5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration

The 5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration—an annual exhibition series launched by the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC) spotlighting works in private collections—brought together art acquisitions by three Chinese collectors: Guan Yi, who has a penchant for Chinese avant-garde art of the 1980s; Lu Xun, founder of the Nanjing’s Sifang Art Museum; and Zheng Hao, founder of Wenzhou and Shanghai-based How Art Museum. Guest curator Ling Min also worked with art critic Fei Dawei and scholar of Chinese contemporary art Gao Minglu, who contributed archival materials from their personal collections to help contextualize the artworks on view. The exhibition showcased a diverse selection of paintings, video works, and sculptures by 32 international artists, alongside architectural models and artifacts, amply filling the two and a half floors of the HKAC’s Pao Galleries. 

Upon entering the gallery’s foyer, viewers are greeted with a cluster of six colorful neo-expressionist sculptures, produced between 1993–95 by Markus Lüpertz. The six works are characteristically rough and abstract in form; pieces such as Woman with Mirror and The Gardener feature distorted though recognizably human heads and bodies. In the same space was Joseph Beuys’s famous photographic self-portrait, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (We Are The Revolution) (1972), and a newsletter promoting his land-art project for documenta 7 in Kassel, titled 7,000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982). The latter involved piling 7,000 basalt markers outside the Museum Fridericianum; a stone was removed from the pile and placed next to each oak tree that was planted in the city. Together, the two exhibits at HKAC are testament to Beuys’s politically and environmentally engaged works, which underscore an individual’s capacity to generate change.

From then on, the exhibition took a sharp turn toward Chinese contemporary art, presented in roughly chronological order, starting with the ’85 New Wave movement in China—a creative burst that arose during a period of post-Cultural Revolution reform and a gradual opening-up to the West. Huang Yong Ping’s The Beard Was Easiest to Burn (1986)—a set of four black-and-white photocopies of Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait, burnt to varying degrees by Huang—speaks to an avant-garde irreverence and rejection of traditional high art recalling Dadaism. Wang Luyan and Gu Dexin—co-founders of the Tactile Sensation Group, which experimented with isolating the sense of touch by blocking vision and hearing—were represented in an adjoining room with their collaborative Tactile Art (1988), a collection of 15 silver gelatin prints that feature white Chinese texts and simple analytical diagrams against a black background. Influenced by Minimalist ideas of simplicity of form, this series employs a stripped-down aesthetic to engage with semiotics, attempting to convey physical sensations, such as the temperature at 39 degrees Celsius, purely through language and symbols.

Further into the gallery were pieces from the late ’90s to present, with works dynamically combining Western and Asian influences. Oscar Chan Yik Long’s large-scale Wong Gu, Zi Jau Geng, Coeng Cin Gwai (2016) portrays faces rendered in calligraphic strokes of black ink, Arranged in vertical lines, the faces recall pictorial Chinese characters. Architect Arata Isozaki’s Conference Center (2019) model reflects the amalgamation of his Japanese heritage and Western post-modern and mannerist influences, with its sleek curved design, and the use of wood to help the building blend in with the natural environs.