are often experimental in nature. Lam’s works engage the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia, which articulate an ongoing negotiation of the overlapping city-state’s reality. In his allegorical landscapes, journeys and sceneries become essential passages connecting time and distance, longing and loss. Solo exhibitions of Lam’s include Saan Dung Gei (Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019); Hi! House – Lam Tung-pang × Old House at Wong Uk Village (Wong Uk Village, Hong Kong, 2017); The Curiosity Box, Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco, USA, 2013. Group exhibitions include Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen, China, 2017; CHINA 8 (NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2015); and No soul for Sale—A Festival of Independents, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2010. Lam is the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2012). Lam’s work is collected by the Burger Collection, the Deutsche Bank Collection, Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong), Kadist Art Foundation (France and USA), and M+ (Hong Kong), among others. Lam currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Li Binyuan 厲檳源
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction The Book of Songs 2018 Inkjet print on photo paper Edition 1 of 8 + 2 APs 150 cm diameter Estimate: HK $ 120,000 - 165,000 Generously donated by the artist
The Book of Songs is photographic documentation of a performance, where artist Li Binyuan performed a washing of ‘poetry’ in a two-channel video. In the beginning, the artist knelt down beneath a waterfall and started reading ‘The Book of Songs’. As he reads the text, it begins to appear and disappear on the left of the screen, much like the water’s own ebb and flow. The waterfall activates the text of the book, as well as the artist’s bodily codes. After 80 minutes, the water dissolves the book and the text also comes to an end. ‘The Book of Songs’ depicts an extremely vivid picture of social history. It is China’s first poetry collection and the source of Chinese poetry. The earliest poems it contains are more than 3000 years old. The world changes like clouds, but mountains and water are relatively constant natural objects, which can be found and perceived. The artist tries to connect the river with the body, to create dialogue, and to build a new relationship through space and movement.
Li Binyuan (b.1985, Yongzhou, China) is one of China’s leading performance artists. He completed his BFA in Sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the city where he continues to live and work today. Li’s works are often marked by struggle and futility, expressing a confusion with the illogic of contemporary social, political, and economic structures. In Freedom Farming (2014), for example, Li spent two hours throwing himself in the mud of a field in his home village on land he inherited after his father’s death. In other works he has used a hammer to smash other hammers and run naked through the streets of Beijing—deliberate but desperate outbursts of emotions ranging from rage to joy. In 2018, New York’s MoMA PS1 featured Li’s recent performances with early works by Zhang Huan, one of the great Chinese performance artists of the previous generation, in the exhibition Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan. Li’s works have been collected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, M+ Museum for Visual Culture in Hong Kong, KADIST in Paris and San Francisco, and the White Rabbit Collection, among other institutions.
Isabella Ducrot
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Ripetizione 2019 Mixed media on textile Unique 100 × 104 cm Estimate: HK $ 105,000–130,000 Generously donated by Isabella Ducrot, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
In her extensive travels from Russia to the Far East, Isabella Ducrot developed a particular interest in fabrics from Eastern Europe and began studying the many differences in the textile traditions of China, India, Turkey, and Central Asia. Over the years, she has
amassed a collection of rare fabrics of historical interest, and felt an urgent need to transform them into objects. What interests Ducrot in the fabric is how its texture symbolises the structure of the mind and of society. She is not so much drawn to embroidered pieces or shawls as towards the simplicity of fabrics that are absolutely raw and bare, without any kind of ornamentation. All their value and rarity have to do with the elementary quality of woven pieces. Isabella Ducrot’s artistic approach is extremely sensitive, and the initial moment in the creation process of the works is tactile. Ducrot uses textiles and paper both as an artistic medium and as an artistic thread. Isabella Ducrot (b.1931, Naples) lives and works in Rome. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, Switzerland (2020); Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2019); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2019); and Spazio Parlato, Palermo, (2014). She had a major exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, Italy. In 1993 her work was presented at the 45TH Venice Biennale.
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The repetitive elements in Ripetizione become the object of representation—the protagonist of the image. The rhythm of life, the heartbeat, is expressed by repetitive elements, which are, not coincidentally, also musical elements. This is a celebration of virtual infinity. The raw material, from which Isabella Ducrot’s fascination originally emanates, and its characteristics determine the motif for which it becomes an immanent carrier. The same applies to the technique with which the motif is created. Ducrot does not violate the colour of the textile with her chromatic scheme; instead, she allows the material to become part of the images. In doing so, she drains the fabric of its historic content, its origins, to treat it like pure matter. She brings out the most hidden elements like structure and the relationship between colour and light. Repetition is the subject and primary theme in many of Ducrot’s artworks.
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William Lim 林偉而
A plague year: July 2020 Oil on canvas Unique 40 × 50 cm Estimate: HK $ 80,000–100,000 Generously donated by the artist
A plague year: July shows all of Para Site’s important publications, and highlights a series of works by Lim’s favorite artists: Samson Young (painting), Antonio Mak (sculpture), Martin Wong, Tsang Kin Wah, Tozer Pak (books). Lim has returned to oil painting as his favoured medium during this year while being homebound. This series of works is a documentation of a painful year for the world, but also a revelation of new found time in meditative, healing exercises.
The buyer of this work will need to loan the work to the artist for an exhibition in January 2021.
William Lim (b.1957, Hong Kong) is an accomplished artist focusing on large scale installations. Throughout his art career he has been shown internationally, most notably Lantern Wonderland HK 2003 and 2011, Venice Biennale’s International Architectural Exhibition in 2006 and 2010, Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in 2007, 2009 and 2017 and Architecture and Heritage: Unearthing Future, Seoul, Korea, 2019. His signature piece, ‘West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre’, was awarded the Grand Award and Special Award for Culture in ‘Design for Asia Award in 2013’. Committed to promoting culture and education, William is currently on the Board of Trustees for Cornell University, member of Arts and Culture Council and Gallery Advisory Committee for Asia Society Hong Kong Center and member of Museum Expert Advisers for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department. He was conferred an Honorary Doctorate degree by Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2018. He is the Founder and Managing Director of CL3 Architects Ltd.
Michael Joo
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Threshold (Preliminal) 閾值(閾限前)
2020 Silver-mirrored borosilicate glass, bamboo temple ladle Unique 170 × 70 × 125 cm Estimate: HK $ 500,000–700,000 Generously donated by the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Threshold (Preliminal)《閾值(閾限前)》originated from a moment when the artist smiled at a monk in a temple in Kyoto back in the winter of 2018. The monk smiled back and gave the artist this water ladle which he had just used to wash his hands before entering. The artist thinks a lot about clean hands and the difference between inside and out these days.
Michael Joo (b.1966, Ithaca, NY, USA) is a New York based artist whose work asks fundamental questions about identity and the human condition, such as: ‘of what are we made; how do we relate to our environment; and, are we a part of, or apart from nature?’ He has had numerous solo and group gallery and institutional exhibitions of his work, including The Menil Collection, Serpentine
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Mediating space, between wall and floor, between states. A proposal for a cleanse and entrance for all. Object and place, reflected and absorbed, divided and whole. No in or out. No contradictions here.
Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Rodin Gallery (Samsung Foundation), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and the Freer | Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, among others. In 2001 Joo and Doho Suh represented Korea at the Venice Biennale, and Joo was a co-recipient of the grand prize at the 2006 Gwangju Biennial. His works are held in numerous public collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Savannah College of Art and Design, the Israel Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, UCLA Hammer Museum, Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Walker Art Center. In addition to several monographs dedicated to his artwork, Joo has received numerous awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, American Center in Paris, and Smithsonian Institution among others. He currently teaches at Yale School of Art in Connecticut and Columbia University School of the Arts.
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Rirkrit Tiravanija
untitled 2018 DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY
untitled 2018 (我们在同一片天空下做梦吗) 2018 Acrylic and newspaper on linen Unique 232 × 140 cm Estimate: H K $ 950,000–1,200,000 Generously donated by the artist & kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction The typography in untitled 2018 DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY, is layered upon repetitive copies of South China Morning Post, a widely circulated and read Chinese newspaper. As such, through this ongoing series of commissioned drawings and newspaper collage, Tiravanija engages with the ideology and construction of propaganda. The work asks questions about the way in which these images are made, assembled and distributed, and the implicit challenge they offer to the ways in which we are accustomed to seeing. Tirivanija both replicates the profusion of images, the surfeit of information, that is at the heart of what it means to ‘follow the news,’ yet also simultaneously challenges these notions. Rirkrit Tiravanija (b.1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentina-born Thai artist, living between New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai, and his practice exposes the tensions of
this nomadic existence, blending and re-combining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, his work creates open-ended contexts for spectators to grapple with the proposed questions themselves. The strength of Tiravanija’s work lies in its ephemerality, its elusive quality that escapes definition: by appropriating material of the everyday and re-staging it, the artist allows the viewer a perspective both simultaneously banal and deeply profound--a window onto the fleeting nature of life itself. Tiravanija received his BA from Ontario College of Art and Design in 1984 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. From 1985-1986, he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and has received numerous grants and awards, including the Absolut Art Award 2010, the Silpathorn Award by the Ministry of Culture in Thailand (2017), Hugo Boss Prize (2004), and Lucelia Artist Award by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2003), among others.
Fire and Sand: 2 days in Kathmandu
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Estimate: HK $ 80,000–120,000 Generously donated by Sangeeta Thapa
As an exclusive add-on to your next trip to Kathmandu, two guests are invited to experience two very special Buddhist poojas (ritual ceremonies) in Nepal. The first is a Fire Pooja, where idols representing various personal or cultural narratives are constructed using barley, and then burned in a ritual fire. The second is a Sand Mandala ceremony, where guests will join the last day of a 4-day ritual at a monastery, watching the deliberate destruction of a beautifully intricate mandala that had been designed and drawn in the past days.
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The support received from this lot will directly benefit exhibition production in 2021 at Para Site and the exhibition production as well as staff salaries for Kathmandu Triennale 2077. Para Site is a proud Institutional Partner of the Triennale.
This experience is intended as an add-on to your Kathmandu Triennale visit in 2021, but can be arranged around the dates of your choosing with at least a month’s notice—this is also to ensure auspicious dates for the poojas. The visit will be overseen by Ms. Sangeeta Thapa (Founder/Director of Siddhartha Arts Foundation, and Chairperson of Kathmandu Triennale), and guests will be accompanied by a host-translator.
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Pacita Abad
Join the Circle 2003 20-colour, lithograph, collagraph, photo-polymer relief and intaglio, copper relief, on shaped handmade cream STPI paper Edition 16 of 20, plus proofs 127 × 101.6 cm Estimate: H K $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by Pacita Abad Art Estate
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Join the Circle is from a series of works produced by Abad during a three-month collaboration in 2003 at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). When Abad met with the printers and papermakers for the first time, they stated anything was possible and Abad took this as a challenge and pursued it. She started developing drawings on paper and brought in materials like fabric, printed fabric, glass, tin, plastic buttons, yarns and found objects, with the idea of putting these in her drawings, so that her STPI collaborators could find a way to translate them into lithographs and paper pulp works. Of this series, Abad said, ‘I decided to focus on circles as the unifying theme of my STPI prints and pulp paper pieces. Circles have always been in my work and they are direct, simple, modern, universal, intimate, fascinating and playful. I love the shape of the circle!’ Pacita Abad (b.1946, Philippines) studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Arts Student League in New York. In the late 1970s, Pacita began developing a method she called trapunto painting. Trapunto refers to a quilting technique in which canvases are padded and stitched before being painted and layered with a range of printed textiles
and objects, including buttons, rickrack, sequins, and shells. Characterised by their vibrant colour and intricate construction, these works combine a broad range of styles, subjects, and techniques, from social realist tableaus incorporating indigenous textiles to richly detailed abstractions inspired by Korean ink brush painting, Indonesian batik, and Papua New Guinean macramé. Abad’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the National Museum, Jakarta; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong; The Museum of Philippine Art, Manila; Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila; Bhirasri Museum of Modern Art, Bangkok; Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore; The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrant, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, a travelling exhibition organised by the Asia Society, New York; Olympiad of Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Seoul; 2N D Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka; and La Bienal de Habana, Havana. She died in Singapore in 2004.
Pio Abad
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COUNTERNARRATIVES IX 2017 Acid dye print on silk twill Edition 1 of 1 + 1 AP 200 × 100 cm Estimate: HK $ 95,000 - 110,000 Generously donated by the artist and Silverlens Gallery
Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines) lives and works in London. He began his art studies at the University of the Philippines before
receiving a BA from Glasgow School of Art and an MA from the Royal Academy Schools, London. He has recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2020); Kadist, San Francisco (2019); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); 2N D Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii (2019); 12TH Gwangju Biennial: Imagined Borders, Gwangju (2018); Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018); Kadist, Paris (2017); Para Site, Hong Kong (2017); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2016); 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2016); EVA International Biennial, Limerick (2016); e-flux, New York City (2015); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila(2015); Gasworks, London (2014); and Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Manila (2014). Abad’s practice is concerned with the social and political signification of things. Ranging from drawing and textile to sculpture and photography, Abad’s work is deeply informed by the modern history of the Philippines where he was born and raised. Abad uses strategies of appropriation to mine alternative or repressed historical events, unravel official accounts, and draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies, and people. Often appropriating symbols of power and evoking a sense of excess, the artist brings together multiple layers of histories and present-day realities to render visible his critique and his solidarity with those who stand against injustice.
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In COUNTERNARRATIVES, Pio Abad continues his engagement with Philippine political history through a series of silk banners, looking at the problematic cultural legacy of the Marcos dictatorship in light of recent attempts to rehabilitate this dark chapter in the nation’s history. Emblazoned in red are signs appropriated from political protests in the Philippines. An inventory of action often taken amidst a paucity of dissent is shown, from David Medalla’s placard ‘A BAS LAS MYSTIFICATION! DOWN WITH THE PHILISTINES!’, which the artist held up during the opening night of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1969, to ‘HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU’, a line sung by George Washington in the musical Hamilton, refashioned as an anti-revisionist sign during the protests against the burial of Ferdinand Marcos at the National Heroes Cemetery in November 2016. Accessing and reimagining these artefacts from our collective political imagination, Abad raises questions about how they might play into our current lives when images that were once ridiculous now seem lethal, and when objects that used to be fragments of the past now appear to be glimpses into an increasingly perilous future.
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Carmen Argote
Macronutrient 2020 Protein bar oil and crayon on paper Unique 55.9 × 38.1 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000 - 55,000 Generously donated by the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Macronutrient is part of a recent series of oil imprints on paper, where Argote thought about how a print is defined by the transfer of a mark from one surface onto another. The amorphous shapes of these prints result from the nut oils of protein bars seeping into the paper’s surface, as if they were communicating through the changing shape of the oil marks over time. The oil continues to bloom and grow beyond the traced crayon lines, representing continuous change and a lack of control, as well as an accumulation of time and a process of digestion. Argote’s practice is deeply informed by process and material. Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also received her BFA in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Visual Arts Center,
University of Texas, Austin (2020); New Museum, New York (2019); PAOS, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); Ballon Rouge Collective, Istanbul, Turkey (2019) and New York (2018); Instituto de Visión, Bogotá, Colombia (2018); Panel LA, Los Angeles (2017); Adjunct Positions Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); MAK Center, Los Angeles (2015); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2014); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2013). Argote has been featured in group exhibitions at SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2017); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2017), Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2017); and Denver Art Museum, Denver (2017). She is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019); Artadia Los Angeles award (2019); Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015); and a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).
Black Box
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Black Box Collection 2020 UV inkjet-print on Antalis Wove Diamond White, 220gsm, acid-free, FSC-certified paper Edition 18 of 44 + 16 APs 42 × 59.4 cm each Estimate: HK $ 30,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artists
Black Box represents the collective effort of 16 Hong Kong artists who came together in 2019 to empower each other and to navigate through the toughest times in the city. Each Black Box is a collection of 16 limited edition prints, all signed and numbered by the artists.
