Archives: Activity

The Executive Committee is pleased to organise a gallery talk on three very different exhibitions currently presented by the University Museum and Art Gallery. 

1.”North Korea in the Public’s Face: Twentieth-century Propaganda Posters from the Zellweger Collection” 
Stylistically influenced by communist brutalist propaganda and the core work on North Korean art—Kim Jong Il’s 1992 publication Treatise on Art (Misullon)—all of these state-commissioned posters – displayed for the first time in Hong Kong – promote ‘correct’ forms of socialist realism, thereby documenting the socio-political and economic policies communicated from the Leader to the North Korean people. In so doing, daily activities are aligned with political beliefs; for example, the metaphorical configuration of rice farming with the cultivation of socialism. The imagery displayed offers insights into a country that few have visited and from which first-hand information remains sporadic and inconsistent at best. 

2.”Ifugao Sculpture: Expressions in Philippine Cordillera Art” 
The Ifugao are particularly well known for their ritual wood carving and weaving. Many artworks reflect their complex indigenous religion, which is marked by a cosmology that includes thousands of deities. Particularly noteworthy is their skill in carving bululs, carved wooden figures used to guard and augment the rice crop by the Ifugao (and their sub-tribe Kalanguya) and other peoples of the agriculturally well-developed Cordillera mountains. The sculptures are highly stylised representations of ancestors, and are thought to gain power from the presence of ancestral spirits. Rarely shown in such a large group display, both figurative sculptures and ritual boxes exemplify the talent of artists from the Ifugao, Bontoc and Kankanaey tribes in the northern Luzon region of the Philippines. 

3..”Objectifying China: Ming and Qing Dynasty Ceramics and their Stylistic Influences Abroad” 
Porcelain, with its fine white body, delicately painted decoration and associations with China’s culture and vast wealth, has long delighted and captivated people abroad—not only in the Western world, but also within Asia, for example in Korea, Southeast Asia and the Islamic world. And like all successful inventions, it inspired imitations in major ceramic production centres around the world, made using local materials and decorative techniques. These often took interesting forms: from brittle, tin-glazed earthenwares decorated with fantastic figures in the Netherlands, to elegantly incised greenwares from Thailand and Vietnam. 

This exhibition includes selected loan objects from the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and UMAG’s permanent collection, each considered from a number of different perspectives: as the products of skilled artisans; valuable trade commodities, useful objects of daily life and as important evidence of cultural interaction. 

Our tour will be led by Museum Director, Dr. Florian Knothe and Assistant Curator Ben Chiesa. 

Resource Persons 
Dr. Florian Knothe studies and teaches the history of decorative arts in the 17th and 18th centuries with particular focus on the social and historic importance of royal French manufacture. He has long been interested in the early modern fascination with Chinoiserie and the way royal workshops and smaller private enterprises helped to create and cater to this long-lasting fashion. 

Dr. Knothe worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art focusing on European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and on European and East Asian glass at The Corning Museum of Glass, before joining The University of Hong Kong, where he now serves as Director of the University Museum and Art Gallery. 

Ben Chiesa is a scholar of cross-cultural art with an interest in exchanges between China, Japan, and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. His current research focuses on the consumption of luxury objects in the treaty ports of China and Japan; particularly furniture and porcelain. Before joining UMAG in June 2017, Mr Chiesa worked as a curator of Asian export art at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, where he curated several major exhibitions, including “China Mania! The Global Passion for Porcelain”, “800–1900 and Auspicious Designs: Batik for Peranakan Altars”. 

Silver, as early currency, has been linked to global economy, maritime trade and international relations. Silver wares made by this rare metal triggered the technical and cultural exchange of handicrafts between countries and regions. Curated by the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and co-organized with the Home Affairs Bureau, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Guangdong Museum, this exhibition is divided into six sections, including ‘Global Maritime Trade’, ‘Making of Chinese Silver’, ‘Export Silver’, ‘Workshops in Treaty Ports’, ‘From Canton to Hong Kong’ and ‘East Meets West: Table Etiquette’. Taking the role of silver in global economic development as a starting point, it explores the origins of Chinese export silver, Hong Kong as a trading hub of export silver during the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and Hong Kong’s close relation with other silver manufacturing centers in China. Selected from the prominent collections of the Guangdong Museum, the HSBC Archives, Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong Museum of Art and a number of local collectors, this exhibition is organized in conjunction with the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the HKSAR. 

Resource Person 
Dr. Libby Chan is currently Assistant Director (Curatorial and Collections) at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum where she oversees the Museum’s curatorial and education departments, museum service, and responsible for exhibition and collections development. Before joining HKMM, she was Senior Curator (China) at the Asian Civilisations Museum, National Heritage Board of Singapore, with particular oversight of the Chinese collection and the China gallery revamp project. Previously, she was Research Associate and Curator at the Art Museum, Institute of Chinese Studies and lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She also served as J. S. Lee Memorial Curatorial Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and Curatorial Consultant at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas. Her research interests include underwater and land archaeology, cross-cultural maritime and land trade, Chinese decorative and export arts, Maritime Silk Roads topics, material cultural exchanges from Early China to contemporary times, as well as Hong Kong and Pearl River Delta history and heritage. She has authored numerous catalogues and articles on Chinese arts, shipwreck and archaeology, and museum studies.

Featuring works by more than forty artists from across Asia and beyond, The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+, the museum’s first dedicated exhibition on the subject, highlights the diverse explorations that have taken place within ink art since the 1960s. Through paintings, drawings, calligraphy, photographs, installations, and moving image works from the M+ collection, this exhibition explores how ink art is not merely a medium, but a crucial aesthetic in contemporary visual culture. 

Resource Person 
Lesley Ma is Curator of Ink Art at M+. Since joining M+ in 2013, she is involved in the planning, acquisition, and research of the M+ Collection and was involved in organising the 2015 Mobile M+: Live Art events. Ma previously worked as Project Director for artist Cai Guo-Qiang in New York, and was Curatorial Coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and science from Harvard University, a M.A. in museum studies from New York University, and a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism from the University of California, San Diego. She is a recipient of the Fifth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art. 

The Executive Committee is pleased to organise a private tour of the exhibition Painting Her Way: The Ink Art of Fang Zhaoling with the artist’s son Dr. David Fang Jinsheng. Fang Zhaoling was one of the most innovative Chinese painters to emerge in the last decades of the 20th century. After receiving both the Western-style education newly available to a modern woman, and the master-disciple training of a traditional Chinese painter, Fang developed a personal style that is original, distinctive and powerful. Her artistic achievements and contributions to modern Chinese culture reflect women’s changing roles in the twentieth century.

Beyond biography and artistic development, the exhibition also considers how Fang, as a diasporic artist, played a particularly significant role in the revival of ink painting after chaotic reforms in the mid-century. It studies the period of development between traditional ink art of the past and its new direction, showcasing Fang as a bridge between two generations.

Resource Person
Dr. David Fang Jinsheng is the youngest of eight children of the artist Fang Zhaoling. He is a private orthopaedic surgeon and a tenor singer. Dr Fang continues to contribute to the University of Hong Kong as Honorary Professor of the Medical Faculty and Honorary Clinical Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery. He is President of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation, Honorary President of Arts with the Disabled Hong Kong and a founder member of Opera Hong Kong.