Shanghai-born artist Chen Danqing was only 14 when he started painting Mao propaganda posters in the 1970s. “I painted more than 100 portraits of Chairman Mao on the street walls in Shanghai and its suburbs and also on factory iron sheets,” he says. “During that time, there were millions of amateur and professional painters in … Continue reading
I’m standing under Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, ‘The Creation of Adam’, craning my neck to see Adam and God’s outstretched near-touching hands. But the faces I’m looking at are identical and Chinese–it is the face of celebrated Hong Kong artist Chow Chun-Fai. And I’m not in the Vatican, I’m in the artist’s Fotan studio. Fotan … Continue reading
Published in Hong Kong Tatler, December 2014. It would be hard to find clearer confirmation of Federico Fellini’s aphorism that all art is autobiographical than the work of Sophie Calle. For more than three decades the French conceptual artist has plucked events out of her life, and the lives of others, to use directly as … Continue reading
As published in Prestige Art Basel HK, 2014, magazine supplement. Large sacks of flour from the factory-scale bakery next door block the entrance of collector Alan Lau’s studio as I squeeze past. Part design den, part cool bachelor pad, the industrial space is bursting with art. A Lee Kit fabric work rests on a low … Continue reading
Published in Framed, Issue 2, 2011 Don and Mera Rubell have been collecting art for as long as they have been married, which is almost 50 years. Today they have one of the world’s largest, privately-owned contemporary art collections which was established in 1964 and is housed in a museum in Miami, Florida. Later this … Continue reading
The National Gallery of Victoria is usually one of my first pit-stops when I’m back in Melbourne. I’ve spent many a blissful afternoon there on art-class pilgrimages or to take a breather from my day. Last December on a trip to visit the parentals I was lured back to the NGV by Melbourne Now, an … Continue reading
As published in Hong Kong Tatler, December 2013 “In art, truth is suggested by false means,” Edgar Degas once declared, and artist Yinka Shonibare’s work reveals some harsh realities about modern society: racism, inequality between colonising and colonised cultures, and the excess of a contemporary society increasingly on the verge of implosion. Works by the … Continue reading
