Chancery Lane gallery’s latest show, 31 Women Artists — Hong Kong, highlights how fast, furious, trending and pervasive the rise and vitality of their work and influence has been, writes Stephen Short.
Never judge a book by its cover,” goes the mantra in publishing and retail, because it’s art. Yet in art, the mantra never goes, “Don’t judge a gallery show by its title,” because they’re words, not pictures. All of which makes the 31 Women Artists – Hong Kong exhibition at Chancery Lane Gallery, a prescient challenge in our binary/non-binary world. 1) Because it’s not, as curator Caroline Ha Thuc insists, a show intended to be a feminist exhibition. 2) Because many women artists don’t want to be identified as women artists. 3) In an ideal world there’d be no need for all-women exhibitions at all. And therefore, 4) What does seem meaningful, and necessary in Hong Kong today, is “to acknowledge the practice of women Hong Kong artists and to show the extraordinary vitality of their works”, Ha Thuc writes of the show’s intent.
And depth. In a sign that absence counts as much as presence, it bespeaks volumes for the lot of Hong Kong’s contemporary female artists that so abundant – or visible – has their work become that, prior seeing Chancery Lane’s inventory of 31 artists, we wrote down a spontaneous list of those at work in the tall, small city, whose names trip off the tongue with the stature – and ease – of luxury-brand labels: Leelee Chan, Christy Chow, Fatina Kong, Firenze Lai, Kwong Wing-kwan, Ngai Wing-lam, Sarah Lai, Livy Leung, Angela Yuen, Sharmaine Kwan, Mak Ying-tung, Chloe Cheuk, Rosanna Li, Boule Choi, Ling Pui-sze, Shirley Tse, Angel Hui, Sarah Tse, Stephanie Teng, Tap Chan, VV Kwok … (for brevity’s sake let’s stop at 21), and by the time we’d reached 35, we paused to compare notes with Ha Thuc’s list. And … only three were duplicates – Ellen Pau, Hilarie Hon and Doris Wong Wai-yin. Wowzers!
In meta-contemporary 2022, we can identify more female Hong Kong artists at work in the city (never mind the many of the “Hong Kong female art diaspora” working in Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) than we can global luxury brand names. That highlights a concomitant swing in cultural contours, of course; the rise in the female voice – or, more accurately, greater promotion and platforms for such – of their contributions within art’s ecosystem, and the luxury industry’s attempt to appropriate from the art world to fulfil the increasingly exacting demands and expectations of its consumers. Now whether these purveyors of paint, plaster, plexi-glass and product identify as women artists or no, that volume of womanly artistic weight is no small triumph, and one to be shouted, boldly and proudly, from the city’s vertiginous rooftops.
Ha Thuc appropriated her title from a legendary show Peggy Guggenheim staged in Manhattan in 1943, at Art of This Century, her private museum/gallery at 30 West 57th Street. Guggenheim was opening the gallery and in need of some gilt-edged spin to generate buzz. Cue Marcel Duchamp. The French “artpresario” suggested the radical notion of a women-only show. Guggenheim was, in fact, the only woman on the curatorial board for the show, which included such luminaries as Duchamp, Max Ernst, André Breton, James Johnson Sweeney and James Thrall Soby.
And the women selected for the show – among them Frida Kahlo, Sophie Taeuber- Arp and Xenia Cage – were notable for their attachments to their more famous male counterparts. Despite their work being of just as high a standard, their aesthetic prowess had been largely womanwashed out of the white male art narrative. Of the artists approached, only one, Georgia O’Keeffe (already an art star), refused, saying she didn’t want to be identified as a “female painter”; and though Taeuber-Arp took part (she died five days after the show), she also disapproved of being labelled a “woman artist”.
Works were selected by a jury process (unheard of in New York at that time but common in Europe) and, naturally, there were conflicts of interest between Ernst, Breton and Guggenheim in soliciting both current and former lovers. (Max Ernst was married to Peggy Guggenheim only to dump her – and she, him – during the course of the show, for the younger, dynamic surrealist Dorothea Tanning, whose work Ernst had insisted Guggenheim include.) There was even a work by popular vaudeville stripper, writer and bohemianista, Gypsy Rose Lee, whose Self-Portrait, somewhat controversially, showed her fully clothed. By show’s end three weeks later, only three works had sold, all to Peggy Guggenheim, one of which was Tanning’s.