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Black Box (list of individual print names, respective to artist name list): Too Much Happiness《多幸福》, C(r)Y, Temporary Storage (video still)《臨時儲存(錄像截圖 )》, 2014 & 2019, Strangers《陌生人》, Your skin, Lily (distance)《百合花,距離。》, Celebration of the National Liberation Day of Korea on the top floor of the Mandarin Hotel on August 15, 1969,《1969年 8月 15日於文華酒店頂樓 慶祝韓國國慶紀念 Participating artists: Ho Sin Tung 何倩彤 , Nadim Abbas 唐納天 , Ko 日》, The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers (video still),《Rosy Leavers 的 Sin Tung 高倩彤 , South Ho 何兆南 , Firenze Lai 黎清妍 , Lee Kit 李傑 , Ivy Ma 馬琼珠 , Warren Leung 梁志和 , Angela Su 徐世琪 , Pak Sheung Chuen 前世今生(錄像截圖)》, P180310- TTCI-L3- P, Either / Or, Signs, In 白雙全 , Tan Yuk King 陳玉瓊 , Tsang Kin Wah 曾建華 , Sara Wong 黃志恒 , between the regular intervals《等距之間》, Shadow of Mr. Butterflies (Causeway Bay)《蝴蝶先生的陰影(銅鑼灣)》, Protect Yourself, Choose Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗 , Wong Wai Yin 黃慧妍 , Samson Young 楊嘉輝 your revolt and its shadow
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Mircea Cantor
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
2019 × 1 2019 Ink on rice paper Unique 33.7 × 45 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist
Mircea Cantor (b. 1977, Romania) has had solo exhibitions including Manifestation IN SITU Patrimoine et Art contemporain, La Passe Muraille, Forteresse De Salses, Salses-le-Château, France, 2019; Wine wallpapers and other leaks, #7 clous à Marseille, Marseille, France, 2019; Vanatorul of imagini, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France, 2018; HISTORY IS JUST A BULLET ON YOUR TIMELINE, VNH Gallery, Paris, France, 2018; Your Ruins are my Flag, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy, 2017, among many others. Selected group exhibitions include Voyage Autour de ma Chambre,
Dvir Gallery, online exhibition, 2020; Animals in Art, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark, 2020; BRINK: Caroline Lucas curates the Towner Collection, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK, 2019; Your footsteps are the road, for there is no road, Red Brick Museum, Beijing, China, 2019, among many others. Cantor‘s work is included in The Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, The Israel Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Abteiberg Museum, Magasin 3, as well as in other collections worldwide.
Gordon Cheung
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Window #8 2018 Financial Times newspaper, bamboo and adhesive Unique 75.5 × 94.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 55,000–75,000 Generously donated by artist, Edel Assanti, and Yas Mostashari Chang
Gordon Cheung (b.1975, London, UK) is interested in historical revisionism and the underlying mechanics of power that govern our understanding of the world. Imagery itself is Cheung’s primary
medium, co-opted in the creation of multifaceted paintings or manipulated via digital algorithms, ultimately posing a challenge to dominant political narratives and visual culture’s active participation in them. Gordon Cheung completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2001. Solo exhibitions include Tears of Paradise, Edel Assanti 2020; New Order Vanitas at Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, USA, 2017; Gordon Cheung at The Whitaker, UK, 2017; Here be Dragons at Nottingham Castle Museum (2016); Altered States at the Arizona State University Art Museum (2010), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the New Art Gallery Walsall (2009); The Promised Land at Jack Shainman Gallery (2009). Cheung’s work features in numerous public collections worldwide, including Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The British Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Hood Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitworth Art Gallery, and The Yale Center for British Art. Cheung lives and works in London.
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Made from financial newspaper and bamboo, Cheung’s Window sculptures refer to homes in China with traditional window lattice designs, thought to illustrate the multicultural dynamism of the era of the Silk Road in their varied aesthetic origins. Mapping epic post-apocalyptic landscapes against the backdrop of Financial Times stock listings, Cheung’s work draws as much on classical literary and art historical sources as it does on contemporary media and imagery. The window sculptures hover between states of being, suggesting a ghostly architecture that would have supported them while also serving as a demarcation between the march of unstoppable progress; a framework of identity, history and culture that define the individual.
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Luke Ching Chin Wai 程展緯
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
LIKE 讚
2018–2020 Double-sided tape Unique 20 × 20 × 32 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist
Like 讚 , resembles a sculptural fragment from a story involving well-known Chinese philosopher Sun Yat-Sen. In 1883 at the age of 17, Sun Yat-Sen returned to China from Honolulu, in the Kingdom of Hawaii where he had studied English, British history, mathematics, science, and Christianity. Worried that he was embracing Christianity, his brother sent him back to their village and Sun soon met up with his childhood friend Lu Haodong again at Beijidian (北極殿 ), a temple in Cuiheng Village. They saw many villagers worshipping the Beiji Emperor-God in the temple, and they were so dissatisfied with these ancient healing methods that they broke the statue, infuriating the fellow villagers, resulting in Sun Yat-Sen’s escape to Hong Kong. Luke Ching (b.1972, Hong Kong) was a top-notch colour pencil artist in his pre-university years. He was among the best in class at school, and he wasn’t too bad at seal carving, either. In university, Ching trained in the field of mixed media under the tutelage
of Professor Chan. At the time, mixed media still belonged to the category of ‘Others’ when one specified the medium of one’s work. Up until the age of 30, Ching worked as a class teacher of Grade 4 students and taught art and general studies. After turning 30, Ching not only learned to swim and cycle but also managed to get married (even before he was able to type in Chinese)—a feat he considers as his lifetime achievement. In his 30s, Ching took an interest in public space and the development of the gift economy, searching for artistic inspiration from within the breath and pulse of society. After turning 40, Ching began focusing on his career, and his current life ambition is to become his boss’s pet. Ching has participated in exhibitions and residencies worldwide, including Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 2018), Tai Kwun’s inaugural exhibition Dismantling the Scaffold (Hong Kong, 2018), solo exhibitions and residencies at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery (United Kingdom, 2008), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Residence Program (Japan, 2006), and a residency project at PS1 Contemporary Arts Centre (USA, 2000).
Heman Chong 張奕滿
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The Lovely Bones / Alice Sebold 2012 Painting on canvas Unique 61 × 46 × 4 cm Estimate: HK $ 55,000–75,000 Generously donated by the artist and Rossi & Rossi
The Lovely Bones / Alice Sebold is a reimagined cover for this bestselling American novel released in 2002 about the death of a teenage girl, who watches from her personal heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. This work belongs to a series of more than 180 paintings by Chong known as Cover (Versions). It is an ongoing series of 18-by-24-inch canvases using graphical interfaces as invented book covers.
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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; 10T H 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.
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Alexandre da Cunha
Faces 2020 Portfolio of 10 C-type photographs Edition 6 of 40 + 10 APs 25.4 × 20.4 cm each Estimate: HK $ 25,000–45,000 Generously donated by the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery
Faces is a portfolio of imaginary portraits by Alexandre da Cunha composed from household items: fruit, vegetables, appliances, spices, and kitchen and cleaning utensils. They were created whilst working from home every day from April through June 2020 and shared via Instagram. The composition of each face is undertaken almost as a form of daily exercise, part of a new routine or as a marker of the passing of time, a line drawn on the calendar. Reviewing his experience of a familiar domestic environment and encountering an intensification of his surroundings’ potential, Faces was born out of the close examination of the familiar as possibility and spontaneity within limited space and means. Domesticity, habitual labour and household chores are reimagined as a space for reflection and expression. In their subtle, characterful and expedient arrangement, these faces demonstrate that a quiet calendar is never an indicator of time lost. Alexandre da Cunha (b.1969, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo and London. He has referred to his practice as ‘pointing’ as opposed to ‘making’. By ‘pointing’ at existing objects in plain sight, da Cunha highlights new and unexpected
meanings within the objects he chooses. This approach allows him to disentangle preconceptions and instinctive responses inherent to particular objects, restoring them with alternative modes of viewing and understanding. Given their renewed possibility, da Cunha’s sculptures inspire lush potential, illuminating everyday encounters with these ordinary materials. For instance, household cleaning objects suddenly conjure spiritual significance, while seemingly mundane industrial readymades echo art historical precedents. Recent solo exhibitions include: Arena, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy, 2020; Portal, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil, 2020; Boom, Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil, 2017; Mornings, Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium, 2017; Free Fall, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England, 2016. Recent group exhibitions include MECARÕ. Amazonia in the Petitgas Collection, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France; and Plymouth Box, Plymouth, England, 2020; A View in General, Mata Gallery at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil, 2019; Form and Volume, Museum of Modern Art and Western Antiquities, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019; Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer III, Fulmer, England, 2019; Garden of delight with final judgement, Horse Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2018; and Histórias da Sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2017, among others.
Iftikhar & Elizabeth Dadi
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Gandhi, They Made History 1999 Metal, plexiglass, LED, Duratrans print, circular light box Edition of 5 48.26 cm diameter Estimate: HK $ 55,000–75,000 Generously donated by the artists and Jhaveri Contemporary
Iftikhar Dadi (b.1961, Karachi, Pakistan) and Elizabeth Dadi (b.1957, Seattle, WA, USA) live and work in Ithaca, NY, USA. They make collaborative work that explores questions of identity
and borders, and the capacities of the informal realm in the Global South. They work in diverse mediums, including large-scale installations, often incorporating neon lights and mass-produced objects. Their work draws on the tropes of advertising and media, and critically engages with the legacies of Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and site- specificity. Iftikhar Dadi received his PhD from Cornell University. He is an associate professor at Cornell in the Department of History of Art, and also served as chair of the Department of Art (2010–14). Elizabeth Dadi received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Selected exhibitions include: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2019-20); Havana Biennial, Havana (2019); Lahore Biennale 01, Lahore (2018); Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo (2017); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2016); John Hartell Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca (2018); Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario (2013); and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka (2012).
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In They Made History, diverse non-Western figures from Hollywood films loom as icons against visionary landscapes. The very idea of the great man or (less-commonly) woman, energising the march of civilisation, or the gifted human subject busy creating and shaping the dynamics of history, eclipses all other conceptions and structural understandings of apprehending the play of historical forces. These epic narratives now constitute a universal norm. Jan Rambo, the only larger work in this series, serves as a kind of pendant or exclamation mark, and is the Lollywood response to Hollywood’s rendering of epic history. The Urdu text in the work records the title of the film, Hero, in which Lollywood film actor ‘Jan Rambo’ has starred.
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Cian Dayrit
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Insidious Imperial Insignia 4 (Cop Out) 2019 Acrylic and collage on handmade paper Unique 51 × 77cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
The series Insidious Imperial Insignia looks into the bereavement and irony of how military forces seem to serve the ruling class rather than whom they are meant to protect—the people. Insidious Imperial Insignia 4 (Cop Out) from this series references the seal of the Philippine National Police. The work of Cian Dayrit (b.1989, Manila, Philippines) investigates notions of power and identity as they are represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, maps and other institutionalised media. They often respond to different marginalised communities, encouraging a critical reflection on colonial and privileged perspectives. His cartographic projects which combine archival references and grassroots countermapping show how empires scored out the maps of the modern world, how its aftermath perpetuates industrial development,
and how alternative territories might be imagined from the ground up. Informed by the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the Philippines, Dayrit’s work nonetheless resists being fixed in a specific position or location. Dayrit studied painting at the University of the Philippines. He was a recipient of the Ateneo Art Award in 2017 and Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award in 2018. Select solo and group exhibitions include The Crack Begins Within, Berlin Biennale (2020); Beyond the God’s Eye, Nome, Berlin (2019); Part of the Labyrinth, Gothenburg Biennial (2019); Allegories of Nation-Building, Kaida, Manila (2018); A beast, a god, and a line, Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Songs for Sabotage, New Museum Triennial, New York (2018); Busis Ibat Ha Kanayunan (Voices From The Hinterlands), Bellas Artes, Manila and Bataan (2017); and The Bla-Bla Archaeological Complex, U.P. Vargas Museum, Manila (2013).
Willem de Rooij
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Wall 2017 C-Print Photograph Edition of 5 + 2 APs 60 × 45 cm Estimate: HK $ 120,000–160,000 Generously donated by the artist
Willem de Rooij (b.1969, Beverwijk, the Netherlands) investigates the production, contextualisation and interpretation of images through a variety of media. Appropriations and collaborations are fundamental to de Rooij’s artistic method, and his projects have stimulated new research in art history and ethnography. With Jeroen de Rijke (1970-2006), he represented the Netherlands at
the 51ST Venice Biennale in 2005. De Rooij is Professor of Fine Art at the Städelschule Frankfurt/Main since 2006, and visiting advisor at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam since 2015. In 2016, he co-founded the BPA // Berlin programme for artists. Recent solo exhibitions include Bouquet II at LAXart, Los Angeles (2019); Whiteout at Kunstwerke Berlin (2017); Ebb Rains at IMA Brisbane (2017); Entitled at MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt/Main (2016); The Impassioned No at Consortium, Dijon (2015); and Bouquet IX at the Jewish Museum, New York (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Mindful Circulations at the BDL Museum, Mumbai (2019); Stories of Almost Everyone at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles (2018); the Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta (2017); EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick (2016); 10T H Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2014); and Hollandaise at Raw Material Company, Dakar (2013).
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Wall was photographed in Sekondi, Ghana, in 2014. It depicts part of a deserted structure built with bricks imported from the Netherlands in the 17TH century. Dutch trade ships would sail from Dutch harbours to Ghana empty of cargo. For the stability of the ship, the cargo holds were filled with bricks. In Ghana, the bricks would be exchanged for goods, or enslaved West African people. The bricks were used to construct fortresses, jails, living quarters, and other permanent structures on the coast.
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Patrizio Di Massimo
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Hi, I’m the spirit of fragmented segments of thoughts 2019 Watercolour on paper Unique 35.6 × 25.4 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
Like the rest of his body of work, the driving force behind Hi, I’m the spirit of fragmented segments of thoughts is Di Massimo’s combined interest in personal and collective history, along with a soft spot for the twisted side of things. It was in 2009 on the occasion of his degree show at the Slade School of Art in London—when Di Massimo showed a series of male figures loosely adopting fascistic mannerisms next to one of women and aptly named after Picasso’s aphorism (‘As every artist I am first of all a painter of women’)—that painting began to claim a central role in his practice. Patrizio Di Massimo (b. 1983, Italy) lives and works in London, where he graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art. Solo shows
include those at Francois Ghelaby, Los Angeles (Upcoming 2020); Palazzo Ducale, Urbino (2019); ChertLüdde, Berlin (2018); Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2017); NICC, Brussels (2016); Monteverdi, Tuscany (2015); T293, Rome (2014); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2014); Gasworks, London (2013); and Villa Medici, Rome (2012), among many others. Recent group include those at Para Site, Hong Kong (2020); A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (2019); Museion, Bolzano (2018); EVA International, Limerick (2018); HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); BASEMENT ROMA, Rome (2016); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2015); Triennale di Milano (2015); MuHKA, Antwerp (2014); Castello di Rivoli, Tourin (2014); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2013); and MAXXI, Rome (2012), among others.
Izmail Efimov
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Untitled (From the series Floristica) 2019 Watercolour on paper Unique 42 × 29.7 cm each Estimate: HK $ 48,000–68,000 Generously donated by the artist
visuality. ‘Leaning on the past, working for the future’ is the ethnofuturist motto, borrowed from the Mexican indigenous painter Rufino Tamayo. Izmail Efimov (b.1946, Porandaykino, Russia) in the Hill Mari region by the Volga river, lives and works in Yoshkar-Ola. He trained as a muralist in the socialist realist style at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, during the so-called reconstruction (‘perestroika’) of the USSR, he chaired the artists’ union of the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and in the 1990s and 2000s he was in charge of the heraldry of the Republic of Mari El, the official name since 1990. Efimov is the author of its flag, coat of arms, and many other visual symbols. Past exhibitions include Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong (2020); Blood and Soil, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2019); and A Temporary Futures Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2017). Upcoming exhibitions include the Kathmandu Triennale (2021).
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The series Floristica (2019) consists of both drawings and watercolours on paper in the A3 format. The imagery is both joyful and menacing, both experimental and grounded in solid academic knowledge about composition, draughtsmanship, and the correct use of painterly effects for lulling viewers into a sense of security. What could possibly go wrong in these ornamental variations ‘about nothing’? Floristica invokes a classical balancing act (playing fluid, well-rounded shapes against somewhat acrid colour) and an expressive charge. The series revisits the popular idea of art as self-expression, as the accessible visual articulation of intangible moods. Yet with these supposedly inane floral compositions, Efimov launches into something essentially anti-classical: a new insecurity oozes out of their intestine-like complications. Seemingly a mere diversion, Floristica nevertheless embodies the programme of ethno-futurism, a movement in art in the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic republics of Russia’s Volga Basin that Efimov helped found in the early 1990s. His work amalgamates archaeological and ethnographic influences with contemporary
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Etsu Egami 江上 越
Confusion by brushing past-2019-119 2019 Oil on canvas Unique 45.5 × 38.0 cm Estimate: H K $ 18,000–38,000 Generously donated by the artist and Whitestone Gallery
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Unlike Etsu Egami’s previous works, Confusion by brushing past-2019-119 is from a series that explores the relationship between people and omnipresent communication and surveillance tools. Inspired by human images from video communication systems and surveillance cameras, Egami’s work displays a unique means of expression and narration reflecting a current reality we all face, and which captures our collective experience. The artist acknowledges the fundamental distant feeling when confronting another person on camera, and carefully investigates the different levels of distance and borders in communications between people. Dynamic but thinly painted translucent, Egami’s canvas allows viewers to plunge into the depths of the artist’s never-ending pursuit of communication. Her oil paintings depicting blurred faces are interlocutors between herself and others, creating a sense of incongruity between time and space and reconciling the discomforts between languages.
Etsu Egami (b. 1994, Japan) graduated from her BFA at HfG Karlsruhe (The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design) in Germany and is currently studying at Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Egami’s experiences of living and studying in different places incite her to play with the notion of ‘communication’. The artist is interested in exploring the ‘origin of language’ and describing ‘society’ by words. Her project gained international acclaim for site-specific field surveys and documentations. Her solo and group exhibitions include Into the light...Etsu Egami, Germany; Dialogue beyond 400 years, London; This is not a Mis-hearing game, Beijing; and Dialogue -4,000 years- Etsu Egami Exhibition (Chiba City Art and Culture Newcomer Award Winning Project). In 2019, Egami held her solo exhibition at Whitestone Ginza New Gallery, Etsu Egami: Your Name? which centred around ‘dialogues in hometown’. She is also selected for the Sovereign Art Foundation Art Prize 2019, as well as VOCA exhibition 2020 (Vision of Contemporary Art).
