Cheung Ka Yu, Heung Kin Fung Alex, Kwong Man Chun, Tang Kwong San @ Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong - A Backyard of Memories

A Backyard of Memories

Cheung Ka Yu, Heung Kin Fung Alex, Kwong Man Chun, Tang Kwong San

Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong

18 November 2020 - 14 December 2020.

KWONG MAN CHUN

Hang Cen Ling and Tenement House-the Ming fiery sunset, 2020 (detailed)

Ink and oil on canvas, iron, projection, 137 x 195cm 

© Kwong Man Chun, Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li

Contemporary by Angela Li present joints exhibition A Backyard of Memories, featuring artworks of four Hong Kong artists – Cheung Ka Yu, Heung Kin Fung Alex, Kwong Man Chun and Tang Kwong San. This exhibition attempts to investigate our thoughts and ideologies on experiences, heritage and memories, from the past to present, life to death, and seasons and cycles.

With a background in design, Heung Kin Fung Alex specializes in vividly coloured paintings with unique compositions and powerful concepts, paying particular attention to the subject of nature. He investigates the balance and conflicts between nature, life and urban development. With cool-toned acrylic and charcoal on linen, his works The Garden of Mysteries and Storage of a Landscape explore the unknown in these topics, inviting the audience to join his adventure of an inner escape. Heung received his BA (Fine Art) & MFA degrees co-presented by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University Australia and Hong Kong Art School. He is currently a lecturer at the Hong Kong Art School. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his works have been collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Kwong Man Chun’s surreal paintings attempt to confuse the viewers’ perspective by mixing sceneries and people from the past with modern settings, creating an ambiguous and nostalgic yet playful atmosphere on his canvases. In his oil painting Hang Cen Ling and Tenement House – the Ming fiery sunset, the artist superimposes his former residence in Huang Cen Ling, China with his present home at a tenement house in Hong Kong, with the greenery of Huang Cen Ling blending seamlessly with the interior settings of the tenement house. Kwong’s creative process serves as a ritual for his gratitude towards his root, with each element in the painting echoing with one another and encapsulating the artist’s sentimentality and nostalgic reflections. Kwong holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from the Hong Kong Baptist University. He has participated in exhibitions in Hong Kong, China, Australia and USA since 2013.

The trace of time evokes in Tang Kwong San’s monochromatic practices. The individual elements in his drawings were collected in different time periods and placed in the same work with a dramatic combination. By depicting scenes of flaming candles and soaked films in black and white, the artist has frozen his memories within a small frame. The composition of these objects is almost artificially constructed, combining with the use of colour it encases a tense atmosphere of melancholy. In his latest works, the candle has become a commonly used subject. Implying the ritual objects that catalysing the imagination of remembrance and memories. Tang was the recipient of the Contemporary by Angela Li Award of the Fresh Trend 2019 Art Graduates Joint Exhibition. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, co-presented by The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University Australia and the Hong Kong Art School. He has earned several other outstanding awards, among others, Mr. Jerry Kwan Memorial Scholarship (2018/2019), Hidden Space Award (2018/2019), Hong Kong Art School Higher Diploma in Painting Best Artwork (Painting) (2016), the HKSAR Education Bureau Outstanding Performance Scholarship (2015/2016), and the Hong Kong Designers Association Designer Student of the Year (2014).

Cheung Ka Yu Yumi is the recipient of the Contemporary by Angela Li Award of the Fresh Trend 2020 Art Graduates Joint Exhibition. The award-winning work is a pair of diptych ink paintings titled Who Whisper Softly in My Ear. In her works, she examines the life cycles of the nature through the traditional art form of Chinese ink on silk. “Is it possible to explore brightness when living in a dark age which is full of disappointments, helplessness and limitations? Plants, in any stage of growth, whether they live or die, show the unique beauty of life. Drawing ‘death’ is also another expression of ‘life’”, Cheung explains. Her works question the referential relationship between life and death, brightness and darkness. With extra fine brushstroke and maintaining an oriental feel, Yumi presents us the beauty of the life cycle in a contemporary context. Born in 1997, Cheung graduated from the Fine Arts Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2020.