The press hated it. Time magazine’s art critic James Stern declined a preview invitation, saying that women were better making babies than painting canvases. He claimed never to have seen “a first-rate woman artist”. The New York Sun’s Henry McBride made an equally pompous and contentious observation. “Women surrealists are better than men because Surrealism is about 70 percent hysterics, 20 percent literature, 5 percent good painting and 5 percent just saying ‘boo’ to an innocent public. There are, as we all know, plenty of men among the New York neurotics, but we also know that there are still more women among them.”
André Pieyre de Mandiargues, husband of surrealist Bonna de Mandiargues, also in the show, was appalled. “They [women artists] are oppressed with a sort of malediction, or more precisely excommunication, that separates them from the vaster public, which deprives them of the warm approbation that they need as much as all other artists.”
And so fast forward to Hong Kong, where the vaster public should rush to share their warmest approbation for 31 seriously talented aesthetic purveyors at Chancery Lane, in a show mixing different generations working across diverse contexts, and as Ha Thuc puts it, “aims above all to celebrate the right to be truly oneself”.
Start with radiographer, video artist and filmmaker Ellen Pau, who represented Hong Kong at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. She Moves (1988), a three-minute, 12-second Video 8 single-channel work, devoid of “story” or “character”, which uses the movement of water droplets to express emotion, hinted at Pau’s prescience. She leveraged her curiosity for medicine and radiographic technology into moving images, and set up the collective art space Videotage in the 1980s. The only problem was finding enough – or any – such artists to fill it.
Pau’s landmark Hong Kong artwork, though not in this show, remains her Venice entry Recycling Cinema (1999). The film records vehicles speeding along Hong Kong’s Island Eastern Corridor expressway for 24 hours, projected on to a 150-degree curved screen, which automatically moved backwards and forwards on a 120-degree axis. Using disparate POV techniques – long-take surveillance, panning and close-up – Pau unexpectedly builds a hypnotic, haunting and even heartfelt rhythm, as cars go back and forth, and even sideways, in opposite directions. There’s no dialogue; only waves crashing, cars racing, street lights blinking and two lines from John Lennon’s “Love” (1970) at the film’s end: “Love is truth, truth love.” When Pau’s film showed in Venice, global aesthetic aficionados wept at its poignancy.
Wu Jiaru doffs her digital cap to Pau’s legacy. “I don’t personally know Ellen Pau very well, but she has a very special and original perspective as a Hong Kong artist, and her experiments on media art/moving images are hugely inspiring and impressive to someone like myself.” Wu creates digital and film/video work that watches like a precocious architectural and aesthetic roadmap of our technologically enhanced and very immediate future. In her own way, Wu is next-gen Pau. And if Pau’s film equates to Wong Kar-wai and Chris Doyle’s existential cinema minus slow-motion neon and languorous coffee-table lush, then Jiaru is the multidimensional and potential bio-and-neuro-narratives of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.
Despite her digital prowess, Wu also paints, prolifically. Her Two of Cups (2022), a term derived from tarot, emphasises union and connection, and sees the artist rethink some concepts related to human destiny during this difficult time. Detractors accuse Wu’s painting of being too similar to Francis Bacon’s; and herein lies an interesting contradiction of the art world. Artists can appropriate Andy Warhol’s Marilyn’s, Campbell’s soup cans, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa without so much as a by your leave, yet Wu’s riffing off a Baconesque colour palate and use of triptych appears to ruffle aesthetic feathers, as though Marilyn’s somehow public property and Bacon’s isn’t (Pop vs Anti-Pop). Perhaps it’s also the boldness or novelty that shocks. Wu is ahead of a curve; its Bacon but not as we know it, physicality with a feminine metasizzle.
The late Irene Chu’s guiding mantra, “the universe is my mind; my mind is the universe” (from Chinese philosopher Lu Jiuyan), echoes a philosophy Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama might espouse. One of the founders of ITAO (In Tao Art Association) and OAG (One Art Group), Chu lived with depression during the ’70s and produced a style of “piled ink” technique painting. Primordial and cosmic, she’s all about rebirth. She showed in London’s Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in the 1970s and was also a key link in the NIAM (New Ink Art Movement) chain, traditional Chinese painting’s next-gen “inksta”, leveraging the power of art to heal and reinvent the human spirit. Chu thought the life-energy of Nature and the Universe lay inside the reproductive organs of the female body, and that physical landscapes were its natural manifestation. Witness Infinity Landscape Flame 1 (1980), one-part abstract embodiment and four parts vagina, uterus, vulva and cosmos. Chu’s “infinite wombs” are Kusama’s “infinity rooms”. Maybe.