Jes Fan 范 加
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If you would like to see a preview of the video, please contact jacqueline@para-site.art
Dr. Pimple Popper
The luminous orbs shown in Dr. Pimple Popper were extracted from oyster shells by the artist Jes Fan when he went to a pearl harvesting studio in Shanghai, an unusual activity which has been gaining in popularity in recent years. Resonating thematically with the uncanny fusion of organic and inorganic matter in his sculptural work, in this video Fan explores the porous boundaries between flesh and object, commodity and body, the beautiful and the abject. 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 labour.
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 magazine.
2020 HD color video in silicon frame Unique 49 × 42 × 8 cm 2 min 30 sec Estimate: HK $ 38,000–48,000 Generously donated by the artist and Empty Gallery
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Hans-Peter Feldmann
Untitled / Untitled Mixed media collage, $5 bill, photograph, framed/ Mixed media collage, £5 bill, photograph, framed Unique 30 × 21 cm each Estimate: HK $ 38,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Simon Lee Gallery
In both Untitled works, the artist debunks the exalted stature of each subject featured on the currency. Banknotes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest in them. By using them as a medium, Feldmann raises questions about notions of value in art. His primary interest in the serial display of currency lies less in its status as a symbol of capitalist excess than in its ubiquity as a mass-produced image and a material with which we come into contact every day. Through challenging our visual habits by means of minimal humoristic interventions, Feldmann directs focus towards trusted trivialities, thereby revealing the absurdity of our everyday. Abraham Lincoln, the 16T H president of the United States (1861–1865) assumes the appearance of an average man, and Queen Elizabeth becomes the average woman. By confronting the viewer with their own pictorial world and perception, the artist ensures the meaning of the work depends on the viewer’s own interpretation. Hans-Peter Feldmann (b.1941, Düsseldorf, Germany) would not describe himself as an artist. He is a compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera. His works have an aesthetic and conceptual simplicity. An interest
in the formal language of typology is played out in pictorial assemblages of the overlooked and mundane: strawberries, shoes, seated women in paintings, lips, romantic seascapes, and kitsch floral photography. His witty play with traditional aesthetics sees collections of classical paintings of nudes and portraits daubed with black crosses, red noses and cross-eyes. Feldmann intentionally bypasses the rules of the art market and high culture by making unsigned, undated works and limitless editions. Similarly, his artworks and exhibitions remain untitled, thereby allowing the works to speak for themselves. In doing so, he resists commodification and commercialisation—making his work purely about the value of the art itself. He is of the democratic belief that art cannot be owned and that it is purely the viewer’s personal experience of the work that engenders its worth. His work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and projects, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2017); Sammlung Philara, Dusseldorf, Germany (2016); C/O Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2016); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2015); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (2013); and Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2012), which travelled to BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2012).
Simryn Gill
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Midden Mother 2020 Collage Unique 23 × 15 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary
Midden Mother is characteristic of Gill’s diverse art practices and her works often focus on gathering and transforming found objects to create new associations, and examining the relationships between culture, knowledge, and place.
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Simryn Gill (b.1959, Singapore) presently lives in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and Sydney, Australia. Her methods include photography, drawing, objects and collections, and writing. Gill’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Gropious Bau, Berlin (2020); Drawing Room, London (2019); TarraWarra Museum, Victoria (2019); Met Breuer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); National Gallery, Singapore (2018); Kohta, Helsinki (2018); Lunds Konsthall, Lund (2017); Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (2016); NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2015); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014). Gill represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in a solo presentation in 2013. She has exhibited in dOCUMENTA 12 and 13 (2007, 2012), and in biennales that include Sydney Biennale (2018) and Moscow Biennale (2013). Gill also writes and makes artist books. Her most recent publication is Becoming Palm, with Michael Taussig, published by NTU CCA Singapore and Sternberg Press in Berlin.
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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Florence & Constantin (Jardin Brancusi)
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2015 Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle photo rag Edition 6 of 10 25.4 × 19.4 cm Estimate: HK $ 28,000–48,000 Generously donated by the artist
Florence & Constantin is a special edition by Dominique GonzalezFoerster inspired by Constantin Brancusi’s photograph Florence Meyer posing in the Studio, approx. 1932. From a very young age, Florence Meyer lived her life among artists and practiced her violin in the studio of sculptor Constantin Brancusi. An experimental artist and filmmaker based in Paris, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (b.1965, Strasbourg, France) has been exploring since 1990 the different modalities of sensory and cognitive relationship between bodies and spaces, real or fictitious, up to the point of questioning the distance between organic life and work. Metabolising literary and cinematographic, architectural and musical, scientific and pop references, she creates ‘chambers’ and ‘interiors’, ‘gardens’, ‘attractions’ and ‘planets’, with respect to the multiple meanings that these terms take on in the works of Virginia Woolf or Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brontë sisters or Thomas Pynchon, Joanna Russ or Philip K. Dick. This investigation of spaces extends to a questioning of the implicit neutrality of practices and exhibition spaces. Her ‘mises en espace’, ‘anticipations’ and ‘apparitions’ seek to Invade the
sensory domain of the viewers in order to operate intentional changes in their memory and imagination. Haunted by history and future, her works become containers where the artist incubates a form of subjectivity that does not yet exist. Through multiple international exhibitions, short films, productions and concerts, her mutant work contributes to the invention of new technologies of consciousness. Select solo exhibitions include Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Tales of the 21ST Century, Galerie for Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, 2018; Pynchon Park, Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, 2016; Costumes & Wishes For The 21ST Century, Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin, 2016; and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. 1887–2058, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2015, among others. Select group exhibitions include May You Live in Interesting Times, 58TH Venice Biennale, Venice, 2019; Luogo e Segni, Palazzo Grassi– Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2019; Cabinet d’amateur, an oblique novel, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2019; Generations Part 3, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, 2018; and Kunsthalle for Music, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2018, among others.
Sheela Gowda
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This, deathless 2014 Inkjet print on paper Edition 2 of 10 33.41 × 25 cm Estimate: HK $ 38,000 - 58,000 Generously donated by the artist
Sheela Gowda (b.1957, Bhadravati, India) is a contemporary artist living and working in Bangalore. Gowda studied painting at Ken School of Art, Bangalore, India (1979), pursued a postgraduate diploma at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India (1982), and an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London
(1986). Trained as a painter, Gowda expanded her practice into sculpture and installation, employing a diversity of material like human hair, cow-dung, incense, and kumkuma powder (a natural pigment most often available in brilliant red). She is known for her ‘process-orientated’ work, often inspired by the everyday labour experiences of marginalised people in India. Her work is associated with postminimalism, drawing from ritualistic associations. Her early oils with pensive girls in nature were influenced by her mentor K. G. Subramanyan, and later ones by Nalini Malani towards a somewhat expressionistic direction depicting a middle class chaos and tensions underplayed by coarse eroticism. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maria Lassnig Prize. Notable exhibitions include: Sheela Gowda. It.. Matters, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (2020); Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach (2014); Arken Museum, Copenhagen (2012); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2012); Garden of Learning, Busan Biennial (2012). Gowda’s works can be found in the collection of the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, USA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA.
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This, deathless is a photograph of a sculptural collage—an Anthropocene portrait. Gowda is interested in the power that objects and forms carry in capturing aspects of reality, with its social and cultural narratives, that are otherwise unseen and unspeakable through other languages of representation and analysis. Materials for Gowda can be at the same time complex metaphors and ends in themselves, forgetful of their many cultural and spiritual investments attributed by human practice, but charged with a potential spiritual tension of their own, serving as relics of worlds unravelled and building blocks for other, new ones. These worlds are complex, often conflicted and equivocal. Her vocabulary is constantly discovered and invented in the things that surround her and that she respells into her works.
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Gu Benchi 顧奔馳
Endless Lines No. 2017–14 2017 Polyester yarn line, stainless steel nail, acrylic adhesive, acrylic Unique 90 × 70 cm Estimate: H K $ 38,000–58,000 Generously donated by the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction The lines in Endless Lines No. 2017–14 continue to intertwine and overlap to the point that the beginning and the end are indistinguishable. This overlapping of the frontal surface over the underlying grid gives a powerful and rich visual effect of illusionistic perspectival space. Gu Benchi begins his works striving towards a sense of order. Gu believes the universe is organised with an unseen and subtle order and that human beings naturally aspire towards order over chaos. Following the principles of geometry, he begins with the shapes of square, rectangle and triangle that further become stars or diamonds or pure abstraction through the intertwining of the polyester threads. These interesting patterns are strikingly similar to the ceilings of ancient Chinese architecture and the altar structure in Buddhist paintings. In Chinese traditional culture, everything in the universe is cyclical, and there is no definite beginning or end.
Gu Benchi (b.1979, Shanghai) was inspired by one of the abstract art pioneers Piet Mondrian and has taken geometric abstraction to a new level in his artworks. By way of using colored high-strength polyester thread, he weaves multi-layered configurations, playing with balance, harmony, symmetry, perspective, and light. Gu also combines the ideas of poetry, philosophy and geometry in his detailed creations. Solo exhibitions include Endless Lines, Fabrik Gallery, Hong Kong, 2014. Group exhibitions include ‘In X Shanghai’ Contemporary Art Group Exhibition, ISGO Gallery, Shanghai, 2017; Degree Zero of Art: the Rational Expression of Abstract Art, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017; ‘Urban Fable’ Greenland Colorful Cities Art Exhibition, Greenland Art Gallery, Shanghai, 2017; ‘Cismontane Scenery Beyond Compare Here’ Joint Exhibition of Young Artists, Mount Qiyun Art Field, Mount Huang, 2017; and Line, China and South Korea Exchange Project ‘Bridge’ Series II, Korean Cultural Institution, Shanghai, 2017.
Federico Herrero
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Wave 2020 Monotype on paper Unique 50 × 40 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–30,000 Generously donated by the artist
Federico Herrero (b. 1978, San José, 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.
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Wave is a monotype on paper done at the printing studio Keystone in Berlin. Herrero started working on paper only about four years ago. In these works, colour is seen as volume and has a strong influence on sound. 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.
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Ho Tzu Nyen 何子彦
Waiting (Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen) 2020 Digital video, single-channel, 16:9 format, colour and sound (stereo) 4 min 36 sec Edition 1 of 10 + 2 APs Estimate: HK $ 30,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery
Waiting features Ripon Chowdhury, one of some 323,000 migrant workers living in dormitories amongst the city state of Singapore, where the overwhelming majority of Singapore’s more than 50,000 COVID-19 infection cases take place. Since 21 April 2020, the government has imposed strict lockdown measures upon all dormitories, and the migrant workers—mostly hailing from South Asia or China—have been largely confined to their rooms. It is in this context that Ripon Chowdhury was invited by artist Ho Tzu Nyen to contribute to Contactless Deliveries. A poet, writer, and activist from Chittagong, Bangladesh, Chowdhury has been based in Singapore since 2010 as a migrant worker. A plethora of historical references dramatized 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. Ho Tzu Nyen has been widely exhibited
Half of the proceeds from the sale of this donation will be given directly to Ripon Chowdhury. If you would like to see a preview of the video, please contact jacqueline@para-site.art
with solo exhibitions at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg (2019); Kunstverein, Hamburg (2018); Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2018); TPAM, Yokohama (2018); Asia Art Archive (2017); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2015); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); and Artspace, Sydney (2011), amongst others. He also represented Singapore at the 54T H Venice Biennale (2011). Recent group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Busan (2019); Aichi Triennial 2019, Toyota City and Nagoya City (2019); Home Work 8, Beirut (2019); Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah (2019); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2018); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2018); Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Dhaka (2018); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016); Times Museum, Guangzhou (2013); and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012). 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).
Andrew Thomas Huang
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Estimate: $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist
HK
‘Strange Piece of Paradise’ Cowboy Portrait #1
‘Strange Piece of Paradise’ Cowboy Portrait #2
2018 Digital art, inkjet print on paper Edition 5 + 2 APs 20 × 20 cm
2018 Digital art, inkjet print on paper Edition 5 + 2 APs 14 × 20 cm
Rat King
Rat King
2020 Photography, digital art, inkjet print on paper Edition 5 + 2 APs 30 × 40 cm
2020 Photography, digital art, inkjet print on paper Edition 5 + 2 APs 32 × 40 cm
Filmmaker and artist Andrew Thomas Huang (b.1984, Los Angeles, CA, USA) crafts hybrid fantasy worlds and mythical dreamscapes inspired by his Chinese heritage and queer Asian mythology and folklore. A Grammy-nominated music video director, Huang’s collaborators include Bjork, FKA Twigs and Thom Yorke among others. His films have been commissioned by and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Sydney Opera House, Para Site, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. Huang graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Animation from the University of Southern California.
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‘Strange Piece of Paradise’ Cowboy Portrait #1 & #2 are digital avatars of a cowboy sculpted and rendered in Maya. They are a queerizing of the American hero archetype, reinterpreting the cowboy vigilante in its strangeness, horror, and monstrosity. The concept is partially inspired by the novel Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz. The Rat King works are from a series of self-portraits of the artist created to celebrate 2020 as the Year of the Metal Rat.
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Hung Fai 熊 輝
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Wild Grass XVIII 野草之十八
2020 Ink on paper Unique 68 × 68 cm Estimate: HK $ 65,000–95,000 Generously donated by the artist In Wild Grass XVIII《野草之十八》, the artist follows the cold and heavy ruler, painting line after lines like a sharp knife on the drenched paper. The ink, along with the movement of hands, soaks into the paper. The trace of ink condenses like a line at the fringe of the ruler. Pressing with fingertips, the droplets of ink diffuse. Some transform into hills and some grow into wild grass. Repeatedly painting homogeneous straight lines, and pressing the black ink, letting the free flow of ink diffuse as unique traces on the soaked wet paper. It awakes and records the signifier weaved by the scars of the trampled. Hung Fai (b. 1988, Hong Kong) graduated from the Fine Arts department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. Exploring both Chinese and Western media, Hung has developed unique expression and presentation techniques on both paper
and canvas. Through the deconstruction of elements in traditional Chinese ink paintings, his works are reconstructed conceptually with a series of experimentation and transformation and extend possibilities in ink painting. Solo exhibitions include The Departing Landscape - Hung Fai Ink Project, Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong (2016); Movement - Hung Fai, Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong (2014); and Variation: by Hung Fai, Vito, Fabrik Contemporary Art Gallery, Hong Kong (2013). Group exhibitions include Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong (2020); Homeland In Transit, Onkili, Basel (2019); Beijing Contemporary 2019, National Agricultural Exhibition Center, Beijing (2019); Art Shenzhen 2018, Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Centre, Shenzhen (2018); and The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+, M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong (2017), among others. His works are in the collections of M+ Museum for Visual Culture and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
JR
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28 Millimetres : Women Are Heroes, Eye on bricks (New Delhi) 2011 Produced by Social Animals, 4-color lithograph printed on Marinoni machine White BFK Rives paper, 300 grams Edition of 490/500 44.5 × 119 cm Estimate: HK $ 10,000–15,000 Generously donated by Perrotin
JR works at the intersection of photography, street art, filmmaking and social engagement. Over the last two decades he has developed multiple public projects and numerous site-specific interventions in cities all over the world: from buildings in the slums around Paris, to the walls in the Middle East and Africa or the favelas of Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include The Chronicles of San Francisco, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2019); JR: Chronicles, the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2019); and Momentum, la mécanique de l’épreuve, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2018). JR is also the director of two full-length documentaries: ‘Women Are Heroes’ (2011) and, with Agnès Varda, the Academy Award-nominated ‘Faces and Places’ (2017).
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JR’s Women Are Heroes project underlines women’s pivotal role in society. Women in harsh environments of social conflict are invited to be photographed going about their daily lives. The artist highlights the dignity of these women, pasting mural-size portraits of the subjects on the sides of buildings, in streets, and various publicly visible locations where they live and work. In 2009, the project took place in various cities in India. In creating this featured image, construction workers on a street in New Delhi allowed JR to achieve this pasting on an old brick wall within a few minutes before they removed the bricks for their use. Women Are Heroes has also taken place in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, Brazil, and Cambodia.
