A Retrospective of Art HK 2011

Time again to take another look at art ! The HK International Art Fair 2012 will open today. I won't be able to go to the opening but will surely go before it closes. I just realized that I didn't post anything about the exhibition last year. So here are some of the art works I saw last year.



I like this piece. Is that a person or a continent climbing and leaning down precariously from the top of the wall with a star for hand, reaching out for what looks like the Hall of the People's Congress, its feet supported by stilts? Europe leaving the peep hole and coming out from behind its wall, trying to reach the PRC? What's that split light on top? A modern day symbol of yin and yang, a world seen through blue eyes of the Caucasians or the brown eyes of the Asians? The tips of what looks remarkably like pointed swords coming out from between the columns of a simplified early modern European style mercantile hall or monastery?

The Euro-Asia land mass joined by white positive (negative?) wires to America by brown negative (positive?) wires to the opposite poles of electricity through the Aleusian Islands?

People on little pedestals being joined together in the form of a cross by vases and fields vibrating with the harmonics of strings?

Contemporary version of partitions in metal: all lines, perforations and angles!

In the foreground, a rocket and satellite disc surrounded by a ribbon used in Chinese folk dance? In the background, hammer and sickle above a spiraling metal tower. What do they mean? Do they need to "mean" anything apart from their forms?

Hole on what looks like a wall through which one can see the top of the protective wall of an old hutong and an ancient palace, old castle wall (or part of the Great Wall of China?) and building materials and demolition of the old everywhere in that ancient capital. The plaster of the new looks just skin deep? Traces of the old and more solid bricks and mortar breaking through everywhere?

Another piece on a similar theme

Can man find an open space to replicate himself like a commodity as graffitis on a dilapidated wall with "tree trunks" scraped off the wall plaster and the botto of which is fringed by rubble and other building waste in front of old buildings anxious to protect itself with barbed wire?

This one shows a similar contrast but not present with the distant past, but recent past with the present and perhaps the future. Instead of the artist putting his name to a work, he inscribes his name to something we would not normally consider "art"; instead of "art" being in a museum, only the "image" of such "art" is in a gallery, a "play" of "simulacra" of images of images of images without origin in time and place or where time is collapsed into space! But perhaps the exhibits are their own best advocates.