blog GAMIL: an insider look at design » hong kong

P.O.D. October 16, 2007

beth — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:30:03 +0000

Pokadot stairwell. A celebration of Halloween near the Star Ferry, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.

Yan Fei Solo Exhibition poster

beth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:39:34 +0000

Poster advertising the Yan Fei Exhibit at the Baoqu Tang Gallery.

Hong Kong Art – it’s all from the mainland

beth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:31:43 +0000

Although I have now returned to the great state of North Carolina, I thought it important to throw in a coupla more blog summations of trip. We had a great time going to galleries in Hong Kong and saw some beautiful work from a variety of contemporary Chinese artists. The shocking thing to me was that basically all of the art we saw was from mainland china, and when we asked gallery owners about it, we repeatedly heard that the artistic momentum and inspiration is, indeed, all coming from the mainland. I guess Hong Kong is too busy being the financial center (?). We saw Mao represented everywhere, with his particular representation handled with respect and care in almost all cases. There is irony and wit threading through a lot of what we saw, but political rebellion was handled with subtlety and humor if at all.

So here are some of the galleries and artists that were particularly inspiring:

Wellington Gallery on Wyndham St
Tiny little gallery that only fit about 10 pieces, but all of them worth seeing. The gallery owner was incredibly friendly and told us a lot about the artists, and also showed us catalogs of other works by those artists. Two of our very favorite artists of the whole tour we saw at this gallery:
Liu Chun Hai, born 1966 in Harbin China, has a visually arresting contemporary style chock full of political commentary, or maybe he just likes a girl in uniform. Anyway, these 2 paintings we saw in the window are what made us go inside.

Also at the Wellington Gallery, was Liu Baomin. He is also from mainland China, born in 1968. I cannot find a website for him, and he is not listed on Wellington’s website, but I did find another Hong Kong gallery that shows much of his work online: Gallery on Old Bailey. I like the work we saw at Wellington better than the series represented on this site. The work we saw is quite large – maybe 60″ wide – and has a technique which looks like you are looking through a rainy window to the image. The colors are vivid, the greens are super juicy. It was hanging in the window which is the pic I snapped. Keep in mind that my pic has a lot of reflections which are not in the actual artwork, but all of the drippiness IS in the artwork.

The next gallery we went to was the Connoisser Art Gallery, 1 Hollywood Road. The artist that drew us into this gallery was Zhang da Zhong, an artist from Guangzhou, born in 1953. The pieces were portraits of young women in Red Guard uniforms (hmmmm, a recurring theme…). His technique has a classical art quality to it, but his subject matter conflicts with that style for a truly contemporary result.

Plum Blossoms Gallery, 1 Hollywood Rd, was a fun find, as they had a group show of contemporary artists showing at the time we were there. Jiang Shuo is a chinese female sculptor, turning red guards into cute little cartoons. Her art has been exhibited around the world and she now lives in Austria.

My favorite art at this gallery was by the Luo Brothers, 3 brothers out of Beijing. Their art is the embodiment of kitsch, and I love me some Chinese kitsch! Little fat babies are in every piece, and there’s usually at least one major logo of today mixed in. It’s all shiny happy colors and there’s often a shinier happier lacquer encasing the whole thing. I love it.

The Joyce Gallery was another that was a pleasure to visit. Apparently, their contemporary gallery opened a few days before we got there, so there is nothing on the web as of yet. They also have an antiques gallery, which is impressive. That webiste may be expanded to include the contemporary gallery, so I will link it here. Anyway, the folks we talked to were extremely knowledgeable about the artists and very willing to show us the work and tell us about it. The artist that immediately caught my eye upon walking in was Xiong Yu, and that was probably because the artwork had giant eyes. Found some pix at Artnet. Check it out to see more from this artist.

We had to venture into the Opera Gallery, which is aptly named as it lives up to it’s scary intimidating place for the most serious of art benefactors. But I couldn’t pass it up, because they had a Warhol exhibit. They had oodles of the Warhol Mao screenprints. After seeing Mao all over the place, I had to go back to the pop art version I was familiar with. They had much more high-end art worthy of a free look, like Xingtao Jiao’s Mao bust, which is a sculpture that looks like a Mao bust wrapped in kraft paper. What’s amazing is that this wrapped blob was totally recognizable as Mao! Anyway, the only pics I can find is on the Opera Gallery site. Rather than me putting them here, I think you should go there to check it out. Just look through the Asian Art section.