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Vvzela Kook 曲淵澈
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Confidential Records 機密錄
2019 Neon sign Unique + 1AP 99 × 197 × 15 cm Estimate: HK $ 80,000–100,000 Generously donated by the artist
This work is a part of the Confidential Records《機密錄》 series. Scientist Ray Kurzweil defined the acceleration of the development of technology as the Law of Accelerating Returns. He reckons that technology is growing exponentially, that humans could match the progress of the entire 20T H century with only 20 years in the 21ST century, and we are here right before the ‘explosion’— what will happen decades later might threaten all human beings. Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong had been reckoned as a ‘City of Crime’ and ‘City of Darkness’ as a consequence of improvisation and organic growth through the last decades before it was finally demolished in the early 1990s. In the story Confidential Records, the virtual underground city inherits this characteristic and functions as a shelter and final frontier to fight against the AI regime. In the future Ray Kurzweil predicted, Pure Blood Humans revolted in various ways such as cyber warfare, illegal army, assassin team, etc. Human beings work as a community, ‘bombing’ the city above ground attempting to take back sole sovereignty. While in the eyes of the majority—in this case, the artificial intelligence that is being produced day and night—this is nothing but an act of terrorism, political violence against ‘civilians’. How do we define terrorism in this case? Terrorism itself is one of the most controversial and contested questions because it is so politically loaded. The idea that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter might be an explanation because it goes back to the cause of
The buyer of this work will need to loan the work to Para Site for an exhibition from December 2020 to February 2021
why people become terrorists in the first place. This also brings up multilateral problems like, what is the definition of terrorism in the future? Does fighting against the government equate committing a crime? Is killing a robot an offence? Vvzela Kook (b. 1990, Dalian, China) is a new media artist who mainly works in audiovisual mediums, including performance, theatre, computer graphics and drawing. Kook’s video works combine technology with her artistic practice to reproduce and convert urban cityscapes into an integrated virtual experience, guiding the audience on a cybernetic journey. The condensed textures in her works connect with multiple sensual levels in our perception and reintroduce the unexplored potential of video as a medium. The narrative plays an important role in her work, the transmedia storytelling is part of the artistic concept. Especially the mixing of delicate drawings, 3D printing and video game optics in her videos show the wide range of media and materials the artist uses to visually translate her research-based projects. Kook has participated and shown her works in Para Site (2020), C-Lab Taipei (2019), MoCA Taipei (2019), Asia Society Hong Kong Centre (2019), Tai Kwun (2019), Microwave International Media Festival in Hong Kong (2018, 2016), PuSh Performing Art Festival in Vancouver (2017), Centre for Heritage Arts and Textile (2017), K11 Shanghai (2016), Hong Kong Arts Festival (2015), and the ‘89+’ programme (2012) co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets.
Maria Laet
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Earth (Parque Lage) 2015 Inkjet print on cotton paper Edition 1 of 5 104 × 158 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and Galeria Marilia Razuk
Earth (Parque Lage) is from a series of works that speaks of both possible and impossible attempt to join and to be together. It speaks of the open limit between inside and outside, of what is visible and invisible and of a continuation of the gesture, of the body, and in the landscape. Each one of these works has a different dialogue with the landscape, taking their poetics to different places.
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Multimedia artist Maria Laet (b.1982, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her choice of materials and mediums avoid meaning, any codification of sense, bringing nearer the very episode of creation. In her own words, ‘there is an act, as a ritual, in which the first poetry of the work is condensed.’ In her creative process, she uses candid objects that are concrete and accurate, like a needle or that which bears qualities of elasticity or fluidity, such as gauze, balloons, thread. She also uses natural elements or substances, such as air, wind, sand, wood sticks, chalk, milk, whereby her poetics of creation can be homologised to creative dynamics of nature, in opposition to the codified means of established artistic creation. She participated in the 33RD Bienal de São Paulo: Affective Affinities (2018); and 18T H Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012). She had her solo show Almost Nothing, as part of the project OTIUM#4, at the IAC Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes,
France (2019). She has participated in group exhibitions including I Remember Earth, Magasin des Horizons, Grenoble, France (2019); Matters of Concern, La Verrière, Fondation D’entreprise Hermès, Brussels, Belgium, (2019); Cosmogonies, au Gré des Éléments, MAMAC, Nice (2018); Video Art in Latin America, LAXART, Los Angeles (2017); La Vie Aquatique, Musée régional d’art contemporain, Occitanie/Méditerranée, France (2017); The Valise, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Tangents, MSK, Ghent, Belgium (2015); Encruzilhada, Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2015); Rumors of the Meteore, 49 Nord 6 est – Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2014); Everydayness, Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Poland (2014); From the Margin to the Edge, Somerset House, London (2012); Convite à Viagem, Rumos Itaú Cultural, São Paulo (2012); and O Lugar da Linha, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói and Paço das Artes in São Paulo (2010). Her work is part of collections such as MAM, Gilberto Chateaubriand, Rio de Janeiro; MAC Niterói; 49 Nord 6 est – Frac Lorraine, Metz, France; MSK, Ghent, Belgium; MAR, Rio de Janeiro; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; and MoMA, New York.
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Leung Chi Wo 梁志和
The Parish Feast Day of the Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Yuen Long, October 28, 1969 1969年 10月 28日 , 元朗聖伯多祿聖保祿堂慶祝主保瞻禮 2019 Archival Inkjet Print Edition 1 of 5 + 2 APs 52 × 82 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–55,000
Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery
The Parish Feast Day of the Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Yuen Long, October 28, 1969《1969 年10 月 28日 , 元朗聖伯多祿聖保祿 堂慶祝主保瞻禮》was photographed on black and white film on October 28, 2019, at Wing Hong House, Fuk Loi Estate, Tsuen Wan. On October 28, 1969, a middle-aged woman was seriously injured by a man with a chopper at the estate due to a dispute over love affairs. Her daughter tried to save her and also suffered from minor injuries in the fingers. Both the mother and daughter were later sent to the hospital. This is from the Date Series which the artist began in 2017. An ongoing reading of news archives for violent events from bombing to domestic conflicts, sexual assaults and gang fights, the collection of these events has become a social diary with a personal touch when the artist was able to revisit the sites of violence. On the same date, at the same location, exactly fifty years later, the artist turned the camera skyward. In naming the images, Leung chose civil and personal events that happened on the day of the crime, bringing to the forefront coexistences of ephemeral yet notable timelines referenced by the very same images. Through polysemy and polyphony, Leung systemises the contemplation and conception of two kinds of parallel worlds: one temporally synchronous but spatially distant, another temporally distinct yet spatially unified.
Leung Chi Wo (b.1968, Hong Kong), studied Culture of Photography at Centro di Ricerca e Archiviazione della Fotografia in Italy in 1991 and obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1997. Using photography, texts, found objects, performance and installation, Leung Chi Wo combines historical exploration with conceptual inquiry, to reinforce our doubts about memory, power systems and the ambivalence of history. Focusing on the 1967 anti-colonial riots in Hong Kong, Leung continues to research different social, cultural and political incidents that took place in that year. By synthesising and collecting vintage objects, archival materials and images, Leung juxtaposes quotidian events against parallel moments of political instability. His works have been exhibited at major international museums and institutions including Tate Modern in London, NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), and Queens Museum in New York. In collaboration with Sara Wong, he represented Hong Kong for its first participation in the Venice Biennale in 2001. He also participated in other biennials and triennials, such as Shanghai Biennale in China, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen, Marrakech Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and Asia Triennial Manchester. He had his first survey exhibition at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen in 2015. Leung Chi Wo is the co-founder of Para Site and currently Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media of the City University of Hong Kong.
Liu Chuang 劉 窗
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Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities Archive - Nikon D5200 Sample Color Photo 2018 Print on paper Edition 6 + 1 AP 100 × 150 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist
In Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities Archive - Nikon D5200 Sample Color Photo, shot with a Nikon D5200, we can observe moiré patterns resulting mainly from interference between the digital camera’s CCD sensor and the texture of feathers. The artist cites this image as a major point of reference for his field research methods: when the anthropologist, however observant, approaches his or her subject too closely, what he or she finds might just be a mirage.
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Liu Chuang (b.1978, Hubei, China) lives and works between Beijing and Shanghai. Liu graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 2001. He produces works that integrate social intervention with institutional critique to examine immediate social realities. Working across disciplines including video, installation, architecture, and performance, Liu uses banal readymades and intervention techniques with a subtle sensibility and an awareness of absurdity. Liu has extensively exhibited in international exhibitions including Segmented Landscape, K11 Art Village, Wuhan (2015); Love Story, Salon 94, New York, (2014), Untitled (The Dancing Partner), Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway (2014).
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Lung Yuet Ching Joyce 龍悅程
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction In Pep talk - transmitter《眾頌-傳送機》, Lung captures human virtues like generosity, kindness, courage and selflessness, and transforms them into a utilitarian ceramic object, not only bringing people comfort and hope, but also reminding us of Camus’s words, even after the pandemic dies down, ‘to state quite simply what we learn in times of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise’. The pandemic has changed our lives radically. In the past few months, we have experienced not only the physical barriers such as quarantine, distancing from families and friends, school closures, and the long use of masks, but also the fear, anxiety, solitude, and depression that accompanies this. Nonetheless, during these times of crisis, Lung still sees the rekindling of human virtue as we unite in this battle against the virus. However difficult it is, we have made our bonds even stronger.
Pep talk - transmitter 眾頌-傳送機
2020 Ceramics Unique 24.5 × 26 × 13 cm Estimate: HK $ 12,000–18,000 Generously donated by the artist
Joyce, Lung Yuet Ching (b.1992, Hong Kong) was born and raised in Hong Kong. She graduated from School of Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA from the ceramics department in 2019. She undertook her bachelor’s degree in Hong Kong Baptist University Academy of Visual Arts in 2015 and won the AVA award. She has also been an artist in residence in the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen and Red Gate Gallery in Beijing during 2017 and 2016. Select exhibitions include Another Day, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong (2020); Carving into the Forest. A Dichotomy in Clay, Waka Artisan, Hong Kong (2020); Sea Breeze, Biennale Jogja, Yogyakarta (2019); Six Briefcases, Karin Weber Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); An Archive of Touch, Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago (2019); Symbiosis, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018); and Afterwork, ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (2017), among others.
Jonathan Meese
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DER WEHRBUB 2018 Acrylic on paper Unique 64 × 50 cm Estimate: HK $ 55,000–75,000 Generously donated by the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseld
Jonathan Meese (b.1970, Tokyo, Japan) now lives in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany. His work extends across paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, performances, but also extends to writing, stage design and directing within theatre and opera. Major retrospective exhibitions include Revolution,
Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2003); Mama Johnny, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2006); Jonathan Meese Sculpture, Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami (2010); Jonathan Meese. Malermeese - Meesermaler, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2013), Meese’s Odyssee, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2018); and Dr. Zuhause : K.U.N.S.T. (Erzliebe), Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck (2019). His work is part of several private and public collections such as Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Albertina, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Musées de Strasbourg; K20, Düsseldorf, and several more.
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DER WEHRBUB is one of Meese’s characteristic self-portraits, showing himself as a young boy, dressed up as a soldier. He is breaking the perception of a warrior by wearing red lipstick, thus fighting for the freedom of art. In his paintings, sculptures, and performances Meese explores such themes as revolution, the failures of ideology, and the role and power of art.
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Daido Moriyama 森山大道
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Hawaii 2007 Gelatin Silver Print Unique 40 × 28.2 cm Estimate: HK $ 38,000–50,000 Generously donated by Taka Ishii Gallery
About Hawaii, Moriyama said, ‘I had never felt like sightseeing, had never been interested in it, but I was always concerned with this.’ When Moriyama started shooting, he just decided to ‘photograph Hawaii in black and white’, but it seems like a fluctuating perception of a trip to nowhere and a return to Daido’s original starting point. Daido Moriyama (b.1938, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. He first trained in graphic design before taking up photography under Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe as an assistant. He became an independent photographer in 1964, publishing Nippon Gekijō Shashinchō (Japan Theater Photo Album) in 1968 and Shashin yo Sayounara (Farewell Photography) in 1972. His work shows the
darker sides of urban life and the city. He has had a radical impact on the photographic and art world in both Japan and in the West, with his expressive style of ‘are, bure, boke’ (rough, blurred and out-of-focus) and of quick snapshots without looking in the viewfinder. Recent shows include: Daido Moriyama. A Diary, Foto Colectania, Barcelona, 2020; Silkscreen, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2020; and Daido Moriyama, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019, among others. Moriyama’s works can be found in many prestigious collections including: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Los Angeles, CA.
Ciprian Mureșan
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Five Studies for Daphne 2020 Pencil on Paper Unique 29.7 × 21 cm each Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
Ciprian Mureșan (b.1977, Dej, Romania) lives and works in Cluj, Romania. Since 2005, Ciprian Muresan is editor of IDEA art + society magazine, published in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Solo exhibitions include: Ciprian Mureșan, SMAK, Ghent (2019);
L’atelier sans fin, Galerie de l’Atelier Brancusi, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019, with Șerban Savu); Ways To Tie Your Shoes, Convent Art Space, Ghent (2017); Your Survival is Guaranteed by Treaty, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2015); Stage and Twist, Project Space, Tate Modern, London (2012, with Anna Molska); Recycled Playground, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2011); Contemporary Art Center, Geneva (2012); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013). Group exhibitions include: Viva Arte Viva, 57TH La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2017); Allegory of the Cave Painting, Extracity Kunsthalle, Museum Middelheim, Antwerp (2014); Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2012); Les Promesses du passé, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); and The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).
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Five Studies for Daphne are studies sparked by a dialogue with curator Mihnea Mircan. The starting point of the project is the figure of Daphne from Greek mythology. Daphne was a naiad, a variety of female nymph, who was associated with fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater. According to myth, a curse by the god Cupid on the god Apollo, resulted in Apollo’s unwanted infatuation with her. Just before being kissed by him, Daphne pleaded to her river god father for help, and he transformed her into a laurel tree, thus foiling Apollo.
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Cassi Namoda
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Jalan, A Tea Estate 2019 Acrylic on Canvas Unique 40.5 × 30.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Jalan, a Tea Estate is an ode to the tea producers of Mozambique and is one of a number of Cassi Namoda’s works that reference tea cultivation, distribution, and enjoyment. Cassi Namoda’s wide-ranging painting practice, full of collective folklore and personal memories, presents a rich and layered portrait of post-colonial Mozambique. Cassi Namoda (b.1988, Maputo, Mozambique) is a painter and performance artist who explores the intricacies of social dynamics and mixed cultural and racial identity. Capturing scenes of everyday life, from mundane moments to life-changing events, Namoda paints a vibrant and nuanced portrait of post-colonial Mozambique within an increasingly globalised world. Namoda deftly captures scenes which have the
appearance of film stills: fleeting snapshots within much larger narratives. Her paintings range from bustling, faceless crowds to close-up individual portraits, and her characters often stare out of the paintings, locking eyes with the viewer and breaking the fourth wall. Interweaving her own memories and imagination with images from archival photographs and the works of other artists, Namoda reflects on the cultural specificity of Mozambique, her birthplace and home for several years. Recent solo exhibitions include those at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, and Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami. Namoda’s work has been included in exhibitions at Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York; CFHILL, Stockholm; Library Street Collective, Detroit; Nicodim Galleries, Los Angeles and Bucharest.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
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The Last Woman on Earth 2020 Pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper Edition 2 of 5 + 2 APs 69 × 121 cm Estimate: HK $ 95,000–125,000 Generously donated by the artist & James Cohan, New York
The practice of Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b.1976, Saigon, Vietnam) explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and reworking narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and
fiction are both held accountable. Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1999 and an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Nguyen has received several awards in both film and visual arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010 and best feature film at VietFilmFest in 2018 for his film, The Island. His work has been included in several international exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial 2006, the Whitney Biennial 2017, and the Sharjah Biennial 2019. Nguyen founded The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. Accolades for the group include the grand prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur for the film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. Besides a major travelling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including The Ungovernables (New Museum Triennial, New York, 2012), LA Biennial (2012), Prospect3 (New Orleans Triennial, 2014), and the Venice Biennale (2015).
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The Last Woman on Earth is part of a body of photographic work created in conjunction with Nguyen’s recent video project The Boat People. This little girl, who we discover is the last woman on earth, comes face to face with a mysterious Quanyin statue head buried in the sand on the beach in Bataan. They engage in a dialogue that explores concepts of a future and a past world through an existential lens. This dialogue, both literally and figuratively, brings the dead object to life again. The Quanyin (also Padmapani), or female Buddha of Compassion, is regarded as one of the most widely beloved Buddhist divinities, with powers to aid all who pray to her. She is generally seen as a source of unconditional love, and more importantly, as a saviour, and also known as the ‘Goddess of Mercy’.
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Uriel Orlow
Botanical Gardens (#3) 2017 Archival pigment print on baryta paper Edition 1 of 5 55 × 75 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Botanical Gardens (#3) is taken from the film The Fairest Heritage, consisting of found footage at the height of the apartheid regime in 1963, when the national botanical garden of South Africa in Cape Town decided to commemorate its 50T H anniversary with a commissioned series of films documenting its history, the unique floral region of the city’s surroundings, as well as ‘national’ dances, pantomimes of colonial conquests, and visits of international botanists. The films’ protagonists of scientists and visitors are all white – the only Africans featured are labourers. Considered neutral and passive, flowers were excluded from the international boycott against apartheid South Africa until the late 1980s and so botanical nationalism and flower diplomacy flourished unchecked at home and internationally. The films have not been seen since 1963 and were found by the artist in the cellar of the library of the botanical garden. The found footage was altered through Orlow’s collaboration with actress Lindiwe Matshikiza who puts herself and her body in these loaded pictures, inhabiting and confronting the found footage and thus contesting history and the archive itself.
