Exhibition Review: ‘Art Personalised’ Hong Kong Museum of Art
Some background may be needed to understand the joyful curatorial folie of ‘Art Personalised’, an exhibition on view from 10 November 2023 through 7 April 2024 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMOA). Under the direction of Maria Mok Kar-wing, the museum has pursued an unabashedly populist strategy since it reopened in Tsim Sha Tsui in December 2019, after four years of expansion and renovation. It had a jump start on the cerebral M+ Museum, which opened two years later, in West Kowloon, three kilometres to the west. It has the advantage, too, of being the city’s first public art museum; several generations of Hong Kong museum-goers and collectors have given parts of their collections to the HKMOA, which opened in 1962 in a different location. With the exception of the museum’s special travelling exhibitions, its various collections prior to the renovation were siloed and poorly explained.
HKMOA’s star assets include 370 works by Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) and the world’s richest collection of China trade paintings, which are the museum director’s specialty. Mok initially studied fashion design in Paris, returning in 1996 to Hong Kong, where she began working at the HKMOA. She became the museum’s director in 2019. In a magazine interview in 2022, the sixtieth anniversary of the museum, she said, ‘Instead of curating exhibitions, I “curate” the entire institution, which means that I come up with unique and inspiring experiences for anyone who walks through our door’; she added, ‘What we do is fun and on trend’. This ethos, and the museum’s broad target audience of both young and old, can explain the curatorial approach of the exhibition, which aimed to offer a way to approach the HKMOA’s 18,000-piece collection as reflective of types of personality. Rather than employing the familiar sixteen personality types of the Meyers-Brigg quiz, the HKMOA narrowed them down to four: Innovation/Adventurer; Exquisiteness/Perfectionist; Elegance; and Exotica/Fashionista. Each of these personality types was represented by a separate gallery. Each gallery had a presiding personality as its emblem, which was shown on a light screen in the gallery.
The ‘Innovation/Adventurer’ type was represented by Wu Guanzhong, who studied in France in the 1940s, breaking away from traditional Chinese painting to create his own style and setting the stage for contemporary ink painting. The ‘Exquisiteness/Perfectionist’ type was represented by the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) although there were enough pieces dating from the reign of his grandson, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95), that suggested he might have served as its emblem as well. The ‘Elegance’ gallery was overseen by Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645), the Ming period (1368–1644) literatus, who was a premier arbiter of taste through his Treatise on Superfluous Things, and finally the Song period (960–1279) emperor Huizong (r. 1100–26) was the champion of the type ‘Exotica/Fashionista’.
Metal tree
Lam Yau-sum (b. 1981), 2016
Mixed media; height 138 cm, width 62 cm, diameter 110 cm
Hong Kong Museum of Art
Each gallery and personality type was also coded with a hand-painted icon, created by the Hong Kong artist Joey Leung (b. 1976), and five scents with tear-away stickers, from Scentory Hong Kong, whose online store features book and scent sets. The final passage of the exhibition, leading to the exit, included a viewing gallery with site-specific art installations, inspired by the museum collection, by Angela Yuen (b. 1991) and Bovey Lee (b. 1969). There was also a photo booth where viewers could create personalized images: four photos of themselves superimposed on icons of their selected personality type.
With its quirky approach, the exhibition drew in teenagers and families, and it succeeded in creating buzz around its 100 ‘hand-picked’ pieces from the collection. Individually, these objects are superb, and—although the museum’s count reached 100 by including some small netsuke-like Yixing-ware creatures and a 19th century tea set—they are quite wonderful. The setting of the objects in small, connected galleries meant that visitors’ experience of wonder overcame any exhaustion. Although the exhibition’s objects were drawn from the museum’s four core collections—‘Chinese Antiquities’, ‘Chinese Painting and Calligraphy’, ‘China Trade Art’, and ‘Modern and Hong Kong Arts’—the descriptive gallery titles offered a more stimulating context.
The first gallery, ‘Innovation/Adventurer’, could easily have been labelled ‘Modern and Hong Kong Arts’, but that would have been less fun. The subtext was that Chinese art of the 19th and 20th centuries put traditional aesthetics in direct collision with the Judaeo-Roman traditions of the West. Wu Guanzhong was represented by large canvases, including Wind from the Sea (1997) and Waters and Mountains (1992), that retain his emblematic ‘kite with an unbroken string’ relationship between figuration and expressionism.
This gallery also included Landscape (2015) by Wang Tiande (b. 1960) and Silvery Woods Amidst Cloudy Mountains: Tibet Series No. 16 (2000) by Liu Guosong (b. 1932). Wang used burning incense sticks like a brush to apply ink on stacks of xuan paper, and Liu painted on a coarse-fibred paper that he tore off to create white lines.