The last place I want to mention is the Baoqu Tang Gallery at the InterContinental Hong Kong in Tsim Sha Tsui. We went to this gallery because a poster caught my eye (see the post above). After trekking over to see the Yan Fei exhibit, we got there and realized the exhibit was over. We did get to see one piece that was still there, as well as a catalog of lot of his work. His painting style is amazing. It is unfathomably detailed and realistic, with every hair and every pearl rendered flawlessly. The color scheme is a bit dark, with a grayish cast to it, and the people themselves (especially the girls) look a little odd, with eyes that are too big and necks too long. Add to that the fact that the girls are just staring out at you without any expression whatsoever, and the effect “it’s real but it can’t be real” is eery and magnetic all at the same time.

Another piece of art with a sense of uncomfortable realism is a piece called “Woman with Bag” by Ba Te. She is more human than art normally allows a human to be…

Beautiful Chinese Dolls

beth — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:39:33 +0000

This picture is from the “Ladies Market” in Mong Kok, Hong Kong.

Sneaker Street

beth — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:45:15 +0000

Today Aly and I struck out to Mong Kok to go to Fa Yuen St, otherwise known as “Sneaker Street,” to see what kind of inspiration we could get from the hottest sneaks in Hong Kong. Well, it took us a while to actually get to the sneakers, because we had to walk through the “Ladies Market” to get there, which has everything you never knew you wanted. After lightening our pockets and loading ourselves down with new merchandise, we finally arrived at our destination…an entire street with store after store of sneakers. We saw what I am assuming is the latest newest design from every athletic shoe brand you can name. Everybody’s got limited edition artist series, with some especially memorable ones from Vans and Puma. Some memorable style also came from casual wear with Birkenstock’s latest design. And we were magnetically drawn to the Hong Kong shoe brand Acupuncture, which uses an icon very similar to the anarchy A (kind of a funny icon to go with the name “Acupuncture”). Acupuncture is a cross between Japanese style and skate style. They’ve also got some lifestyle crossover styles with Japanese cherry blossom design for the girls and hip-casual wingtip-ish kicks for the guys.

Incidentally, after returning from Sneaker Street, I searched the web for more info and found a bunch of sneaker-specific blogs. Here are some of the ones I spent time on:
Sneaker Blogger
Hypebeast
Sneaker Freaker

Here are some pics. Pardon the quality. I was shooting thru store windows, and sometimes the shoes were wrapped in plastic as well…The first is a shot of some of the Acupuncture shoes.The last 2 are supposedly the latest Vans. I couldnt find any info on these styles, but I’m sure all the sneaker freaks will know the scoop.

The land of neon

beth — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:39:25 +0000

It’s amazing how much graphic design and signage in the form of neon is seen in Hong Kong. Makes some of the more…subtle…signage get overlooked. Here’s an homage to a few of those special signs.

No Spitting

beth — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:29:39 +0000

yes, spitting is apparently an issue in Hong Kong. This sign is located at the entrance to the Zoological Gardens.

P.O.D. means Picture of the Day

beth — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:07:19 +0000

Each banner comes from a larger picture. Supposedly, we will have an interesting picture to use each day. That is our intent, but we’ll see if life is really that visually interesting for the Gamil folks… Anyway, we will have apost each day as well which shows the whole Picture of the Day. That way, it will be archivable and able to see a large batch of old ones at a time…

So here they are so far:

Today, October 10, is lamps hanging in the designer dining lounge at Dragon-I on Wyndham Street, Hong Kong

October 9 picture is bird cages from the Bird Garden in MongKok, Hong Kong

October 8 picture is the designer Alain Mikli, eyeglasses shop on Hollywood Road, Hong Kong

Designing a day of meandering

beth — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 05:35:21 +0000

We were tired today, and tired of all of the smells and noise of Tsim Sha Tsui, so we decided to spend the day leisurely walking around in the Central district of Hong Kong. We went to a buncha art galleries, which I will write more about later, after I can backtrack and figure out what was where and the names of the galleries. Wyndham Steet, which eventually turns into Hollywood Road, is a great little area of galleries, upscale shops and shishi little eating and drinking spots. My favorite trendy stop in the area is a beautifully designed space called Dragon-I, apparently a pretty happenin night club (way too happenin for the tourist geek-wear complete with over-sized camera and desert-sized water bottle I was sportin at the time), but also a good spot to stop in the afternoon for tea and dimsum (or, if it’s particularly hot, I recommend the Pina Colada). There was hardly anyone there in the afternoon when we arrived, so I managed to get a few pix in b4 they told me not to take pictures. They have outdoor and indoor lounge seating, another loungey bar area, and even the bathrooms are so swanky you could spend a while in there, just enjoying the ambience. There are bird cages everywhere outside, and there’s even a big 10ish foot birdcage, which I will not show you pix of so you can enjoy it fully when you go.