The practice of Uriel Orlow (b.1973, Zürich, Switzerland) is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary including film, photography, drawing and sound. He is known for single screen film works, lecture performances and modular, multi-media installations that focus on specific locations and micro-histories and bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. His work is concerned with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. Orlow’s work has been presented in many international survey shows including the 54TH Venice Biennale (2011), Manifesta 9 and 12, Genk/Palermo (2012, 2018), Lubumbashi Biennial (2019), 13TH Sharjah Biennial (2017), 7TH Moscow Biennial (2017), EVA Biennial (2016, 2014), 8th Mercosul Biennial, Brazil (2011), Aichi Triennale (2013); and Bergen Assembly (2013) amongst others. Solo exhibitions in 2020 include Kunsthalle Mainz, La Loge Brussels and State of Concept Athens. Other recent solo exhibitions include Tabakalera, San Sebastian (2019); Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (2018); Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (2018); Market Photo Workshop & Pool, Johannesburg (2018); PAV – Parco Arte Vivente (2017); Parc Saint Léger (2017), The Showroom, London (2016); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2015); Depo, Istanbul (2015), Spike Island (2013). In 2020 he received the C. F. Meyer Prize and in 2017 he was awarded the Sharjah Biennial prize.
Prabhakar Pachpute
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Until we cross the border 2020 Watercolour and pencil on paper Unique 28 × 35.6 cm Estimate: HK $ 15,000–25,000 Generously donated by the artist & Experimenter, Kolkata
Prabhakar Pachpute (b. 1986, Sasti, India) lives and works in Pune, India. Prabhakar Pachpute works in an array of mediums and materials including drawing, light, stop-motion animations, sound, and sculptural forms. His use of charcoal has a direct connection to his subject matter and familial roots, coal mines, and coal miners.
Pachpute often creates immersive and dramatic environments in his site-specific works, using portraiture and landscape with surrealist tropes to critically tackle issues of mining labour and the effects of mining on the natural and human landscape. Using Maharashtra as a starting point, the artist combines research from around the world and personal experiences, moving from the personal to the global, investigating a complexity of historical transformations on an economic, societal and environmental level. Pachpute received his Bachelor’s in fine arts in sculpture from Indira Kala Sangit University, Khairagarh (Chhattisgarh, 2009) and his MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Gujrat, 2011). He has exhibited extensively with solo shows at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2012); Experimenter, Kolkata (2013, 2017 & 2020); National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2016); Asilo Via Porpora, Milan (2018); and Glasgow School of Art (2019). He has also participated in group exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2013); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013); IFA, Stuttgart & Berlin (2013); DRAF, London (2014); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2017); Asia Cultural Centre, Gwangju (2017); STUK, Leuven (2018); AV Festival, Newcastle (2018); and was part of the 31ST São Paulo Biennial (2014); 5T H Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (2014); 14TH Istanbul Biennial (2015); 8T H Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2015); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); 2ND Yinchuan Biennale (2018); and the 4TH Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018). Prabhakar Pachpute is represented by Experimenter, Kolkata.
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Until we cross the border deals with the fear and chaotic surroundings that make us more vulnerable towards our present and future. Our day-to-day activity has slowed down and limited our actions. We are stuck and at the same time protected by the walls of our houses. But this is one part of the reality; the other part has infinite questions. Now the question is: What about those who don’t have these walls? Indian labourers and migrant workers are facing huge crises and the impact of mismanagement of the government during the lockdown. There are many daily wage workers who have nowhere to go, walking thousands of kilometres on their way home. Who has failed them? The government? We as a society? The structure of capitalism? Our greed or ignorance towards labour rights? There is a collective responsibility for this failure. The work is a continuation of the artist’s ongoing series of a plight of hardship which addresses these concerns. Though it is not a final answer one can see in the artwork, it can be seen as evidence and also a questioning self-accountability. Under the pile of different layers, there is injustice in this society we cohabit.
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Thao Nguyen Phan 潘濤阮
The Chaland in the Rain / The Conference from Siesta Children series 2017 Oil on X-ray film backing Unique 45 × 53 cm each Estimate: HK $ 65,000–85,000 Generously donated by the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery
Siesta Children is an ongoing painting series on X-ray film backing, developed in parallel with the video Tropical Siesta, to create a set of video installations that is loosely based on accounts from two works by Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit priest who travelled and proselytised in and around what is known as present day Vietnam between 1620 to 1646. Set in ‘Vietnam. The Present’, Siesta Children and Tropical Siesta postulate a state where agriculture is central and people live in self-sufficient farming communes. The main protagonists are children who, in the absence of adults, have invented their own curriculum based on stories from the Rhodes texts, representing them through play and performance. Re-enacting stories titled ‘About Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Water Goddess’ and another tale about a young Vietnamese martyr, the children perform these and other make-believe lives, with tools and toys such as bamboo ladders, twig whistles and chalk, amidst the rural setting of a village school and rice fields, and natural landscapes of hills, gullies, and rivers.
Trained as a painter, Thao Nguyen Phan (b.1987, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses video, painting and installation. Drawing from literature, philosophy and daily life, Phan observes ambiguous issues in social conventions and history. She started working in film when she began her MFA in Chicago. Phan exhibits internationally, with solo and group exhibitions including at WIELS (Brussels, 2020); Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Lyon Biennale (Lyon, 2019); Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019); Gemäldegalerie (Berlin, 2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2018); Factory Contemporary Art Centre (Ho Chi Minh City, 2017); Nha San Collective (Hanoi, 2017); and Bétonsalon (Paris, 2016), among others. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. In addition to her work as a multimedia artist, she is co-founder of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the local community. Thao Nguyen Phan is expanding her ‘theatrical fields’, including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. Phan is a 2016–17 Rolex Protégée, mentored by internationally acclaimed, New York-based, performance and video artist, Joan Jonas.
Antonio Pichillá
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Abuela/Grandmother 2019 Oil on canvas, wood, threads and stone Unique 127 × 80 × 8 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist
Antonio Pichillá (b.1982, Solola, Guatemala) shows with his textile art an intercultural abstraction. His work is closely linked to the culture of the Mayan-Tz’utujil ethnic group,
to which he belongs, which is present in the work through different elements that tell us about inherited ancestral knowledge. In his work with sacred objects such as glyphs and looms and in a play with the possibilities of patterns and knots, the artist references the entire cosmovision surrounding his daily life. His work has featured in solo and group exhibitions around the world, most recently as part of the 11TH Berlin Biennale and the forthcoming 22N D Bienale de Arte Paiz, Guatemala and Kathmandu Triennale 2077. Other exhibitions include: Subasta de arte Latinoamericano Juannio, SOMA Centro Cultural Guatemala, 2013; FIN DE CICLO, Centro Cultural Hermanos Aguilar, San Salvador, El Salvador, 2012; and Subasta de arte Latinoamericano Juannio, Museo de arte Moderno Guatemala, 2011. Pichillá’s works can be found in the collections of Lars Romer Coppenhague, Denmark; Dexter Lelain San Francisco, USA; and Chris Eaton Antigua, Guatemala.
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Abuela/Grandmother conjures the chromatic universe of the Maya-Tz’utujil people in Guatemala. His fabric works further refine the abstract patterns found in Maya-Tz’utujil traditional male attire, and experiments with combinations of yellow, red, black, and white colour threads, quoting the natural colour of maize—an important food of cultural value for Amerindian civilisations and present-day indigenous struggles. By naming some of his pieces after his relatives, the artist honours and celebrates his ancestral heritage which is threatened by cultural extinction. Other works are named after Maya deities, such as Q’uq’umatz, the Feathered Serpent divinity of the Popol Vuh who created humanity together with the God Tepeu.
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Gala Porras-Kim
Tabula recta 2013 Serigraph Edition 20 of 30 + 5 APs 71.1 × 50.8 cm Estimate: HK $ 6,500–9,500 Generously donated by the artist Tabula recta is a print edition created by Porras-Kim, a ‘tabula recta’ is a tool to encode and decode texts, the basis for many ciphers today. It was originally produced for her solo exhibition at Commonwealth And Council, The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today. In this exhibition, Porras-Kim tested the potential of an art object to function as an epistemological tool. Porras-Kim incited an open system for interpreting the artifacts in the exhibition containing undeciphered scripts such as Mesoamerican writing systems, and invited the viewer to language abstraction through recodification and engagement. Despite their current stasis, the pending decipherment of ancient scripts proposes a futurity of stories from the past unfolding in the present.
Gala Porras-Kim (1984, Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from CalArts and a BA from UCLA. Her research practice considers how sounds, language and history have been represented through methodologies of linguistics, and conservation. She has received grants from Art Matters, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Artadia, Creative Capital, Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann and California Community Foundation. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Ural Industrial Biennial, and in exhibitions at LACMA, Seoul City Museum, and Hammer Museum. She will have upcoming solo exhibitions in 2020 at Kadist NY, The Rose Museum, Gasworks London, and participate in the Gwangju and São Paulo Biennales. She was a recent David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is currently the artist in residence at the Getty.
John Pule
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Fotufotu (A Simple Dance) Tau aho mena koa (Extraordinary Days) Ativili malolo (Strong Heart) 2020 Sennelier inks on paper Unique 76 × 57 cm each Estimate: HK $ 90,000–120,000 Generously donated by the artist
John Pule (b. 1962, Liku, Niue) immigrated to New Zealand at the age of two in 1964. He is one of the most significant artists, poets, and educators in the Pacific. Selected group exhibitions include Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong (2020);
Amanakiaga, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (2007); Turbulence, the 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (2007); Paradise Now!, Asia Society Museum, New York (2004); South Pacific Arts Festival, Belau (2004), New Caledonia (2000). Pule’s works are held in major public collections in Australasia including Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa, The National Gallery of Victoria, and Queensland Art Gallery. Career highlights include a survey exhibition at the City Gallery Wellington (2010) and inclusion in exhibitions at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile (2012), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2011) and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2007). His work is the subject of several books including the monograph Hauaga (Otago University Press, 2010). Pule is also a published writer and poet. He was the recipient of the New Zealand Order of Merit for the services to the Arts in 2012.
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These new drawings, Tau aho mena koa (Extraordinary Days), Ativili malolo (Strong Heart), and Fotufotu (A Simple Dance) were created by Pule this year amidst the global pandemic. Pule’s works are deeply informed by the visual language of hiapo, the highly original tradition of barkcloth in his native Niue, as well as by some of the references found in these ancient artworks. Pule places this visual language in further dialogue with his own interests in cosmology, religion, migration, and colonialism, appearing as forms of mapping in which the cosmos, the ocean, lands, people and their histories reveal themselves little by little.
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Norberto Roldan
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Fugitives from Years of Captivity XII 2016 Assemblage with found cigar boxes, collage and found objects Unique 47.6 × 47.6 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–45,000 Generously donated by Silverlens Gallery Roldan’s Fugitives in Captivity series reminds us that the way we regard shadows is similar to how we think about histories— unconscious at best, dismissive at worst. Both can be triggering. These triggers can be found in Roldan’s works, in the form of objects, images, and keywords, to see where we can establish our shadows. What we locate as messages in Roldan’s works have always been consistent—the misuses of power, the economies of peacekeeping, how social constructs perpetuate not blindly but by design. These are shadows that thin out and get extinguished, like a material without an image, an image without meaning, a text without voice. Norberto Roldan’s (b.1953, Roxas City, Philippines) practice is rooted in social and political issues. His installations, assemblages and paintings of found objects, text fragments and found images address issues surrounding everyday life, history and collective memory. His artistic process engages with ways in which material
objects are re-appropriated in another context. He graduated with a degree in BA Philosophy from St. Pius X Seminary and took his BFA in Visual Communication from the University of Santo Tomas. He is represented in several landmark surveys like No Country: Contemporary Art for South/Southeast Asia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2012); Between Declarations & Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19TH Century, National Gallery Singapore (2015); Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, National Art Centre Tokyo (2017); and Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017). Roldan founded Black Artists in Asia in 1986, a group with a socially and politically progressive practice. In 1990, he initiated VIVA EXCON (Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference), the longest running biennale in the Philippines. In 2000, he co-founded Green Papaya Art Projects, which remains the longest-running independent and multidisciplinary platform in the country.
Citra Sasmita
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Figur Pagi (Morning Figure) 2018 Acrylic on cow’s hide Unique 186 × 80 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
Citra Sasmita (b.1990, Bali, Indonesia) is a contemporary artist from Bali whose work focuses on unravelling the myths and misconceptions of Balinese art and culture. She is also deeply invested in questioning a woman’s place in social hierarchy and
seeks to upend normative constructs of gender. Citra Sasmita has never formally graduated from an art institution. She holds a Literature Diploma from Udayana University (2008) and studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Sciences, Ganesha University of Education, majoring in physics (2009). Her dream as an artist grew again when she joined the campus theatre group and became a short story illustrator in Bali Post. When she became an illustrator, she deepened her self-taught world of art and actively participated in exhibitions in Bali and outside Bali. One of her long term projects, Timur Merah Project; Harbor of Restless Spirits, was presented in Garden of Six Seasons at Para Site, a painting on cow’s hide reflecting the Kamasan Balinese painterly language that Citra has been developing in her practice. She participated in the Biennale Jogja 2019 and was the recipient of Gold Award Winner UOB Painting of The Year 2017.
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Figure Pagi (Morning Figure) is one of the works in the solo exhibition Under the Skin, which was created during Citra Sasmita’s art residency at RedBase Foundation, Jogjakarta, 2018. During this residency, the artist observed the culture of Javanese women who were domesticated in a patriarchal philosophy which passed down from generation to generation, such as the confinement of married women to roles such as cooking, sex, and procreation. In this series of works, Sasmita also tries to trace the patriarchal cultural connections between Java and Bali which have apparent similarities.
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Wing Po So 蘇詠寶
Seed of Damocles 達摩克利斯之果
2020 Tree of Damocles, copper stand, LED light AP 180 × 40 × 40 cm Estimate: H K $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Seed of Damocles conveys an imminent danger, at the same time it is an infinite treasure. It is made from the long fruit pods that hang from the branches of the Tree of Damocles, resembling dangling swords. Therefore, it is named after an incident depicted in an ancient story by Cicero, in which there is a sword hanging over the head of Damocles. When the pod of the tree splits, numerous round seeds with paper-thin wings drift away with the wind like dancing butterflies, thus the seeds are aliased as ‘thousand papers’ in Chinese. Wing Po So’s father told her the story about the Sword of Damocles as he picked up its tree pod from the ground to give her as a gift while hiking in Tai Po Kau Forest Walk. Born into a family of Chinese medicine doctors, Wing Po So grew up surrounded by medicinal ingredients, transforming them into raw materials for playthings and eventually artworks. Seeing that traditional Chinese medicine originates in observation, sensitivity and imagination towards nature, So applies the same theory of knowledge in her investigation of forms, materiality, metaphysics and relationality.
Wing Po So (b.1985, Hong Kong) graduated with a BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in Saint Louis in 2007, and with an MA in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012. So had a solo exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, titled Six-part Practice (2018). Another recent solo exhibition is From the Body to the Body Through the Body (2019) at de Sarthe, Hong Kong. Her work has also been widely exhibited in group shows, including Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong (2020); and Holy Mosses, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). Her recent work was covered by Art Asia Pacific, Artomity, The Art Newspaper, City Magazine, Time Out Magazine, South China Morning Post, and Ming Pao Newspaper. She also published an artist book in 2018, titled From Space to Space: An Illustrated Guide to an Infinite Something. Wing Po So currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Rebekka Steiger
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Untitled 2020 Ink on paper Unique 75 × 56 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–30,000 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing / Lucerne
Through a layer-by-layer colour rendering in Untitled, Steiger transforms her perception of emotions and atmospheres into mysterious and delicate art pieces, achieving unexpected visual results. The tension between abstraction and representation, the expressive rendering of bright colours as well as the use of non-narrative figurative motifs are key aspects of her work that make the painting not only intriguing, but also unsettling.
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Rebekka Steiger (b.1993, Zürich, Switzerland) received her BA (honours) in Fine Arts, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art, in 2016. Selected solo exhibitions include Rebekka Steiger, Lemoyne Project, Zürich (2020); boxing the compass, Kunsthaus Grenchen, Grenchen (2019); wild is the wind, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne (2019); If you see her, say hello, Kunst(Zeug) Haus, Rapperswil-Jona (2019); 猫头鹰 –virages nocturnes, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing (2018); Sykomore, Kabinettausstellung, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2017); and AMOR APPROXIMATELY,
Galerie Müller, Lucerne (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Zentral!, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2020); Werkschau Zürich 2020, Canton of Zurich, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich Shifting, Pop-up Art Parcours, Galerie Urs Meile, Ardez (2020); Edition März. Tief- und Flachdruck: Arbeiten auf Papier, Edition VFO, Zurich (2020); In my view: a group exhibition of young artists, Meicheng Space, Shenzhen 2017 Extended Ground, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne (2018); Jahresausstellung Zentralschweizer Kunstschaffen, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne ‘Ohne uns ist keine Kunst’, Interim Use Neustadtstrasse 6, Lucerne (2018); Rebekka Steiger and Sven Egert, Luzerner Kantonalbank, Lucerne (2018); and Werkschau Design & Kunst, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art, Lucerne (2016); among others. She was the recipient of Lucerne Art Society’s Exhibition Prize (2016) and Zeugindesign Foundation’s Advancement Award (2016). Her works are part of public collections including Schweizer Nationalbank; Credit Suisse Collection; Luzerner Kantonalbank, Lucerne; Switzerland Collection of the cantone of Lucerne; and Switzerland Collection of the canton of Zürich.
