Current
MONUMENTS
21 June - 9 August 2025
Hanart TZ Gallery

 

MONUMENTS

Opening Reception: 28 June 2025 (Saturday), 2pm to 6 pm

Preview: 21 June to 27 June 2025

Exhibition Period: 21 June to 26 July 2025

Hanart TZ Gallery
2/F Mai On Ind. Bldg., 17-21 Kung Yip St., Kwai Chung, Hong Kong


Hanart TZ Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the new exhibition “MONUMENTS” on Saturday, June 28, 2025, from 2pm to 6pm. This special group show features monumental works by artists from different generations and with conceptually diverse practices: YEH Shih-Chiang 葉世強 (1926-2012), LEUNG Kui Ting 梁巨廷 (b. 1945), HU Xiancheng 胡 項 城 (b. 1950), YANG Jiechang 楊 詰 蒼 (b.1956), LU Dadong 魯大東 (b. 1973), Howie TSUI 徐浩恩 (b. 1978), CHOW Chun Fai 周俊輝 (b. 1980) and the art collective BOLOHO 菠蘿 核 (est. 2019).

The three years of COVID-19 redefined the cycle of an era, separated nation-states, and divided regions. The global carnival of neoliberalism and the acceleration of IT technology have caused a pivotal turn towards an unknown historical destiny. The new art that emerged since the 1990s is now defined as belonging to a past era. However, the shape of the present is constantly being defined, just as its mission and memories are constantly being reshaped. The monument is a marker of space and time. This exhibition includes both new works and selections from the past. “MONUMENTS” is not predicated on volume, but rather on the idea that the macroscopic view is achieved by critical icons that define the times and open up the present.

Exhibition runs till 26 July 2025.

(Translation by Valerie C. Doran)


Legendary Taiwanese painter YEH Shih-Chiang (1926-2012) experienced the turmoils of war and the turbulent vicissitudes of the times, but through it all he travelled his own uncompromising creative path. YEH’s response to the great civilizational changes he witnessed was to create paintings that embodied a spiritual aesthetic of purity and transcendence. Through his art YEH Shih-Chiang connects to the cosmic space-time of the traditional literati. In the oil painting The Yeh Shih-Chiang Art Museum (2006) and the ink painting Misty White Building (2002), architectural structures are turned into civilisational symbols of a dignified human world that can consort in harmony with heaven and earth.

葉世強(1926-2012)   《葉世強美術館》   2006    油彩 布本    217 x 425 cm
YEH Shih-Chiang (1926-2012)   The Yeh Shih-Chiang Museum
2006    Oil on canvas  217 x 425 cm

 

LEUNG Kui Ting (b. 1945)’s most important innovation lies in transforming the genes of traditional landscape painting through the visual language of the digital age. The ubiquitous screens of the Global Positioning System have quietly and relentlessly transformed human visual imagination. In his landscapes LEUNG Kui Ting creates a new kind of spatial aesthetics by appropriating the geometrical coordination lines of the digital screen and using them to update the brushwork language for mountains and rocks: in this way inserting them within the structural space of Chinese traditional landscape art. Leung’s twelve-panel painting Roaming Vision (2018) employs his innovative style to construct a grand panoramic vista with contemporary imagination.

梁巨廷(b. 1945) 《遊觀》   2018   水墨 設色 紙本   231 x 630 cm
LEUNG Kui Ting (b. 1945)   Roaming Vision
2018    Ink and colour on paper    231 x 630 cm

 

HU Xiangcheng (b. 1950), a pioneering contemporary artist in China, has dedicated his career to pushing the boundaries of both art and culture. He was among the first mainland painters to settle in Tibet to teach art after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, he travelled to Japan to study the Mingei folk art movement, and in the early 1990s moved to Africa where he lived and worked collaboratively with African folk artists for several years. Upon his return to China in mid 1990s, he shifted his focus to the revival of rural culture and folk architecture in Jiangnan canal villages, and this became a decade-long commitment. As an artist, HU never ceases to expand the scope of his creative and cultural investigations. He is known for his monumental paintings and installations that reflect on contemporary challenges for art posed by new technologies, global ecology, ideological cold war, and the disintegration of historical cultures.