After we had our fill of the 2-for-1 Happy Hour specials (a delightfully consistent daily celebration in Hong Kong), we trekked up to the Zoological and Botanical Gardens. In the congestion of the city, Hong Kong has some fairly nice and relaxing green areas. And people really take advantage of it…families, folks reading on benches and one or two people around every turn doing tai-chi. Also, it seems to be fairly common that they have semi-exotic animals in cages in the parks. In this one, there were lots of different birds and monkeys, and there was one really fat jaguar sleeping in a cage way too small for an animal built to run.

One of the weird things we saw was their approach to erosion control…just cement over everything…

We saw the sun go down from the top vista of the park. From that direction, the I.M. Pei Bank of China building steals the show.

We then trekked back down to Wyndham Street for another cocktail. A truly great spot to go for a drink and be in the thick of it while being outside of it at the same time is the rooftop terrace at The Fringe Club. It is only 3 floors up, so the skyscrapers surround you and make you feel like you are actually in a room with walls. It is also, different from the other bars of the area, which is to say it is completely unpretentious, complete with astro-turf and plastic chairs.

We ended the night in the Lan Kwai Fok district, which is an expat frat boy haven/heaven. 3 full streets where cars basically dont drive, and it’s all lined with bars open to the streets. We people-watched for a while, periodically commenting on how all those girls could possibly walk down the steep hill with 4-inch heels on. It was funny, because it seemed like the largest singles bar in the world…we saw the same people over and over again, as they just did laps around the streets. I think this sign says it all about the area. Hopefully you can read the subtext…I wont right it here cause who knows what kind of ads we’d end up with…

10,000 everything (except Buddhas)

beth — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:18 +0000

We have a long list of things we’d like to see in Hong Kong this trip, and one thing on the list was the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. It’s in the New Territories (the burbs), which is a direction not really on our path for the rest of the trip, so we multi-tasked and added other destinations that were on the way.
We had no idea how appropriate the concept of 10,000 would be for this excursion. First, it was another day of seemingly 10,000 degree sweltering, nasty humid heat… Our first stop was Mong Kok, which, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, has the highest population density in the world. High heat and high numbers of humanity do not go well together…

We were headed to the flower market and the bird market. It took us a while to get there since we started by going in the wrong direction off the MTR and ended up in a bit of an industrial district. Factories and warehouses right in the middle of all of the high-rise apartments. Noise and pollution being the only things we could really focus on. So, it was quite a contrast when we finally worked our way back around and found the flower market. The street smelled and looked beautiful. It was surreal seeing the sheer quantity of orchids of all sizes and colors. And it was almost a relief to see that they were asking a decent amount of money for the Orchids, although still cheap by our florist standards. I think the most expensive we saw was a pot of about 40 orchids for a cost of around $265 US.

Our next stop was the bird market (or bird garden as it is called here), which is right beside the flower market. Once again, a completely surreal experience of quantity. There were all sorts of song birds and parrot/cockateal birds caged up and ready to be taken as a most convenient pet for the congested living quarters of Hong Kong. Overall, the bird market was fascinating but also a bit depressing for me, seeing all those birds in tiny little cages in the heat. The people were pretty fascinating too. The competition for getting the best bird seemed pretty high. Everyone was eyeing what everyone else bought as they passed each other. We even saw a so-ugly-it’s-cute baby bird.

Our last stop of the day was the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. We took a train a few stops out into the suburbs (which was populated more sparsely…more like Manhattan…) We trekked the short distance from the station to the monastery, looked up at all of the steps with overheated intimidation, and then saw the escalators (whew!). Here’s a picture of the layout…in the picture, the lower left is where we started, with the escalators leading up about halfway. Our goal was to get to the tower in the far upper right of the photo.

So, based on the title of this blog entry, I’m guessing you knoiw something went awry with our plans. The monastery was very interesting. As you make your way up (travelling by actual stairs at this point rather than the blessed escalators), different levels have different pagodas, and lots of graves (?) where people come to pay homage to their relatives. There is paper money burning on each level in big furnaces. So ashes and heat add to the quietness of the monastery. Well, we got to the highest point in the picture that still shows the white buildings, but apparently, the path from that highest point to the even higher final pagoda (the one with the 10,000 Buddhas) was closed due to renovation. There were no signs (not in English anyway) letting us know this small detail. We slowly marched our grumpy hot selves back down the mountain and got to the central pagoda where a lady was selling water. I asked her how much the water was. She didn’t speak English and didn’t understand my question. Instead, she handed me a small laminated piece of paper that said “Sorry. This is not the way to the 10,000 Buddhas. Go back down to main entrance and walk around construction to find path up.” And that was the end of that excursion.