Among the standouts of the gallery were metal sculptures (from 2015 and 2016) (fig. 1) by Lam Yausum (b. 1981), which evoke literati paintings of plum branches and barren trees (representing dynastic transition) but are made of industrial materials and feature whimsical figures inhabiting the branches. King and Queen chairs (2004) by Ha Bik-chuen (1925–2009), also made of found objects, were given regal presentation. The King chair also served as an Instagram-able icon for the ‘Innovation/Adventurer’ section.
The next gallery, stewarded in spirit by the Kangxi emperor, naturally featured ceramics, jade, and lacquer. Its icon was the outline of an 18th century painted enamel hand warmer. The first displayed object was a Kangxi period underglaze-blue porcelain jar with three dragons chasing a pearl amid waves. Next was a double-handled vase in fencai enamels, painted with a hunting scene of 100 deer, a popular image in the Qing (1644–1911) court, whose denizens fancied themselves hunters from the northern plains, from where they originated.
The gallery of ‘Exquisiteness/Perfectionist’ did not contain only ancient objects. Here, a 2012 painting by Chung Tai-fu (b. 1956) called Ripple, of mineral pigments and metallic leaf on paper, showed a link not only with ink brush painting but also with paints used before the 20th century. There were also objects made of lacquer, boxwood, rhino horn, jade, and a nested set of balls carved from a single piece of ivory. Whether these objects should be described as apex crafts (or, as in the museum’s core collection, ‘Chinese Antiquities’) is moot, but they were interesting and led seamlessly into the next gallery, ‘Elegance’, which had as its Instagram icon outlines of bamboo branches.
Versifying under the Influence of Wine
By Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), c. 1646
Ink and colour on silk; 138.8 x 50.1 cm
Xubaizhai Collection
The ‘Elegance’ gallery, with Wen Zhenheng as its mentor, showed off a traditional scholar’s desk with interactive screens in Chinese and English explaining the significance of the displayed objects, from a reclining greyhound paperweight to seals, brushes, and waterpots. Another modern piece presented in this gallery was Reworking the Classics by Koon Wai-bong (b. 1974), an eight-panel laminated screen featuring mountains and streams. The gallery also featured an elegant 17th century painting by Chen Hongshou called Versifying under the Influence of Wine (fig. 2)—which, for the literati, was what life was all about.
The final gallery, ‘Exotica/Fashionista’, assembled objects from the core collections of ‘Modern and Hong Kong Arts’ and ‘Chinese Trade Paintings’, while including others that must have come from the museum’s capsule showcases ‘Eclectic Mix’, ‘Hong Kong Stories’, and ‘Picturesque Views’. Among the most stunning of the contemporary paintings on view was Fountain: Fan Kuan Versus Duchamp (fig. 3) by Zhang Wei (b. 1956). This work combines the waterfall from the Northern Song (960–1127) painter Fan Kuan (c. 960–c. 1030)’s Travellers Among Mountains and Streams, kept in Taipei’s National Palace Museum, and Duchamp (1887–1968)’s urinal.
Since the whole exhibition is framed by a quotation from Duchamp (‘Art is all a matter of personality’), the inclusion of this work seemed more than appropriate.
However, Huizong’s hypothetical mentoring of the ‘Exotica/Fashionista’ gallery seemed entirely arbitrary; a few trade paintings with images of birds and flowers evoked the bird-and-flower paintings of Huizong and his artist-retainers.
Fountain: Fan Kuan Versus Duchamp
Zhang Wei (b. 1956), 2000
Digital image on canvas; 375.8 x 114.5 cm
Hong Kong Museum of Art
Gouache paintings of pineapples and tropical fruit by Guan Lianchang (Tingqua; act. 1840s–70s) were made entirely for the export trade, however, and have no reference point in dynastic painting. Similarly, the blue-and-green-on-gold landscape paintings by Wen Qiqiu (1862–1941) superimposed on paintings of Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) ritual bronzes reflect the exotica of the gallery’s title and were very beautiful, but, like Zhang Wei’s Fountain, they seemed to reflect the conflict of tradition with modernity.
A mirrored corridor with inscriptions—including ‘Now is Now’, ‘Think Out of the Box’, and ‘Endless Imagination’—amplified the exhibition’s Instagram potential, along with a spyglass looking down at the installations by Yuen and Lee and the photo booth for visitors to make souvenirs of their faces on their personality-type icons.
This was not an exhibition for the art snob or the purist, but its quirkiness helped to achieve itsgoal, which was to make the museum’s collections accessible to young people, in particular. And the youths were there, in rather large numbers, along with families testing out the interactive display on the scholar’s desk, teenage girls in the latest Korean fashion waiting in line to look through the telescope at the Yuen and Lee installations, dating couples wearing headsets, and the odd singleton.
This exhibition demonstrated successful art marketing to the masses (lou bak sing). But it worked for the art connoisseur as well, if one was not too fixed on its anomalies.