胡項城(b. 1950) 《來自細胞的記憶重疊》   2025  綜合材料 木板  244 x 122 cm
HU Xiancheng ( (b. 1950)     Palimpsest of Memories Coded in Cells
2025    Mixed media on plywood   244 x 122 cm

 

The art of YANG Jiechang (b. 1956) explores issues of cultural identity and regional disparities. Aesthetically grounded in the calligraphy and ink painting tradition, Yang takes the strength of local cultural systems as his core focus. YANG’s seven-metre-long painting Dark Horizon (2008) shows a number of speech-bubbles emerging from a world of dark clouds, the only phrase they contain is “Oh My God”. As Yang explains: “This is the mantra of the 21st century… As I watched the 9/11 incident unfolding on TV, I saw buildings collapsing and a young man with a soiled face rushing out of the ash wave shouting ‘Oh My God’; in that moment, I felt like my head opening up to an abyss.”

楊詰蒼(b. 1956) 《Dark Horizon》   2008    水墨 設色 絹本    144 x 669 cm
YANG Jiechang ( (b. 1956)      Dark Horizon
2008   Ink and mineral colour on silk mounted on canvas    144 x 669 cm

 

LU Dadong (b. 1973) is fascinated by ancient Taoist calligraphy, which has become a main resources for his art. The Taoist’s worship of words is reflected in the diverse forms of magic writing used in rituals, and is core in the history of calligraphy. Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi (4th CE), revered as Sages of calligraphy, were Taoist inspired, and their calligraphy influenced the main Chinese writing styles for nearly two millennia. Lu’s work Purification Spell (2019) fuses the structural patterns of ancient seal script for his innovative Taoist mantra.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic occurred during an extraordinary era signaling that the world order had now entered into a new era. LU Dadong used the phraseology of the public discourses that emerged during the pandemic to create original hand-carved seals, which serve as a witness to a special moment of global history. As a personal testament to the times, it is named Modest Monuments (2020-2024).

魯大東(b. 1973)  微碑系列《萬國新冠拜冕旒》   2020-2024    原礦清水泥    13.5 x 11 x 11 cm
LU Dadong (b. 1973)    Modest Monuments: All Nations are Newly Crowned
2020-2024    Yixing ceramic    13.5 x 11 x 11 cm

 

Howie TSUI (b. 1978) often uses the perspective of an “outsider” to expose social and cultural anxieties. Through imagery derived from the cultural matrix of the martial arts world, he expresses the reality of a complex psychological state filled with superstition, trauma, surveillance, and alienation. TSUI’s recent work Jumbo (2024) blends hand-painted details with computer-generated imageries. Hong Kong’s “Jumbo Floating Restaurant” is an iconic establishment, but this famous local landmark came to an absurd end, and became a symbolic event for the post-Covid era. TSUI uses this visual narrative as a medium to open up an intricate maze that allows glimpses into the order and chaos of Hong Kong culture.

徐浩恩(b.1978)《珍寶》Edn. 2/5    2024    收藏級微噴 裱Dibond鋁板    111.8 x 243.8 cm
Howie TSUI (b. 1978)     Jumbo (Large)《珍寶》Edn. 2/5 
2024     Archival print mounted on Dibond    111.8 x 243.8 cm

 

Film City: Remembering Ye Si (2013) is a collaboration between artist CHOW Chun Fai (b.1980) and the late Hong Kong poet Ye Si (1949-2013). It is a project of mutual interpretation between poetry and painting. Ye Si’s poetry is marked by images from the language of everyday life, and Chow Chun Fai responds with paintings incorporating metaphorical movie titles and classic lines of dialogue. In the years since Ye Si passed away this set of paintings has become a monument memorializing Ye Si’s era of Hong Kong culture.

周俊輝(b.1980)  《電影城市:念也斯》  2013    磁漆 布本    300 x 800 cm
CHOW Chun Fai (b. 1980)     City of Films – in memory of Ye Si
2013    Enamel paint on canvas    300 x 800 cm

 

BOLOHO (established 2019) is a six-member art group from Guangzhou. Their monumental series YES SIR! (2022-2024) was painted collectively by the members, combining individual perceptions to interpret their collective memory as a constantly flipping “topography”, interweaving fiction with reality. YES SIR! narrates their collective imagination of the world at large during their adolescence in Guangzhou. A very important resource for seeing the global world at that time was TV programs broadcast from Hong Kong. Although YES SIR! reflects an era of Guangzhou’s growth, it is also a memory of a period marked by mutual imagination and anticipation between the worlds of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. It is a monument of the era created by BOLOHO for Hong Kong.

菠蘿核(成立於 2019)《YES SIR! 》【局部】  2022-2023   集體繪,中性筆 紙本    77.5 x 1290 cm
BOLOHO (est. 2019)    YES SIR!     2022-2023
Collective painting    Mineral pigment, colour gel pen on paper    77.5 x 1290 cm

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