Highlights
Abstract Evolutions: Sixty Years of Paintings by Fong Chung-Ray
With an artistic career spanning six decades, Fong Chung-Ray (b. 1933) is an early pioneer of contemporary Chinese art. The recent retrospective held at the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) at the University of Hong Kong is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the city.
Exhibition Review: China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta
In the fall semester of 2023, I—and likely every faculty member in North America teaching about the arts of China—had an opportunity to say at least once a week, ‘If you can get to Cleveland before January, you will see this’, referring to one of the more than 240 objects—paintings, metalwork, jade, ceramics, furniture, prints, and calligraphy—on view in ‘China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta’.
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.
Materials of Inspiration: Zheng Chongbin
Contemporary artist Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961, Shanghai) has turned Chinese painting inside out, focusing on its materials and surface, the performance and process of painting.
Lalan’s Metaphysical Journey Through Her Artistic Practice
Xie Jinglan (1921–95), nicknamed Lalan, was an artist who paved her search into spirituality through the oeuvre she composed, choreographed, performed, and painted.
Pursuing the Aesthetic: An Interview with Lee Min-te and Patty Liu
In October 2012, Taiwan’s Ching Wan Society marked its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of bronzes, porcelain, paintings and works of art selected from the collection of its members at the National Museum of History, Taipei (see Hsiung Yi-Ching, ‘The Ching Wan Society: Twentieth Anniversary Reflections, Orientations, October 2012, pp. 85–89). The objects shown included works owned by Lee Min-te, who collects Chinese ceramics and works of art, and his wife Patty Liu, who is interested in Chinese 20th century and contemporary paintings. Orientations visited Lee and Liu at their home in Taichung to talk about their collecting journey.
Autumn Viewing in the Forbidden City: An Interview with Dickson Hall
In late 2016, The Forbidden City Publishing House released a colour edition of a catalogue of the early paintings in the Palace Museum, Beijing that had originally been published in the late 1980s. The catalogue, Chinese Paintings in the Palace Museum (4th–14th Century), is unique in that it was written in English by a Western scholar with unprecedented access to the paintings, and in that it was intended as a guide for Westerners visiting the regular autumn display of the works. The author, Dickson Hall, was one of the first Westerners to study at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
Encountering the Majestic: Imperial Portraits and Qing Court Rites
For the July 2022 opening of the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM), an unprecedented number of over 900 precious treasures were loaned from the Palace Museum for display in the opening exhibitions. While some of these treasures have never been exhibited before, many have been widely presented in past exhibitions. It therefore became both a challenge and an opportunity for curators to find new and innovative ways to represent and reinterpret them. Take, for example, the por-traits of emperors and empresses.