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Angela Su 徐世琪
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Cultures and Colonies 1 2019 Hair embroidery on linen Unique 50.8 × 50.8 cm Estimate: HK $ 40,000–60,000 Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Cultures and Colonies 1 is a work composed of hair embroidery, through which Angela Su creates biomorphic forms that blend scientific precision with mythological aesthetics. This work references the unlikely unity and analogy between different organic forms, like that of floral bloom and bacterial cultures. 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.
Angela Su (b. Hong Kong) received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts. 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.
Yuk King Tan 陳玉瓊
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Baton 2020 String, mixed media Unique 185 × 56 × 35 cm Estimate: HK $ 6,000–15,000 Generously donated by the artist
Yuk King Tan (b. Australia) has had major solo and group exhibitions, most importantly at the Camden Arts Centre in London, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Kunstverein in Hamburg,
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Wellington City Gallery, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Artists Space in New York. She has held residencies at Dunedin, New Plymouth, Queensland, Aachen, Sydney, and London and has participated at International Biennials in Queensland, Vilnius, Auckland and São Paulo. She graduated in 1993 with a Bachelor Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University, New Zealand. The work of Chinese/New Zealand artist Yuk King Tan, now living in Hong Kong, negotiates issues such as value, politics and cultural systems within a constantly evolving post-colonial society. Her detailed work, which includes delicate drawings in ash and smoke residue, exploding firecracker installations, photographs taken from rockets, and a giant cardboard HSBC lion pushed through the streets of Hong Kong is often poetic and frequently suggestive, connecting highly different subject matters and mediums. The meta-themes in the artist’s work unveil interests in cultural delineations, global migration, and a personal relationship to world-defining issues such as identity and economy.
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Baton is a work from the series ‘Crisis of the Ordinary’ which mixes collected and found objects wrapped or ‘mummified’ in one of the artist’s signature materials—silk tassel string. The tightly wound truncheon is situated precariously high on a presentation shelf allowing individual falls of delicate silk strings to drop in parallel lines from the baton to the floor. With bright blocks of colour, the object is transformed into a tightly bound symbol. Each colour-hue is taken from the small palette of national flag colours and the proportions of sections are based on what the artist describes as ‘value systems’—economic charts, growth rates, surveys or other value codes relating to the object’s history. The original status of the baton, as both protection and disciplinary device, is subverted into a type of Cuisenaire Rod to a different set of values.
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Charwei Tsai 蔡佳葳
A Supplication 2012–2020 Photography Edition 1 of 6 + 2 APs 120 × 127.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 38,000–48,000 Generously donated by the artist
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction A Supplication depicts passages of the Heart Sutra written on a seashell. Highly personal yet universal concerns spur Tsai’s multi-medium practice. Geographical, social, and spiritual motifs inform a body of work, which encourages viewer participation outside the confines of complacent contemplation. Preoccupied with the human–nature relationship, Tsai meditates on the complexities among cultural beliefs, spirituality, and transience. A Supplication was photographed in 2012 and printed in 2020. ‘Signs incised upon the shells of tortoises, upon the bones of oxen. Signs borne upon bronze vessels, sacred and mundane. Divinatory or utilitarian, these signs are manifest first of all as tracings, emblems, fixed attitudes, visualised rhythms. Each sign, independent of sound and invariable, forms a unity of itself, maintaining the potential of its own sovereignty and thus the potential to endure.’ - François Cheng Charwei Tsai (b.1980, Taipei) currently lives and works in Taipei and Saigon. Tsai graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Industrial Design and Art & Architectural History
(2002) and the postgraduate research program at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (2010). Tsai has had solo exhibitions and projects at CFCCA, Manchester, UK; Institute of Contemporary Art, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France, Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre, London, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal; A Dedication to the Sea, curated by Eugene Tan at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Singapore and Water, Earth and Air, curated by Suhanya Raffel at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. She has participated in exhibitions at institutions and biennials including Jogja Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, Sharjah Biennial, Ruhrtriennale, Yokohama Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, Singapore Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Metz; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; ZKM Center of Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Cartier Foundation, Paris; Southbank Centre, London; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Rubin Museum of Art, New York; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Tsai’s works are in public and private collections including those held at Tate Modern, M+, Mori Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Yokohama Museum of Art, FRAC Lorraine, Kadist Foundation, and Faurschou Foundation.
Howie Tsui 徐浩恩
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Parallax Chambers (White Camel Mountain No.2) 2018 Epson Ultrachrome pigmented ink on Epson Coldpress Rag paper Edition of 25 + AP 1 of 5 47 × 64 cm Estimate: HK $ 6,500–8,800 Generously donated by the artist and Art Labor
Howie Tsui (b.1978, Hong Kong) was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and Thunder Bay, Canada. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Working in a variety of media, Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that subvert venerated art forms and narrative genres, often related to the Chinese literati class. Tsui synthesises diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, trauma, acculturation, and otherness through a distinctly outsider lens to advocate for liminal and diasporic experiences. Recent solo exhibitions include those at The Power Plant, Toronto (2020); Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (2020); Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (2020); Ottawa Art Gallery (2019); OCAT Museum, Xi’an (2018); and Vancouver Art Gallery (2017). Select Group exhibitions include the Asian Art Fair, Paris (2019); Art Labor, Shanghai (2015); Dalhousie Art Gallery, Nova Scotia (2015); Para Site, Hong Kong (2014); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2014); and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2012). Tsui received Canada Council’s Joseph Stauffer Prize in 2005 and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2018. He holds a BFA (2002) from the University of Waterloo.
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Parallax Chambers (White Camel Mountain No.2) is a digital composite derived from Tsui’s ongoing algorithmic animation sequence Parallax Chambers—furthering his interest in conflating the anarchic universe of wuxia with recent social upheavals. The work involves a nonlinear rendering process that outputs an unpredictable and elastic sequence of hand drawn animations. By ceding the narrative agency to algorithms, the work formally raises questions about order, and whether harmony can emerge from seeming chaos. As it cycles through a series of confined rooms, recalling claustrophobic spaces and hermetic chambers used for internal training and meditation, the motif of fragmented loops within bound environments has gained new resonance amid recent global conditions of isolation. Tsui’s depictions of struggle, conflict and mourning, reflect mounting anxieties around the creeping suppression of voice and thought.
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Wai Pongyu 韋邦雨
A Rhythm of Landscape 11 山河變奏 11
2020 Ballpoint pen on paper Unique 31.5 × 49.0 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
The political vagaries of Hong Kong have been shaping our social and imaginative landscape every day over the past year. Seeing our emotions bending and curving collectively and individually recalls a childhood memory in which rainfall and mountains engage in conversation, depicted in A Rhythm of Landscape 11《山河變奏 11》. Wai has developed his own oeuvre using ink from a ballpoint pen on paper, spinning the thread of his emotion and mind continuously as one line as it multiplies in a rhizomatic manner. His subject matter often relates to the notion of the cosmos, time, nature, across the fields of juxtapositions and metaphysical forms.
Wai Pongyu (b.1982, Hainan, China) moved to Hong Kong at the age of two. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2006.Solo exhibitions include Wai Pong-yu - Moment of Truth - The Synergy of Ink, Grotto Fine Art, Hong Kong (2013). Group exhibitions include Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong (2020); Homeland In Transit, Onkili, Basel (2019); Together We March Forward: New Asia 70TH Anniversary Art Exhibition, HART Hall, Hong Kong (2019); Beijing Contemporary 2019, National Agricultural Exhibition Center, Beijing (2019); and Ink Global 2017, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (2017), among others. Wai’s work has been collected internationally by public museums and institutions including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.
Lawrence Weiner
Estimate: HK $ 8,000–18,000 Generously donated by the artist
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EACH TO THEIR NEEDS EACH TO THEIR ABILITIES À CHACUN SELON SES BESOINS À CHACUN SELON SES CAPACITÉS 2019 Aluminum stencil (with printed cardboard envelope and signed + numbered certificate) 21.5 × 28 cm Edition 43 of 100 + 6 APs
EACH TO THEIR NEEDS EACH TO THEIR ABILITIES À CHACUN SELON SES BESOINS À CHACUN SELON SES CAPACITÉS is characteristic of Lawrence Weiner’s interest in personalising the artistic experience of each of his viewers. He believes that his job as the artist is to conceive an idea and possibly produce instructions, but it’s the audience who finishes the construction. Starting off as a key artist in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, he wrote this infamous ‘statement of intent’, which dictates much of his work: 1. The artist may construct the piece; 2. The piece may be fabricated; 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
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Lawrence Weiner’s texts have appeared in all sorts of places over the last five decades, and although he sees himself as a sculptor rather than a conceptualist, he is among the trailblazers of the 1960s to present art as language. He defines his sculptural medium simply as ‘language + the material referred to’ in the sense that language is a material for construction.
Lawrence Weiner (b.1942, Bronx, NY, USA) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions have been held at Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2017); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, USA (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2016); Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016); Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2014); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2013); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (2007); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2004); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2000); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (1994); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA (1990). He participated in dOCUMENTA 5, 6, 7, and 13 (1972, 1977, 1982, 2012); the 36TH , 41ST , 50TH and 55TH Venice Biennales, Italy (1972, 1984, 2003, 2013); and the 27TH Biennale de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006). Among many honours, he was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999) and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (2013).
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Brittney Leeanne Williams
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Insight 2 2019 Gouache and acrylic on paper Unique 28 × 22 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
In Insight 2, the artist focuses on the figure, more specifically on the body as a site of mourning and suffering, yet capable of transcendence and transformation. The drawing is able to depict the duality of the body in the landscape as well as the body landscaped. These red bodies recur throughout her practice.Her works interrogate the duality of the body in the landscape as well as the body landscaped. The environments which feature in her images are often assembled from memory, art history and flat colour fields.
Brittney Leeanne Williams (b.1990, Pasadena, CA, USA) is a Chicago-based artist, originally from Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami (Untitled Art Fair), Venice (Venice Biennale), London, and Hong Kong, as well as in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. Williams attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008–09). She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient and a Luminarts Fellow. Williams’ artist residencies include Arts + Public Life (University of Chicago) and McColl Center for Art + Innovation, among others.
David Wojnarowicz
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Democracy at Work 1990 Silkscreen on Paper Open Edition 58.4 × 50.8 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–70,000 Generously donated by the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W New York, NY
Wojnarowicz created this print for ‘Your House is Mine’, which was an assemblage of artistic prints from Lower East Side artists, organised by Andrew Castrucci/Nadia Coen and printed at Bullet Space. Wojnarowicz’s Democracy at Work represents the communal resentment from the artists against the establishment who were destroying their neighbourhoods and communities. The artist points a critique towards the system of democracy and government agencies set on destroying communities for capital gain.
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memories and lived experiences, Wojnarowicz became well known for his spray-painted iconographies, blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations that deftly conveyed his cultural critiques. Wojnarowicz’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris; The Busan Museum of Modern Art; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life An important figure in New York’s East Village art scene of the and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies. 1980s, Wojnarowicz is primarily known for his several volumes of Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the fiction and memoirs, and for his art work in most media, including painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance. Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (1990) After being diagnosed as HIV-positive in the late 1980s, Wojnarowicz and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron (1999). A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me engaged in widely publicized debates over medical research Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, and funding, censorship in the arts and politically-sanctioned opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. homophobia, creating deeply political art even as he became a The widely acclaimed exhibition has been reviewed in Artforum, target for the Right-wing. The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. The retrospective travelled to the Museo Reina Sofia, David Wojnarowicz (b.1954, Redbank, NJ, USA; d.1992) was among Madrid in May 2019, and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and Jean, Luxembourg City, which closed in February 2020. 90s. Channelling a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds,
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Adrian Wong 王浩然
Snoopy ca. 1992 / Omar 2017 2020 Framed archival print Edition 2 of 4 + 1 AP / Edition 2 of 4 + 1 AP 91.4 × 152.4 cm / 91.4 × 121.9 cm Estimate: HK $ 65,000–95,000 Generously donated by the artist and Carrie Secrist Gallery
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Following the sudden passing of the artist’s pet rabbit, Omar, a telepathic animal communicator revealed that Omar was the reincarnated spirit of his wife’s childhood cat, Snoopy. Snoopy ca. 1992 incorporates one of the few remaining photographs of this cat, provided by the artist’s mother-in-law. Omar 2017 incorporates a photo chosen for Omar’s memorial. Relying heavily on a research-based method, Adrian Wong’s (b.1980, Chicago, IL, USA) installations, videos, and sculptures draw from varied subjects and explore the intricacies of his relationship to his environment—experientially, historically, culturally—through the filter of fantastical or fictionalised narratives. These organic and open-ended artefacts of his process often involve a collaborative engagement with the subjects.
Wong originally trained in psychology (MA Stanford ’03). He began making and exhibiting work in San Francisco while concurrently conducting research in developmental linguistics. He continued his postgraduate studies in sculpture (MFA Yale ‘05). Wong relocated his studio to Hong Kong in 2005, but recently returned to Chicago, where he currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center (New York), Kuandu Museum (Taipei), Kunsthalle Wien, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstverein (Hamburg), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Palazzo Reale (Milan), Saatchi Gallery (London), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), and can be found in public and private collections worldwide, including the 21C Collection (Chicago), DSL Foundation (Paris), K11 Art Foundation (Shanghai), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Sifang Museum (Nanjing), and the Uli Sigg Collection (Lucerne).
Wong Hau Kwei 黃孝逵
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Rain Shower 陣雨
2020 Ink on paper Unique 26 × 59 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–45,000 Generously donated by Ora-Ora
Spending a lot of time by the waters of Hong Kong, Wong is inspired in Rain Shower《陣雨》by the ever-changing play of the light on the ocean waters. Mastering the technique of Chinese ink with contemporary landscapes, Wong’s meticulous treatment in composition and sensitivity to light and darkness offers audiences a different interpretation of Hong Kong’s natural scenery.
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Wong Hau Kwei (b.1946, Chongqing, China) graduated from the China Textile University in Shanghai in 1969. He studied painting under the renowned painter Huang Zhou and was deeply influenced by him. Wong moved to Hong Kong in 1978, returning to China briefly as a visiting artist of the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute. He is a board member of the Chinese Painting Institute, Hong Kong. Selected solo exhibitions include Wong Hau Kwei Ink Art Exhibition, Hong Kong Central Library Exhibition Gallery, Hong Kong, 2016; Zu·Ji·Mo–
Works of Wong Hau Kwei, Jao Tsung-I Academy, Hong Kong, 2014; and Observing in Silence – Wong Hau Kwei, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong, 2013, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Boundless Water – Ink Paintings by Wong Hau Kwei, Zhou Jin and Chan Kengtin, Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Shenzhen, 2016; Epoch in Ink, Liang Yi Museum, Hong Kong, 2015; Shan Bei Feng Cai – Hong Kong Artist Collection, Hong Kong Central Library, Hong Kong, 2015; and Wan.Ink.Art, Wan Fung Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2014, among many others. Wong has received numerous awards for his artistic achievements, including the National Exhibition of Arts in China Award (1999 and 2000), the Secretary for Home Affairs’ Commendations, Hong Kong Contemporary Art Award (2001 and 2009) and the Hong Kong Achievement Award in Contemporary Art (2012). Wong is now a researcher in Chinese Painting Research Institute of China National Academy of Painting.
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Ming Wong 黃漢明
Land of a Thousand Rainbows—Six Queens 2019 Photograph Edition 1 of 5 + 2 APs 60 × 80 cm Estimate: HK $ 20,000–40,000 Generously donated by the artist
Land of a Thousand Rainbows—Six Queens is from a photographic series of works of a collective of six South East Asian queens formed by Ming Wong. This collective came together to create a carnavalesque drag performance based on Southeast Asian myths that culminated in an exhilirating rendition of I Will Survive to commemorate the largest-ever survey of regional contemporary art exploring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer creative histories in Southeast Asia and beyond. Entitled ‘Spectrosynthesis II – Exposure of Tolerance: LGBTQ in Southeast Asia’ this survey was based on the collection of Sunpride Foundation and debuted at the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre in November 2019.
Through a re-telling of world cinema and popular culture and re-readings of cultural artefacts from around the world, the artistic research and practice of Berlin-and-Stockholm-based interdisciplinary artist Ming Wong (b. Singapore) explore the politics of representation and how culture, gender and identity are constructed, reproduced and circulated. Recent exhibitions and projects include: An Opera for Animals, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2019; A beast, a god and a line, Kunsthall Trondheim, 2019-2020; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; 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, 2017; Windows on The World Part 2, 20TH Sydney Biennale, Sydney, 2016; Frieze Film Commission, Frieze London, 2016; Time Test, CAFA Museum, Beijing, 2016; and Aku Akan Bertahan / I Will Survive, 8TH Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2015–16. Wong represented Singapore in the 53R D Venice Biennale and was awarded Special Mention for his presentation.
