Amelia Johnson Contemporary presents Detached Oeuvre, an exhibition of paintings by two emerging Hong Kong artists Michelle Lee Ho Wing and Chris Huen Sin Kan. The exhibition examines the city or environment we live in through the medium of painting. A city is defined by a wide range of elements such as history, politics, architecture, culture, economics, and most importantly, the people who make up the society and it changes when the population as a whole changes. However, “rational city planning” has become dogma to rationalize the reciprocal relationship between government and local property development companies. The ideology of “city planning” is manipulated for certain purposes, without consideration for the historical context and spatial consciousness, often resulting in a divided society. These two artists take on diverse but congenial perspectives to investigate the oeuvre, intrinsic value and specific nature of the post-colonial city.
“Invisible Cities” is the second series of paintings by Michelle Lee Ho Wing that interweave a historic piece of literature with the artist’s own imaginations to create visual representations. Based on the twenty-five cities depicted in the seminal novel by Italo Calvino, Michelle provides an alternative perspective which considers the text and signified city in the form of civil heraldry. Her work attempts to uncover a reliable analogy between the withering cities depicted and the preexisting circumstance in Hong Kong, where society is moving towards homogeneity under vast modernization and development.
In search of an immensely vital existence through his painting, Chris Huen Sin Kan’s work expresses his passion in life, and consciousness of the trivial everyday things that take place in the city where he was born and grew up. He presents a thoughtful series of paintings entitled, “The Big Year” after the birding competition in which birders compete to see or hear the largest number of species of birds within a single calendar year. “The Big Year” does not merely inspire the artist and participants with intense passion, it also creates an escape from mundane life.
About the artists:
Michelle Lee Ho Wing was born in Hong Kong, graduating with a BA Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, her practice encompasses the relationship between text and image through a variety of media. Michelle extracts significant lines from vast sea of writings with keen perception, and further represents and rephrases the text in a specific context, which resonates with the original literature and social circumstances. Michelle’s work is characterized by her interest in triangular relationship between author, reader and text.
A fresh graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan works primarily with paint; his artistic practice has never deviated from observing the nature of life, and is based on the universal condition originating from human life such as history, religion and politics. Chris sees painting as necessary nourishment for his soul and research through his own careful observation of humanity is paramount to his practice. By means of unceasingly adjusting and demonstrating methods of perception, what appears in his paintings is often fluctuated and fragmentary.
Image: © Michelle Lee Ho Wing, Amelia Johnson Contemporary