Movana Chen’s work Body Container – Travel Maps (kid) (2019-21) forms part of a series. Naturally its fashion-y, almost seasonal credentials give her work appeal and she’s been collected by Louis Vuitton. Since 2004 she’s been weaving people’s stories, nay, yarns, through KNITerature – a genre that involves the deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning and content by knitting books. Along the way, Chen shreds maps, dictionaries and atlases in a multi- disciplinary fusion of media, performance, installation and sculpture, which she uses to explore multiple identities, migration and family history. As well as making work you want to wear, sometimes we wish Chen’s mannequins were mobile and could walk.
Marine introvert Hilarie Hon “can’t stop painting the ocean”, having grown up by the sea and given the vast amount of time she’s spent gazing into the shimmering surface with her father, near the Tai Mei Tuk reservoir. In bodies of water, she finds “a source of calmness”. Hon depicts lush, saturant, kinetic and suspenseful subjects – landscape, rain, human figures (Waiting for the rain to stop II; Sunlight Murmur VIII; There is no rain IV), but in a tightly edited way, in which her visual narrative, like a screen shot, or a light being switched on, just “happens”. And much as you want to know the before and after, you can’t. Hence, the suspense, real or imagined, as instead you inexorably glow with the faux in her work. Her figures are vague, too. “Hands and eyes are the two things that can reveal feelings and emotions,” she insists, “even when human beings seem to be calm, or without facial expressions.” And her figures, are oddly indefinable. “The faces in my work are not derived from any particular source. I want it to look ambiguous, without a suggestion of gender, with a face that may feel familiar but which can’t be identified.”
Something with which Doris Wong Wai-yin concurs. The artist and now lecturer says the most interesting part of 31 is to “look at sexuality in the show and see how we all try our best to avoid the issue”. She has a bottom line, which is not to be self-victimised. She explains, “I always turn this into dark humour, and joke about my feeling that being a mother is like being an annoying animal. And being an animal, people will never see you and your work sexually. And that allows the possibility to get rid of the ‘female’ label.”
Invitations to many “feminist agenda” shows have left her feeling uncomfortable. “People expect to see some blood, breasts, naked women and phallic soft objects in such shows. Additionally, the female artists are portrayed as being nervous, overly sensitive paranoid freaks, especially when they appear as the subject of their works.” (Which sounds a lot like 1943.)
Wong’s work It’s not worth it (2022) appropriates images from a famous performance work by Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10 (1973), in which Abramovic spread out her hand and stabbed as quickly as possible between her fingers with a sharp knife in front of an audience, which included Joseph Beuys in a grey fedora on the front row. As she knicked herself continually, the white paper beneath her hand became “impressively stained” with her blood. Wong doesn’t go quite that far; instead, rather than inflicting self-pain, she chose a plastic retractable toy knife, of the type used for magic tricks and children’s parties. The blood Wong uses in the video is also fake blood for Halloween.
Sharon Lee’s The Crescent Void (2018-2019) seems less concerned with issues of identity and gender than consumed by new trends concerning the “scale” on which much Hong Kong art is conducted. “I think space limitation can become an ‘advantage’ for artists who proactively seek rooms for their creative work,” she observes. “More and more Hong Kong artists do not conform to conventional gallery spaces; there’s a trend of turning studios, stores and hotels into spaces for artistic intervention. Artists have been thinking out of the box to respond to the times and the changing environment as a result.”
Hon and Wu share similar sentiments about the most engaging work in the Chancery Lane show. “Annie Wan La-kuen’s complementary ceramic piece and video projection, The Road We Travelled (2015) left the biggest impression,” says Hon. “The way she transcended the medium of ceramics, the clay. Her video is also poetic and emotional, somehow,” she adds. Wu “favours” what she describes as Wan’s “clean and clever concept, which makes for “a neat and elegant piece”. Much like the show itself.
In closing, we ask Wu Jiaru about the boldness of her “Baconerie”. She doesn’t miss a beat. “I just love Bacon’s paintings,” she enthuses. “How I wish I could paint like him, but I’m not even close.” And then she lets us in on a colour scoop. “I hated the colour pink ever since I had memory. I didn’t have a single pink thing in my life until I got a Francis Bacon postcard on my 13th birthday. And, I fell in love with pink the moment I saw his painting, and after that, all kinds of colours.” Francis Bacon is my first art teacher, he is my hero. But now I don’t really think when I paint, I trust my training, culture, intuition and just go with the flow.” Which she is. On the strength of an Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong (ACC) fellowship, Wu will go to New York next year, 80 years after the namesake show in Manhattan.
In the latter part of her life, Peggy Guggenheim was asked about the legacy of staging the 1943 women artists show. Gutted still, that she’d ever lost Ernst to Tanning, “I should have had 30 women,” she caustically remarked, “Not 31.”