Dec 10 2019

First Look: Hong Kong Museum of Art Reopening

by Lauren Long

The Hong Kong Museum of Art has reopened in a renovated complex covered with light-reflecting modular cladding as part of its new facade. All photos by Lauren Long for ArtAsiaPacific.

On the last day of November at the Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade, the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), closed since 2015 for renovations, opened once again to the public. The revamped museum boasts a new glass-walled gallery floor, as well as an annex block with nine-meter-high ceilings designed to accommodate large-scale installations, extending the total exhibition space from 7,000 to 10,000 square meters.

HKMoA inaugurated its refurbished site with a total of 11 displays (all 2019–20), ranging from Chinese antiques, classical paintings, and calligraphy to modern and contemporary art, mostly from the museum’s permanent collection. “Ordinary to Extraordinary: Stories of the Museum” narrated the institution’s five-decade-long history with a selection of its finest items representing the breadth of HKMoA’s holdings. A corresponding exhibition of 14 newly commissioned installations by local artists reinterpreted each of the highlights, instigating a trans-historical dialogue in “Classic Remix: The Hong Kong Viewpoint.”

Also on view were four presentations of recently donated single-owner collections, including a selection of the 450 works by Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong gifted by the late artist and his family to HKMoA. Exhibited at the museum’s new Wu Guanzhong Art Gallery, the show is the first in a two-part series planned by HKMoA on the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth.

The traveling Tate exhibition “A Sense of Place: From Turner to Hockney,” surveying British landscape paintings from the past three centuries, landed at HKMoA following earlier presentations in Beijing and Shanghai. As a response to the show, site-specific installations by Hong Kong artists reinterpreting the port city’s own landscape were commissioned for “The Breath of Landscape” and “Rediscovering Landscape,” respectively shown in the annex and outdoor areas.

“Hong Kong Experience • Hong Kong Experiment,” a new exhibition series centered on the unique aspects of the city’s art and culture, included paintings and sculptures in its first iteration, loosely chronologically ordered to cover the development of Hong Kong’s art scene, from modernism and the New Ink Movement to contemporary creative currents grappling with both globalization and localization.

LUI SHOU-KWAN’s ink-on-paper Zen painting (1970), included in the museum’s exhibition “Ordinary to Extraordinary: Stories of the Museum,” is considered by HKMoA as one of its most treasured pieces. A pioneering figure of Hong Kong’s New Ink Movement, Liu incorporated abstract elements of Western art with traditional Chinese ink painting.

On the new top level, exhibited in “Classic Remix: The Hong Kong Viewpoint,” Hong Kong artist VICTOR WONG’s moving-image and mixed-media installation Since the Beginning (2019) reinterpreted Lui Shou-Kwan’s Zen painting (1970).

Installation view of “From Dung Basket to Dining Cart: 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Wu Guanzhong,” exhibited within the newly established Wu Guanzhong Art Gallery space.

WU GUANZHONG’s ink-and-color-on-paper City Night (1997), inspired by the dense and vibrant cityscape of Hong Kong.

RAYMOND FUNG WING-KEE’s A dialogue with Wu Guanzhong (2019) on a glass window overlooking the Victoria Harbour. Featuring old tiles resembling the outline of birds, the mixed-media installation responds to Wu Guanzhong’s painting of Two Swallows (1981) in his hometown of Jiangnan, a work displayed elsewhere in the museum.

Paintings by SIMON LING, GILLIAN CARNEGIE, GEORGE SHAW, and PETER MINE in Tate’s traveling survey of British landscapes, “A Sense of Place from Turner to Hockney.” Close to half of the exhibits at this iteration were specifically selected for Hong Kong.

In response to the Tate show, local artist SIMON WAN CHI CHUNG presented photographs and a video installation exploring landscapes in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Wan’s projects allude to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, both of whom are included in “A Sense of Place.”

Local artist STEPHEN WONG CHUN HEI invited residents of all 18 districts of Hong Kong to create sketches of the sky, which he combined in Capture the sky (2019), installed below the skylights of the new annex block in “The Breath of Landscape.” The work consists of around 2,000 pieces of acrylic-painted mirrors.

Architect KEVIN SIU’s steel and concrete sculpture Immersion (2019), part of the outdoor exhibition “Rediscovering Landscape.” The curves resemble mountains depicted in traditional ink landscape paintings.

A wooden sculpture by CHEUNG YEE is in front of paintings by ROSAMOND BROWN and LUI SHOU-KWAN at “Hong Kong Experience • Hong Kong Experiment.”

JAFFA LAM’s wood and carpet sculpture in front of photographs by SO HING-KEUNG, and paintings by YEUNG TONG-LUNG and VICTOR LIU CHUN-KWONG.