1-7-2014 The Works

Much of the technology of art has existed for thousands of years, in music, painting and sculpture. But over the past couple of hundred years, new technologies like photography, video, and computer graphics, have evolved that artists of the past could not even have dreamed of. "Distilling Senses", an exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre presents the works of a group of Asian artists who are exploring some of those new technologies.
It took ten months of negotiations for Belgian photographer Anton Kusters to be allowed into the world of the Japanese crime gangs known as the Yakuza. Like most groups involved in underworld activities, they tend not to want a lot of publicity. Kusters wants to highlight the two different worlds of the Yakuza: their often normal family existence and their violent criminal world. An exhibition at the AO Vertical art space shows the results of his efforts: through photographs and text.
On January 5th last year, Hong Kong lost a much-loved writer and teacher: Professor Leung Ping-kwan, better known to many of his readers as Yasi. Yasi was born in Guangdong but grew up in Hong Kong, and developed a strong affinity for the city. He began writing in the 1960s and soon became known not only for introducing Western literary art to the city, but also for celebrating the unique character of Hong Kong in its own colloquial language. Over the coming month, many of Yasi's friends, colleagues, and fans, are celebrating his life and work in a respective series of readings, exhibitions, and other events.
The past forms our identity, but for many of us, particularly given Hong Kong's speed of development, it's also in a constant process of slipping away. Like Yasi, both artist Vivian Ho and filmmaker Wong Kar-wai celebrate Hong Kong's unique identity as a city. Even though not all of her paintings are direct references to his works Vivian is very much affected by the mixture of nostalgia and emotion in the films of Wong Kar-wai. The title of Vivian's exhibition "We Could Start Over" at the Artify gallery is based on a frequently repeated line in Wong's Kar-wai's 1997 film "Happy Together".