CONTEMPORARY BY ANGELA LI

G/F, 248 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.cbal.com.hk

Martin Wehmer @ Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong - Body Fragments

Martin Wehmer: Body Fragments

Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong

24 September - 31 October 2020

MARTIN WEHMER

Women 2, 2019

Oil on Canvas, 170 x 100 cm

© Martin Wehmer, Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li

Contemporary by Angela Li presents Body Fragments, the fourth Hong Kong solo exhibition of Beijing-based German artist MARTIN WEHMER, in conjunction with the launch of his new book MJB and the first edition of Central West Hong Kong, an art initiative by a collective of galleries in the Central West District. Martin Wehmer has been painting in his signature heavy impasto style for more than three decades, a technique he has mastered through premeditated brush and palette-knife strokes. Highly expressive with painterly gestures whilst stripping down “the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”, Martin Wehmer adopts an ideology by Hans Hofmann and develops a one-of-a-kind artistic language of his own, while integrating his personal experience of living in China as a foreigner onto his canvases.

Martin Wehmer has been living and working in Beijing as an artist and an art educator since 2008. He has held a number of successful exhibitions in China and around the world, and continued to foster and forge exchange with numerous art communities. His artistic practice, however, have not been directly influenced by Chinese art as the artist grounded himself deeply in the exploration of Abstract Expressionism. Martin Wehmer compares himself to the late German American painter Hans Hofmann who was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism, not from the artistic point-of-view but the similarity in their directions in life. “He was from Germany and later became a teacher, a founder of the New York School and an important artist in America. This direction is very similar to mine because I am also from Germany, I am a teacher and an artist in China. We both transfer our believes and theories from our own country to another. Exchange in ideas can change the world,” Martin Wehmer said. As a foreign artist in China, Martin Wehmer continues to take up the cultural challenge and experience through living and working in Beijing.

MARTIN WEHMER

Yan, 2019 

Oil on Canvas, 45 x 60cm

© Martin Wehmer, Courtesy Contemporary by Angela Li

The exhibition titles, both English and Chinese, are derived from Martin Wehmer’s unique observations of human postures and daily objects from his everyday surroundings or those he comes across on Wechat and the internet. Following on the idea of eliminating the unnecessary, Martin Wehmer visually and carefully dissects ‘Body’ into ‘Fragments’ with his impasto strokes. “For the whopping visibility of Martin Wehmer’s paintings would be entirely misunderstood if you described it as an abandonment of the visible world,” Hans-Joachim Müller commented, an art critic and a contributor of Martin Wehmer’s latest publication MJB. What is being captured seems unintentional, like ‘an uncontrolled photography’ described by Müller that is taken by accident, but the simplification of representation in Martin Wehmer’s works is an intentional effort to remove unnecessary details to achieve a unified form between gesture and representation. Similarly, with the Chinese title <部首>, the idea is taken from the literal meanings of each of the characters as ‘parts and head’ rather than the direct translate of the word as a whole – Chinese radical, a graphical component of a Chinese character. Martin Wehmer’s works are almost sculptural in their application, with every bold palette-knife stroke giving forms to segments of the body, sharing a glimpse of fragments of the artist’s life in China.

This exhibition brings together 12 paintings that fall short of ordinary portraits, from partial feminine figures to closeups of hands, eyes and lips. None of the persons depicted can be identified as unique individuals due to the lack of defined details, but the imageries are still refined enough to go beyond generic representations of the body. Martin Wehmer invites viewers to look at his works with an open mind and heart in order to achieve open interpretations. “There is no contemporary art without open minds and free human beings,” Martin Wehmer said.

MARTIN WEHMER was born in Blankenstein J. Hattingen, Germany in 1966. He was awarded the Volksbanken art prize in Germany in 1996. He later took up art residencies in Edinburgh and Beijing, and finally decided to settle in Beijing in 2008, where he has lived and worked since. He was one of the organizers of the Beijing 798 Biennale in 2009. Martin Wehmer is also a devout art educator. He has been a lecturer at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and headed the CDK project, a joint programme of the University of the Arts, Berlin and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, facilitating art exchange between China and Germany. His works have been exhibited extensively around the world, and have been included in important collections such as UBS (Hong Kong, Cologne, Zürich), Kunstkredit Basel and Kultusministerium Kanton Basel.

CONTEMPORARY BY ANGELA LI

G/F, 248 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.cbal.com.hk