Lacuna America
VIEW EVENT DETAILSAsia Society-Orientations Art Lecture Series
An evening presentation by Peter Suart
Drinks reception: 6:30pm
Presentation: 7:00pm
Close: 8:00pm
In 1999, Peter Suart saw Ken Burns's long film The Civil War, and was caught by the subject. It took fire in the imagination, and in 2013 became the basis of Suart's seventh one-man performance, prompting three years of research — reading, seeing films, talking to people, and traveling in America. It so happened that a new book in his Tik and Tok illustrated book series came about during this period, and the American research went into that, too, the setting this time the 1870s, somewhere Northwestern. Many themes appear: memory and identity, Chinese railroad workers, the Great Strike of 1877, early photography and outlaws. In the context of his illustrated book Lacuna* and one-man performance America**, Suart discusses nineteenth century America, its relevance to Hong Kong and the world, innovations in warfare in the Civil War, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whaling, gold, the idea of a democratic republic and other more serious topics.
Peter Suart is a writer and illustrator, a musician and a theatrical performer, and has spent his life in Hong Kong and England. Recent projects include Fragile (on the Hong Kong plague of 1894), Melencolia (on Albrecht Dürer), both one-man performances, The World was Made on a Sunday (on Nabokov, Shostakovich, Stalin), the fifteenth of the theatrical concerts by 'the box,' a Hong Kong music ensemble co-founded with Kung Chi Shing, and Soledad, a collaboration with choreographer Helen Lai inspired by García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. His latest published book is Hugh Moss's The Art of Understanding Art, for which he did the pictures. He has illustrated several books for the Folio Society in London, including Gulliver's Travels, The Master and Margarita, Gogol's Collected Stories, and The Deptford Trilogy. He is a regular speaker on a variety of subjects, a keen sportsman, and an assistant gardener.
*Lacuna - Written and illustrated by Peter Suart. Published by MCCM Creations in Hong Kong, September 2016.
**America - A one-man performance on America and its Civil War by Peter Suart. September 23-24, 2016, 8pm, City Hall Theatre, Hong Kong. Presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.
Co-presented with: