Enoch Cheung, Retroactive Interference, 2017

Enoch Cheung is a conceptual artist working with photography, video and mixed media installation to question our perception of daily life and social issues. He was fascinated by the intersection of heritage and contemporary architecture at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center. In 2017, during the exhibition Breathing Space: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong, he used long exposure night-time photography to produce these panoramic images that delineate all the seams where old and material converge at the site. By punctuating the restored heritage with laser beams, the artist calls attention to the memories that still remain from colonial historic vestiges.

張康生的概念藝術實踐運用攝影、錄像和多媒體裝置，反思日常感知和社會議題。張氏對本中心古蹟和新建築物的交匯及空間運用尤感興趣。在本中心於2017年舉辦的《喘息空間：香港當代藝術展》，他使用長時間曝光夜間攝影，透過鐳射光標記新舊建築的夾縫和交合點，創作了這兩張照片，以重組和反思殖民歷史記憶。

Gu Wenda, Mythos of Lost Dynasties, Series E-6, 1997

Gu Wenda is one of China’s most influential contemporary artists known for his practice using traditional ink painting, poetry, calligraphy, and pseudo-characters as well as human body materials to reinterpret ancient Chinese tradition and reflect on problems of globalization. This painting is part of his ongoing Mythos of Lost Dynasties series started in 1983. As with many other works in the series, this painting features a monumental pseudo-Chinese seal script character emerging from a splashed ink landscape. To contemporary readers, the ancient Chinese seal script and his invented ideograph could be equally as illegible. The artist consistently employs pseudo-ideographs in his practice to create an ambiguous familiarity that questions the boundaries of semantic meaning and one’s relationship with cultural history.

谷文達是最具影響力的中國當代藝術家之一，創作包括水墨、詩詞、書法、偽字體以及運用人體物料的作品，旨在重塑中國傳統以及全球化所致的問題。這幅畫屬於谷氏《遺失的王朝》系列（1983-）之一。如系列中很多其他作品一樣，這幅畫繪有一個大型的偽篆體字，浮現於潑墨山水之上。對於現今觀眾，中國古代篆書和谷氏的自創意符可能同等陌生。藝術家持續運用似曾相識的偽字體，反思語言的界限和自身與文化歷史的關係。

Hao Liang, Day and Night I and II, 2017- 2018

Hao Liang private collection of Pia Miller Getty

Hao Liang is a painter trained in traditional Chinese ink painting and recognized for his contemporary landscape compositions that weave together Chinese and Western cultural allegory. This pair of diptychs explore the subject of time and perspective. He depicts the same fantastical landscape in two versions, a monumental one of a colorful day, and a smaller one showing the intense dark of night. In both, the artist distorts spatial dimensionality and proportions, emphasizing the constant transformation of the sea, land and sky. The diptych was inspired by inkstone tablets of Qing dynasty literatus Wang Ziruo who created small replicas of huge, eroding ancient steles engraved with various texts, pictures and historical information. Struck by these tablets and their rubbings, the artist applied the same logic to his landscapes, showing how light, scale, and texture alter legibility and memory.

郝量的當代山水畫植根於傳統中國水墨，以交織中西文化審美和符號的作品見稱。這幅雙聯畫探索時間與感知的主題。兩幅畫作描繪相同的風景，較大呈現色彩繽紛的白晝，而較小的則描繪漆黑的夜晚。藝術家在雙聯畫中扭曲空間與物體比例，突顯海、天和地之間的萬變互動。作品靈感來自清代縮刻家王子若的硯碑；王氏擅長縮刻帶不同文字、圖畫和歷史文獻的古代石碑。郝量深受石碑和拓本的啟發，在山水畫中運用同一邏輯，展示光線、大小和質感如何影響清晰度和記憶。

Eddie Kang, Big City Life, 2017

Supported by Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Hong Kong, Festive Korea 2017, Christina Hee-Kyung Kang, Paradigm Art Compnay, Jung-Yong Lee, Gaga Art Gallery

Eddie Kang is a South Korean artist known for his original, nostalgic characters influenced by television and cartoon of the millennial generation. Inspired by his urban upbringing in Seoul, he created this sculpture with five of his original characters – Storyteller the Clown, Cabbit, Bubble Bearcup, Rag Doll and Goblin the Robot – to reflect a spectrum of emotions in city life that resonate with Hong Kong. The artist uses a cartoonish aesthetic to recall the joy and simplicity of childhood in the hopes of sharing optimism against the unrelenting change of a modern city.

姜錫鉉以啟發自Y世代電視卡通的自創人物最廣為人知。這個雕塑包含五個人物——小丑、貓兔、粉熊、布偶和機器人——靈感素材均取自藝術家在首爾的成長經歷，反映城市人的内在感情。姜氏意用卡通的風格勾起童年的快樂和純樸，希望為生活於擁擠、高壓環境中的城市人帶來安慰。

Zeng Fanzhi, Night, 2005, 215 x 330 cm

The Fanzhi Foundation for Art and Education

Zeng Fanzhi has been boldly experimenting with the new forms of painting, continuing with his exploration of the relationship between colors and lines in expression. Night is a large-scale painting with a spectacular structure and embraces a sort of kinetic force, corresponding to the magnificent and exquisite human experience, and natural pattern of nature. Each line stretched  on impasto mingles with different colors, while sculptural brushstrokes are painted with texture. A new layer of lines is superimposed on the overlaid oils. Each new stroke changes the trajectory of the original marks, alters the combination between colors, and unleashes the diverse possibilities behind the oil paint. Throughout the painting process, the imagery is ever-changing, and the painting is constantly in a perpetual state of motion and transition. Between the ambiguity of deconstruction and reconstruction, transformation, and superposition, Zeng Fanzhi retains a sense of contingency in his paintings, creating visual imageries and opening up uncertainties of interpretations, which depicts his unique expression towards the empirical world. This dynamic and sporadic spirituality is rooted in the artist's painting method and process. As the audience stands in front of the painting, they perceive the cadence from the ever-changing imagery, experience the purity of the tension between the momentum of lines and color, and have a sublimated abstract visual experience.

曾梵志探求創新的繪畫形式，並持續探索色彩和線條的表現關係。作品《夜》畫面結構恢宏磅礡，蘊藏動能，對應壯美宏闊的人類經驗與自然格局。 藝術家在厚塗顏料層上拉動線條，讓每一道線條混和著不同的顏色，筆觸如立體雕塑般充滿質量感。及後曾氏在畫布上疊加的新線條，都會拉動、改變原有筆觸的軌跡，轉化色彩之間的組合關係。色彩和線條之間互為牽引，亦釋放了油彩顏料的可能性和多樣性。在整個繪畫過程中，畫面不斷生成與改變，圖像始終處於一種恆動、變化中的狀態。 曾梵志在打破與重建，變化與疊加的辨証之間，使他的畫作保持了一種偶然性，成為開放而不封閉的圖像，亦是他對客觀世界的獨特感受。這種開放的動態，偶然而來的靈性，來自於藝術家的繪畫方式和過程。觀者站在畫面前方，並感知瞬息萬變的視覺節奏，經驗線條動勢與色彩中純粹的張力， 追求一種昇華的抽象視覺經驗。