Nicole Wong 王思遨
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The Elegy - Vladmir Mayakovsky 2017 Mixed media Unique 21 × 29.7 cm Estimate: HK $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by the artist and Rossi & Rossi
The Elegy - Vladmir Mayakovsky features the last words of Vladmir Mayakovsky, a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. The Elegy is a series of works by Wong featuring the last written words of deceased poets and authors, which have also been combined to form a book. These words were taken from the writers‘ last diary entries, letters or unfinished works. Authors spend their lives expressing life’s intricacies. Their last words capture this elegance. In those final moments, they were prepared.
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Hong Kong artist Nicole Wong (b. 1990, Hong Kong) works beyond the bounds of any single medium, adopting a process-driven approach to investigating philosophical questions associated with time, the tenuous connections between words and objects, and the limits of communication. Often quiet and unassuming, Wong’s works invite introspective thought through their appeal to universal sentiments and desires. Deftly weaving wordplay and double entendre throughout her practice, the artist explores the connections between literal and connotative meanings. Her works thus enter the realm of semiotics, incorporating everyday objects and common materials to question the relationship between an object’s physical form and its meaning. Solo exhibitions include After Nothing Happens, Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong (2020); and Nocturnal Pursuits, Cross Harbour Terminal at Zit Dim, Tai Nan (2019), among others. Group exhibitions include Very Natural Actions, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2019); SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, 21ST Biennale of Sydney (2018); A Tree Fell in the Forest, and No One’s There, Power Station Of Art, Shanghai (2018); and Kotodama, Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), among others.
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John Ziqiang Wu 吳子強
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
No Smoking 禁止吸煙
2020 Watercolour and acrylic on paper Unique 27.9 × 25.6 cm Estimate: HK $ 12,000–18,000 Generously donated by the artist and Empty Gallery
This collage-style scene, observed at the entrance of the Nam Long Shan Cooked Food Market in Wong Chuk Hang, depicts a fictional martial arts fighter battling the real-life smoking sign. A nod to both pop culture and daily minutiae, No Smoking《禁止吸煙》is an homage to the Hong Kong martial arts movie that Wu has watched over the years, including his favourite, Kung Fu Hustle (2004, dir. Stephen Chow). It is painted using his signature watercolours and acrylic on paper, a medium he gravitates towards due to its familiarity to a broad audience.
John Ziqiang Wu (b. 1983, Tangshan, China) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice explores the myriad points of intersection between people, institutions, and pedagogical systems. Manifesting as observational drawings, paintings, and collaborative installations, Wu’s works infuse institutional critique with a much needed dose of generosity and humour. Wu is also the co-founder of Learning Art & Art Learning Studio, an art tutoring workshop which informs much of his practice. Recent solo exhibitions were held at ArtCenter Pasadena, Armory Center for the Arts and Todd Madigan Gallery, Cal State Bakersfield, as well as group shows at SALT, Istanbul, and Pasadena Museum. Wu recently finished a one-year residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Wu Wei 伍 偉
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Superimposed Pelage 疊加的皮毛
2020 Paper on Canvas Unique 60 × 60 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and Tang Contemporary Art
In 2012, Wu Wei (b.1981, Zhengzhou, China) graduated from the Experimental Art Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree and now lives in Beijing. Wu’s
works are full of sensual desires, involving topics of civilisation, barbarism, and mythology, that are searching for new feelings and possibilities in materials and space. He participated in international art residencies in Vienna and Berlin. His works have been exhibited in Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing), the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture 2019, Ichihara Lakeside Museum (Japan), Whitebox Art Center (Beijing), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Art, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery (Philadelphia), Asian Library, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), XC. HuA Gallery (Berlin), Migrant Bird Space (Berlin), FLUC Art Space (Vienna), and many other art institutions. Public collections include Minsheng Modern Art Museum, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Whitebox Art Center, Today Art Museum, Being3 Art Foundation, and other institutions. He won the 6TH Anniversary Award for the New Artists Space Award in 2015, and won the 3R D New Star Art Festival Art Award in 2012.
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Superimposed Pelage《疊加的皮毛》is characteristic of the paper collage works by Wu Wei that depict a furry texture, reminiscent of the growth and undulation of fur to portray the shapes of animal-like bodies. In the details of the work, one can observe that Wu has painstakingly worked to mimic fur growth. The ‘beastly pattern’ reveals a certain kind of ‘godly creature’ with vivid colours and interchangeable forms, injecting new meaning into the pure, abstract formal elements. The artist contemplates and investigates contemporary culture consistently, resulting in the symbolism in his works. His work is more like a partial body, as a metaphor for our current society, representing processes of growth and fracture.
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Sawangwongse Yawnghwe 薩望翁雍維
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction
Prince of Kengtung 2020 Oil on linen Unique 60 × 50 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–35,000 Generously donated by the artist and TKG+
Popular and much loved by his subjects, Sao Sai Long featured in Prince of Kengtung took a great interest in education and sent many youths to be educated at universities. The Prince was unassuming, friendly, and well- liked by all who met him. When the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition went through Kengtung on their way overland to Singapore in 1956, they met the Kengtung Saohpa. Tim Slessor wrote about their encounter, noting Sao Sai Long’s informality when he announced, ‘Just call me Shorty—all my friends do’, a nickname that he had picked up in school since Australians were generally taller than him. The travelers had an enjoyable stay in Kengtung. They were looked after by the prince’s family, and even took part in a game of cricket. Sao Sai Long took an interest in all that was going on in Shan State affairs and supported cultural groups such as the Shan State Students Association and Shan Literary Society of both the Rangoon and Mandalay universities. When elected as a Member of Parliament for the Shan State to the Chamber of Nationalities he was its youngest member. The prince was highly regarded, not only as a Tai Shan leader, but as a national figure. He had a great future and a great deal to contribute to the progress of the Shan Plateau. Unfortunately, when the military coup d’état came, he was imprisoned for five years. When he died in 1997, he left family members scattered all over the globe.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (b.1971, Shan State, Myanmar) comes from the Yawnghwe royal family of Shan. His grandfather, Sao Shwe Thaik, was the first president of the Union of Burma (1948–62) after the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. Shwe Thaik died in prison following the 1962 military coup by General Ne Win. Since then, Yawnghwe’s family was driven into exile. They stayed in Thailand, then escaped to Canada, where Yawnghwe grew up and received education. He now lives and works in the Netherlands. Yawnghwe has exhibited internationally, including: Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh, 2020), the 9T H Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Australia, 2018), the 12T H Gwangju Biennale Exhibition (South Korea, 2018), and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh, 2018). He has also exhibited in numerous museums, including: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – Seoul (South Korea, 2020), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Poland, 2018), and Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands, 2018). His works are housed in the collections of MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Thailand and Singapore Art Museum.
Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗
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Cold Medinilla 發冷的寶蓮花
2020 Archival inkjet print, fabric Unique 80 × 80 cm Estimate: HK $ 68,000–88,000 Generously donated by the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Cold Medinilla《發冷的寶蓮花》features Medinilla, a plant indigenous to the Philippines. Due to its popularity as a houseplant, the tropical plant has been transported outside of its tropical locale and into places with many different climates and conditions. For his residency and solo exhibition in Helsinki, Finland, in 2019, the artist raised two Medinilla plants for an installation work. Against the short daylight of spring in Northern Europe, the artist placed the plants close to the window, letting them catch the maximum amount of sunlight. The artist also placed a translucent nylon cloth above the framed work, a fabric commonly used by gardeners to cover outdoor plants during winter as an anti-frost measure. Yeung’s gesture of care is an effective prevention against the cold foreign climate, but the coldness of being away from home cannot be ameliorated as easily.
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Trevor Yeung (b.1988, Guangdong, China) graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Yeung’s practice 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 La Biennale de Lyon 2019 (Lyon, France, 2019); After Nature (UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, China, 2018–19); Cruising Pavilion at the 16TH International Architecture Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2018); the 38TH EVA International Biennale (Limerick, Ireland, 2018); the 4TH Dhaka Art Summit (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2018); The Other Face of the Moon (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea, 2017); Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2017); Seal Pearl White Cloud (4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Australia, 2016); Adrift (OCAT Shenzhen, China, 2016); CHINA 8 – Paradigms of Art: Installation and Object Art (Osthaus Museum Hagen, Germany, 2015); and the 10TH Shanghai Biennale (China, 2014). His work is collected by Kadist Art Foundation and M+ Museum (Hong Kong). Yeung is shortlisted for the 6TH Edition of the Future Generation Art Prize (2021–22). Yeung currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Angela Yuen 阮家儀
Parallel Universe Ice Cream Motorcycle 2020 Plastic Toys, perspex, resin, LED lights Unique 65 × 65 × 20 cm Estimate: H K $ 35,000–55,000 Generously donated by Contemporary by Angela Li
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction Parallel Universe - Ice Cream Motorcycle is part of Yuen’s Plastic Toys series, where she constructs silhouettes using manufactured objects she collects from family-owned stores in our city’s older districts. These objects represent the heyday of Hong Kong’s manufacturing industries back in the 1960s. Each diorama serves as a historical record of Hong Kong people’s perseverance, and each object tells a story of an old Hong Kong story from where it belongs. With a long fascination of all things local and nostalgic, Yuen uses manufactured plastic toys, old-fashioned stationeries and Hong Kong’s iconic objects, such as plastic rulers, stencils, hair curlers, toy soldiers, rubber ducks, capsule toys, tea party sets and floral beads, to create playful three-dimensional sculptures and installations. Strategically placed lights in the sculptures transform objects into imaginative silhouettes and stories; every object is carefully choreographed, combining cast coloured shadows to produce unexpected, stunning visual
results that resemble Hong Kong’ magnificent skylines and street scenes. ‘I choose plastic toys and manufactured objects as my medium because the material is imbued with symbolic meaning associated with the spirit, sweat and hardship of the local labour, and plastic manufactured objects serve as an iconic representation of Hong Kong’s manufacturing boom that shapes the early stages of the city’s modernisation’, said Yuen. Angela Yuen (b.1991, Hong Kong) and graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, in 2014. She had participated in a Beijing artist residency programme in 2016 and the Hart Haus residency in Hong Kong in 2019 and is a finalist of the 2019 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The Lost Time Travel Machine is Yuen’s first major solo exhibition, and her works have been included in many joint exhibitions, public and private collections in Hong Kong, China and Australia since 2013.
Lisa Yuskavage
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Forces 2007 Four-colour lithograph on BFK Rives Paper Edition 13 of 46 + 10 APs, 5 PPs, 1 BAT 96.2 × 76.5 cm Estimate: HK $ 50,000–80,000 Generously donated by the artist and David Zwirner
Forces is part of Yuskavage’s Couple series. These charged depictions of often interlocking, interdependent male and female figures developed out of the artist’s series of ‘symbiotic’ portraits from the early 2000s that paired two female figures to evoke a sense of a dual manifestation of a single personality. The present work relates to an eponymous painting by the artist from 2006. Another edition of Forces is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage’s (b.1962, Philadelphia, PA, USA) highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, they are cast within
fantastical compositions where realistic and abstract elements coexist, and where colour determines meaning. While the artist’s painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, between sacred and profane, and harmony and dissonance. Yet her oeuvre compellingly resists categorisation, insisting instead on its own kind of ‘emotional formalism’ where characters and pictorial inventions assume equal importance. Select exhibitions include Print Up Ladies, Islip Art Museum, Islip (2015); Modern and Contemporary Prints: Recent Accessions, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2014); Prints Please, Islip Art Museum, Islip (2012); Pressing Print: Universal Limited Art Editions, Syracuse University Art Galleries, Syracuse (2010–12); American Contemporary Printmaking Exhibition, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010); and Universal Limited Art Editions: Then and Now, Greenfield Sacks Gallery, Santa Monica (2009).
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Ran Zhang
Chiral (5) 2020 Punched holes on inkjet print of 100 times magnified miniature food setting Edition 3 of 3 120 × 91 cm Estimate: HK $ 25,000–50,000 Generously donated by the artist and Plan B Cluj, Berlin
Para Site 2020 Annual Auction In Chiral (5) microscopically magnified miniature food settings reveal the photographic tricks that are found in food advertisements to demonstrate how these images are exploited to create and design desire in the viewer, ultimately transferring to a desire for the images themselves. The work possesses two opposing qualities: this invitation of desire, but also, the discovery of ‘matter in the wrong place’, which might be evocative of something closer to ‘horror’. The magnification enlarges the objects, but it also draws attention to undesirable elements and hidden interstices throughout the scene, like dust and microplastics, prompting an uncanny feeling. These details are not actually scary, nor are they an exaggeration; they are in fact reality, excessive as it is. Therefore, the work highlights how the action of desiring something familiar turns desire itself into satiation, the encounter of strangeness turns the by-product of that desire into horror. Between the desired and the by-product of desire, the random punctures on the inkjet prints force these trajectories together.
Ran Zhang (b.1981, Tianjin, China) lives in Rotterdam and Berlin. Ran Zhang graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2010. She was selected twice to take part in the artist residency programme in Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam from 2011 to 2013. Solo exhibitions include Resolution of Traits, L’ahah, Paris, 2020; Amsterdam UNSEEN, Amsterdam, 2016; Natritine Gaze 2, M4 Gastatelier, Amsterdam, 2016; and Natritine Gaze, Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, Paris, 2015, among others. Group exhibitions include Werethings, Galeria Plan B, Berlin, 2019; The Hazenstraat Biennale, Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam, 2018; I Ikigai, Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam, 2017; and My Respects to Madame Bernard, Momart, Amsterdam, 2015, among others. Zhang was awarded the golden and bronze prizes from the Danfoss Art Award in 2008, the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst Ontwikkelbudget, and the Mondriaan Fonds Werkbijdrage Jong Talent in 2014. Her work entered the permanent collection of the Hexiangning Museum in 2015.
Robert Zhao Renhui 趙仁輝
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Singapore, 2019 2019 Archival Digital Print Edition 2 of 3 +1 AP 111 × 74 cm Estimate: HK $ 30,000–40,000 Courtesy of the Artist and ShanghART Gallery
Robert Zhao Renhui (b.1983, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder of the Institute of Critical Zoologists. His artistic practice addresses the human relationship with nature challenging accepted parameters of objectivity and scientific modes of classifications. Zhao received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Photography from Camberwell College of Arts and London College of Communication respectively. His work has been exhibited in international group shows such as Busan Biennale 2020; Singapore Biennale 2019; Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland, Australia, 2018; Jiwa: Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia, 2017; 7T H Moscow Biennale, Russia, 2017; 20TH Sydney Biennale, Australia 2016; Les Recontres d’Arles, France, 2015. Amongst his more recent solo exhibitions in Singapore are The Nature Museum, commissioned by Singapore International Festival of Art (SIFA), and The Bizarre Honour, realised for OH! Open House, both in 2017. Zhao has undertaken residencies at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, United States; and the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. He was awarded the Young Artist Award by National Arts Council in 2010 and was a finalist of Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2017.
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Singapore, 2019 is a work from Zhao’s series entitled New Forest, images taken in Singapore and Taiwan. For Singapore, he spent the last year documenting a small secondary forest where migrant humans and animals have created a new wilderness. Using infrared cameras placed around an abandoned base camp, he captured vagabond species that have come to drink from pails, creating strange, otherworldly tableaux. Since the 1950s, global changes such as deforestation and urbanisation have affected animals and plants in different ways. Sometimes they suffer through human development, and sometimes humans produce situations that allow novel organisms to thrive. Due to a dramatic increase in travel and trade, animals and plants have also crossed into new territories, creating new ecological categories of ‘invasive’ and ‘native’ species. Most conservation efforts are aimed at destroying the former and protecting the latter, though increasingly, more ecologists are conceding that these categories are fluid and unstable. New Forest exposes a variety of collisions; between nature and the city, invasives and natives. Sometimes these result in violent encounters: competition, predation, and extinctions. Other times these interactions result in a new, precarious balance, and a destabilising of categories of foreign and local, noxious and useful.
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Zheng Guogu 鄭國谷
Succulent Shanshui 多肉山水
Dimensions variable Estimate: HK $ 888–888,888 Generously donated by the artist and Vitamin Creative Space
About Succulent Shanshui, the artist says: 1. The allegedly never withering flower Crassulaceae (a very ancient species evolving from an aquatic plant), are now gradually entering the Chinese garden. 2. Succulents are grown in Liao Garden* because of its resemblance to the ancient lotus seat, or the unnameable flowers from the extra dimensions depicted in Thangka backgrounds. 3. Besides the observation on the neural curves of the ancient wisemen, I also observe the entire inner energy construction of the human body and surprisingly found out that, inside everyone of us there’s a tree of life within an optoelectronic system, where nameable and unnameable flowers grow, everything there, blossoming at the same time. 4. I believe that everything differs from one to another, and that everyone of us can find our own way to be with the succulents. 19th October, 2020 *Liao Garden— An ongoing land/garden project Zheng Guogu initiated in 2000.
