Art Basel 2015.13

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Take me to the mardi gras (in his study) 2015: oil on canvas by Takeo Hanazawa (b. 1977) Japanese painter and installation artist, a painting with obvious Freudian implications.

Consume (消化) 2014 in stainless steel and titanium by Gao Weigang (高偉剛) (b. 1976)  a Chinese artist from Heilongjiang associated with Ay Wei-wei, working in painting, sculpture, installation and performance art is constantly experimenting his artistic language, pushing the boundaries of painting into both sculpture and installation,rupturing our conventional perspective on specific topics and bringing the spectators into the space of his work, emphasizing more the meaning and concepts behind his artistic creations than craftsmanship. He won the "Arts Future Award" in Art HK 2011. This is what he says about this metallic structure: " In Hong Kong, one of the world's most famous ports, the container is a popular mode of transportation but is often ignored. The main structure of "Consume" is altered from a container but is in sharp contrast to it. The bridge-like structure has an arched back, the raised medium section is made of stainless steel and titanium and has been polished gold. Almost everything in our daily life were stored in containers and are delivered to us via the container from different parts of the world and are then repacked with new goods and sent to the next stop, thus each stop is a starting point in an endless cycle. Goods and commodities with the associated message run into our desires and are then inter-packed, exchanged or despatched. Like our thoughts and our lives, they engage in an endless round of exchanges of rampant moods and objects , mostly useless and meaningless. Do we really need to consume so much garbage? "

Lucia de B (Accused) (製造死亡天使)

Murders are always interesting. Social psychologists tell us that people have a tendency to be more alert to "bad" things than to "good" things and that the former strike them with much greater intensity than the latter. Evolution psychologists tell us why: the risk of not paying attention to things which may threaten our life is much more serious than the risk of not taking advantage of good things which may benefit us. Whilst we may have a second bite of the cherry if we miss the first one, ignoring a threat to our life may prove fatal because death is irreversible: we only got one life! Perhaps for this reason, bad things makes good news story but seldom good things, which we tend to take for granted. Perhaps for the same reason, news of "serial killing" always makes a sensationally "good" news story. One such is the case of Lucia de Berk (more commonly called "Lucia de B"), a licensed pediatric nurse in the Juliana Child Hospital ("JKH") in Hague, Holland, who was sentenced on 24th March 2003 to life imprisonment with an order that she receive psychiatric treatment for 7 murders and 3 attempted murders of babies under her care, not only in JKH but in two other hospitals where she previously worked. She lodged an appeal and on 18th June, 2004 the original verdict was upheld. However, in 2008, her case was reopened by the Dutch Supreme Court because of new evidence proving her innocence and the order that she receive psychiatric treatment was rescinded because the psychiatrist found that there is no evidence of her suffering any psychiatric problem at all and on a re-trial, she was acquitted of all charges against her in April, 2010.

Everything started with the unexpected death of a baby (Amber) in the JKH on 4th September, 2001. The hospital authorities then checked through its records on the number of deaths of babies occurring whilst they were under her care and discovered a total of 9 such deaths between September 2000 and September 2001. Although previously, such deaths were considered unfortunate but not unexpected and the cause of death was labeled "natural", it now considered them suspicious because in all those case, Lucia de B was given the task of giving medicine to the babies under her care when such deaths occurred. To protect its reputation, the hospital decided to inform the police to start an investigation. It was big news and Lucia de B was called "the angel of death" by the press.

Art Basel 2015. 12

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Untitled 1970: oil on canvas by Chung Sang Hwa (b. 1932) a Korean artist who first trained in his own country and then moved first to Paris, then Kobe, Japan and returned to  Korea in 1992 and has since been working in Seoul. He uses the concepts of grid and covering of the paint on his canvas and folds, sculpts, scalps, and then literally rearranges the zinc-based paint that he uses in multiple layers, a technique that he perfected after years of experimentation to encourage reflection on oriental tradition of painting.  A critic, Lóránd Hegyi. says, “The closer the viewers’ interest in the plastic visual details of the painting’s sensual surface, in the painter’s subtle interventions, and in the pictorial and physical methods he uses to structure his work, the closer they also come to another meditative and emotional domain of the artistic process, in other words poetry, the genuinely poetic strategy of the artwork,”

El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex) (金錢綜合症)

From snapshots of the difficulties ijn the lives of the small guys at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in Gheese-ha, we move in my next film in the HKIFF to those of the Bohemian set of the rich but not the famous at the the western tip of the Mediterranean in El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex), which took place in Southern Spain. There we find Raphael (Rafael Lamata), his wife Francisca (Lola Rubio) and his group of friends Henry (Gianfranco Poddighe) a gold prospector, Domingo (Juan Rodrigáñez ) who is preparing to get 3 million Euros from a certain Herr Müller of Düsseldorf, Lucas (Eduard Mont de Palol) who is fond of reading all kinds of books about economics and culture, Cecilia (Cecilia Molano), a singer (Julia de Castro), another musician (Michel Rodrigáñez) and the idiot  (Pablo Herranz) spending their vacation at Rafael's huge estate. To Rafael's surprise, his son (Jorge Dutor)  brought with him a German girlfriend (Katrin Memmer) who turned out to be a very accomplished pianist.

Art Basel 2015.11

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Untitled 2002: computer print on canvas mounted on panel by Jorge Pardo (b. 1963) , a sculptor born in Cuba and working in Mexico.