Zheng Guogu’s artistic practices use a wide range of media in order to express the extensive diversity of his ideas along with life processes. The land/garden project (initiated with ‘The Age of Empire’ in 2005 which has evolved into ‘Liao Garden’ since 2013) integrates even more complicated spatial modalities and social relations, which comprise the entire process of dwelling in a spatial location, from conceptual ideal to practical implementation to day-to-day living. In his recent painting series based on the research of life energy, Zheng Guogu tries to reveal the energy flow lurking in the process of perception. The vibration of colour frequencies is closely related to the workings of human arteries and veins, as well as the operation of the universe. Furthermore, the vibration is the tempering of an existential insight.
Zheng Guogu (b.1970, Yangjiang, China) graduated from the printmaking department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in 1992. He lives and works in Yangjiang. Zheng Guogu is also one of the founding members of Yangjiang Group, an artist collective focusing on experimental Chinese calligraphy, founded in 2002 in Yangjiang. Zheng Guogu’s principal solo exhibitions include: Zheng Guogu: Visionary Transformation, MoMA PS1, New York, 2019; Zheng Guogu: The Winding Path to Trueness, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2017; Zheng Guogu: Ubiquitous Plasma, OCAT Xi’an, Xi’an, 2015; Zheng Guogu: Spirit Linger with Dust, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, 2012; Zheng Guogu: My Home is Your Museum, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, 2004; This is a Solo Exhibition - Zheng Guogu’s solo exhibition, BizArt Art Center, Shanghai, 2006. He has participated in international exhibitions and bienniales including: The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9), The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Queensland, Australia; Social Factory - 10th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, 2014; Farewell to Post-Colonialism - 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, 2008; Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007; and Canton Express in Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2003. He received the Best Artist Award by CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Awards) in 2006.
Zhong Wei 鍾 慰
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Crush 2019 Acrylic on Canvas Unique 120 × 90 cm Estimate: HK $ 45,000–70,000 Generously donated by the artist and de Sarthe
Zhong Wei’s (b.1987, Beijing, China) artwork takes its form in immersive installations and canvases that speak to China’s vibrant but chaotic Internet-based visual language. Having compiled a massive database of memes and imagery found online, Zhong uses these ubiquitous images as raw materials for his work.
While certain icons in his artwork are widely recognised, others exist merely as memorabilia from a specific time within his browser history. Much of his inspiration is drawn from traditional Buddhist art, which is referenced in the innumerable folds seen within many of his works. To Zhong Wei, the complex shapes conceived from these folds reflect the structure of humanity and culture. However, the concept that runs through all of Zhong Wei’s work is an idea he refers to as ‘coupling’. It is the notion that the endless flow of information on the Internet generates random pairings, resulting in thoughts and energy that drive our current evolution and shifts in culture. Recent exhibitions by the Zhong Wei include: Void Loop, Plate Space, Beijing, China, 2020; When Mythology Jumps Into Economy: A Big Spash of Ecology, Plate Space x postpost, Beijing, China, 2020; Illusive Particles, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2020 and Contemporary Show Off, de Sarthe, Hong Kong, China, 2020
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Zhong Wei’s Crush is an exemplary artwork, portraying both the artist’s concept of coupling and his command of void. On the left of the painting, various visual elements are brought together uniting fabrics, pixelated glitches, pink polka dots, and eyes. At the centre and on the right side of the canvas the painting is largely left black, portraying only what appears to be gray fissures or cracks across a geological surface. The mix of both excessive patterns and pop colours, alongside significant negative space indicates the artist’s understanding of the Internet’s impact on our visual culture. The Internet is overwhelming us, while simultaneously creating a new and tremendous sense of void.
LOOKING FORWARD: Para Site Programmes 2020–22
Winter 2020
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KOLOA: WOMEN, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY at Artspace Aotearoa
AUCKLAND
Photo by Kitmin Lee
Koloa: Women, Art, and Technology is an international presentation based on the lifelong research of Tunakaimanu Fielakepa, the Dowager Lady Fielakepa, the Kingdom of Tonga’s foremost knowledge-holder of ‘koloa’ or customary women’s arts in Tonga. It first launched at the Langafonua ‘a Fafine Tonga, a historic centre for women’s customary arts in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, and was subsequently shown at Para Site until this spring with a parallel curated presentation of three female artists: Tanya Edwards, Nikau Hindin, and Vaimaila Urale.
Even in times of uncertainty and change, Para Site is keen to realise its physical and digital programmes as it approaches its 25 TH anniversary in 2021. Over the coming months, we are excited to collaborate with renowned institutions across the region as well as with artists, curators, and other arts professionals through an exciting array of new and annual projects.
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A BEAST, A GOD, AND A LINE at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum
CHIANG MAI
Photo by Eddie Lam @ Image Art Studio
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SOLO EXHIBITIONS OF LUKE CHING AND VVZELA KOOK HONG KONG
Photo by Eugene Cheung
Para Site
On show at Para Site’s space in 2018, A beast, a god, and a line is an expansive travelling exhibition woven through the connections and circulations of ideas and forms across a geography commonly called Asia-Pacific. Arbitrary as any mapping, not least in contemporary art exhibitions, it could also be known by several other definitions, which the exhibition explores and untangles.
Para Site is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by Hong Kong artists Luke Ching and Vvzela Kook from December 4, 2020 to February 21, 2021. Drawing from different approaches of research and media, Ching and Kook respond to and interrogate cultural and political collisions in the city, and the role of the artist amidst these transformations.
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Looking Forward:
Spring 2021
5 Photo by Samson Cheung Choi Sang
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4 Summer + Autumn 2021
Co-curated with RAM at Para Site
HONG KONG Photo courtesy Rockbund Art Museum
In March 2021, in collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai, Para Site is co-curating a group show based on the concept of a curtain, also the namesake of RAM’s long-term research project, as a material and immaterial boundary governing contemporary perception. The exhibition will be part of an interconnected series of engagement across institutions, going beyond the fixed format of an exhibition to explore new fields of enquiry.
GROUP EXHIBITION Ă— ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM
GARDEN OF SIX SEASONS
at SAVVY Contemporary
BERLIN
Following its recent iteration at Para Site and Soho House Hong Kong, Garden of Six Seasons, curated by Cosmin Costinas, will travel to SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, an art space at the threshold of notions and constructs of the West and non-West, primarily to understand and negotiate between, and to deconstruct the ideologies and connotations eminent to such ways of thinking.
Para Site programmes 2020–22
Para Site
HONG KONG
KATHMANDU TRIENNALE 2077
Photo by Noah Sheldon
LIQUID GROUND
Photo courtesy Junyuan Feng
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As part of Para Site’s annual selection of Exhibition Proposals from Emerging Curators, Liquid Ground, a project by Junyuan Feng and Alvin Li, is organised around the central metaphor of a fundamental dynamism underlying materials and organisms. The exhibition questions how one may learn from the elemental processes of the material environment, and the possibility of artistic intervention into the phases of things to sustain communities.
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October 2021
KATHMANDU
Under the artistic leadership of Cosmin Costinas, along with co-curators Hitman Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, the upcoming Kathmandu Triennale departs from several questions debated in the Nepali contemporary art scene and around the world, related to discourses on decolonisation, migration and displacement, indigenous knowledge, pluralism and multiplicity of worldviews from an Asian perspective, and redefining the parameters of art beyond a Western canon.
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Looking Forward:
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WORKSHOPS FOR EMERGING ARTS PROFESSIONALS Para Site
HONG KONG
The seventh edition of the Workshops will see, where practicable, the attendance of a group of emerging curators, writers, critics, researchers, and other arts professionals at closed-door workshops and studio visits organised in Hong Kong. Participants from the sixth edition, who had to conduct their sessions virtually, will also be invited to attend.
2022
LIQUID GROUND at UCCA Dune
HEBEI
Following its exhibition at Para Site in the autumn of 2021, Liquid Ground travels to UCCA Dune, a new museum along the coast of Bohai Bay in Hebei province, China in spring 2022.
Film still from Lawrence Lek, Geomancer, 2017, HD video
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Para Site programmes 2020–22
PS PAID STUDIO VISITS Para Site
Ongoing
PARA-SITE.ART VIMEO YOUTUBE
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Since May, Para Site has been hosting a free online series of virtual studio visits with a younger generation of Hong Kong artists. Para Site pays each artist a studio visit fee along with one-month health insurance coverage to provide support and visibility to over 80 artists in Hong Kong during the global pandemic. All of the footage is available on our website, Vimeo, and Youtube accounts.
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acknowledgements Artists
Pacita Abad Pio Abad Nobuyoshi Araki 荒木經惟 Carmen Argote Georg Baselitz Mircea Cantor Gordon Cheung Luke Ching Chin Wai 程展緯 Heman Chong 張奕滿 Abraham Cruzvillegas Alexandre da Cunha Iftikhar Dadi & Elizabeth Dadi Cian Dayrit Willem de Rooij Patrizio Di Massimo Isabella Ducrot Jimmie Durham Izmail Efimov Etsu Egami 江上越 Jes Fan 范 加 Hans-Peter Feldmann Frog King 蛙 王 Charles Gaines Simryn Gill Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Antony Gormley Sheela Gowda Gu Benchi 顧奔馳 Hao Liang 郝 量 Federico Herrero Christopher K. Ho 何恩懷 Ho Tzu Nyen 何子彥 Andrew Thomas Huang Hung Fai 熊 輝 Alfredo Jaar Michael Joo JR Vvzela Kook 曲淵澈 Maria Laet Firenze Lai 黎清妍 Lam Tung Pang 林東鵬 Leung Chi Wo 梁志和 Li Binyuan 厲檳源 William Lim 林偉而 Liu Chuang 劉 窗 Lung Yuet Ching Joyce 龍悦程
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Galleries
David Medalla & Adam Nankervis Jonathan Meese Daido Moriyama 森山大道 Ciprian Mureșan Cassi Namoda Tuan Andrew Nguyen Uriel Orlow Angel Otero Prabhakar Pachpute Elizabeth Peyton Thao Nguyen Phan 潘濤阮 Antonio Pichillá Gala Porras-Kim John Pule Ashmina Ranjit Norberto Roldan Analia Saban Citra Sasmita Wing Po So 蘇詠寶 Rebekka Steiger Angela Su 徐世琪 Yuk King Tan 陳玉瓊 Rirkrit Tiravanija Charwei Tsai 蔡佳葳 Howie Tsui 徐浩恩 Wai Pongyu 韋邦雨 Lawrence Weiner Brittney Leeanne Williams David Wojnarowicz Adrian Wong 王浩然 Wong Hau Kwei 黃孝逵 Ming Wong 黃漢明 Nicole Wong 王思遨 John Ziqiang Wu 吳子強 Wu Wei 伍 偉 Xue Jun 薛 珺 Sawangwongse Yawnghwe 薩望翁雍維 Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗 Samson Young 楊嘉輝 Angela Yuen 阮家儀 Lisa Yuskavage Ran Zhang Robert Zhao Renhui 趙仁輝 Zheng Guogu 鄭國谷 Zhong Wei 鍾 慰 Artists of the Black Box project
10 Chancery Lane another vacant space Art Labor Ben Brown Fine Arts Blindspot Gallery Carrie Secrist Gallery Commonwealth and Council Contemporary by Angela Li David Zwirner de Sarthe Edel Assanti Edouard Malingue Gallery El Mismo. Empty Gallery Esther Schipper Experimenter, Kolkata Francois Ghebaly Gallery Gagosian Galeria Plan B Galerie Gisela Capitain Cologne Galerie Urs Meile Galeria Marilia Razuk Hanart TZ Gallery James Cohan Gallery, NY Jhaveri Contemporary Kukje Gallery kurimanzutto Lehmann Maupin neugerriemschneider Nome Gallery Ora-Ora Perrotin P.P.O.W New York Rossi & Rossi ShanghART Gallery Sies + Höke Galerie Simon Lee Gallery Silverlens Sprüth Magers Taka Ishii Gallery Tang Contemporary Art Thomas Dane Gallery TKG+ Vitamin Creative Space Whitestone Gallery
Special thanks to
Meene An & ONE AND J. Gallery Arco Fine Art Framing Company Bonnie Au Zohra Azi Shararah Bajracharya Anneliis Beadnell Britton Bertran Gemma Blest Olga Boiochhi Elena Brugnano Chan Ka Kiu 陳嘉翹 Kaitlin Chan Chan Wai Lap 陳惠立 Johnson Chang Tsong-zung Yas Mostashari Chang Joseph Chen 陳敬元 Stephanie Chik Ching Ching Cheung Karina Chiu Ivan Cheung Samson Cheung 張才生 Jennifer Chiang Janet Chow Mackenzie Constantinou Maisey Cox Mark Cumming Julia DeMaio Estate of David Wojnarowicz Charlie Fellows Julija Fomina Charles Fong Yvonne Fong Joanna Fung Jack Garrity
With special gratitude to our Gala Hosts: Shane Akeroyd and Virginia Yee
Lisa Geddes Oliver Giles Sadie Granberg Rodrigo Guzman Vivian Har Michael He 賀一川 Gordon Ho Amanda Hon Ken Hui Amman Hussain Martin Ip Priya Jhaveri Theresa Kampmeier Hope Kang Khadinn Khan Karen-Sofie Kvamme Kopo Productions Megan Yu Hua Lan 藍鈺樺 Law Yuk Mui 羅玉梅 Jessica Leung Ella Liao Calvin Liu Zabrina Lo Dawn Luk 陸奡恩 Luo Yudan 羅毓丹 Erica Lyon Monica Manzutto Rene Meile Audrey Min Willem Molesworth Daniel Müller Paula Naughton Nadia Ng Masahito Ono
Alice O’Reilly Pacita Abad Art Estate Jiyoung Park Pearl Lam Galleries Kath Punongbayan Apoorva Rajagopal Marília Razuk Annabel Rhodeen Spring Claire Rifelj Raimondo Romani Erlyz Santos Michelle Sauer Sorana Serban-Chiorean Carrie Shen Lavinia Smith Tara Sobti Angela Su 徐世琪 Sangeeta Thapa Shasha Tittmann Vincent Tsang Odetti Tse Yonnie Tse Leah Turner Gan Uyeda Valentina Valente Kai-Morten Vollmer Jing Wang Dennis Wong 黃振強 Hannah Wright Jian Yang 楊 堅 Penny Yeung Ethan Yip 葉仁晉 Nick Yu 俞廸祈
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Global Council
Founding Friends
Shane Akeroyd Mimi Brown & Alp Ercil Jehan Chu Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl Vanessa Ying Xu Virginia Yee Ethan Yip
Burger Collection, Hong Kong Stephen Cheng CMBB Cultural Organization A. Gaw Mimi & Chris Gradel Inna & Tucker Highfield IEs Collection Alan Lau Wendy Lee James Lie Edouard & Lorraine Malingue SUNPRIDE FOUNDATION
Friends
Associates
Nick & Cordula Adamus-Voegtle Christine & James Boyle Lawrence Chu Jane DeBevoise Elaine W. Ng Fabio Rossi Bonnie & Darrin Woo Yan Du
Stefano Del Vecchio Jane Lombard Gallery Bernhard & Cordula Kotanko Ocula Opera Gallery Silverlens Paola Sinisterra & Ignacio Garcia Wkshps
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Board of Directors
Para Site Team
Alan Lau Ka Ming 劉家明 Chair
Cosmin Costinaș 康喆明 Executive Director / Curator
Mimi Chun Mei-Lor 秦美娜 Vice Chair
Claire Shea 謝 清 Deputy Director
Bonnie Chan Woo Tak Chi 胡陳德姿 Treasurer
Anqi Li 李安琪 Curator of Education and Public Programmes
Sara Wong Chi Hang 黃志恆 Secretary
Celia Ho 何思穎 Curator
Nick Adamus
Joyce Mak 麥加縈 Project Manager / Assistant Curator
Shane Akeroyd Kurt Chan Yuk Keung 陳育強 Alan Y Lo 羅揚傑
Jason Chen 陳子岳 Communications Manager Jacqueline Leung 梁婉揚 Development Manager Jenny Tam 譚蔚廷 Gallery Manager Kaman Lam 林嘉文 Gallery Coordinator
Advisors
Tobias Berger Mimi Brown Damian Chandler Reina Chau 周譚蕙菁 David Clarke 祈大衛 Deborah Ehrlich 艾心玫 Patrick Foret Anselm Franke Claire Hsu 徐文玠 Hu Fang 胡 昉 Tim Li Man-Wai 李民偉 Kai-Yin Lo 羅啟妍 Jessica Morgan Magnus Renfrew Honus Tandijono
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Founded in Roma in 2003, established in Hong Kong since 2011
Your Auction partner for Italian Fine Wines Our specialists will guide you step by step in entrusting your wine collection, from estimate to consignment. Thanks to our experience, we are able to provide you with a reasoned estimate of your collection in a short time, based on technical parameters, such as current market value and the hammer-prices registered during the auctions.
www.grwineauction.com
info@grwineauction.com
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contact
Para Site 22/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 youtube: Para Site HK vimeo: hkparasite
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Catalogue designed and typeset by Jian Yang