Art
Hong Kong opens top art museum amid fear of cultural ‘dark ages’ – Al Jazeera English
Hong Kong, China – Its cavernous reception hall affords a glimpse of the glittering view of Victoria Harbour. Its collection promises visitors a chance to see some of the world’s most significant works of art.
M+, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects behind the Tate Modern in London, is being billed as Asia’s first global visual art museum.
The museum, which has been 14 years in the making and is the crown jewel of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon cultural district, opens on Friday at a politically-fraught time.
Even as the Chinese territory bids for a place on the world’s culture map and shed a past dominated by mercantile interests, a dark cloud of censorship in the name of safeguarding national security looms on the horizon.
“It’s a major development, a long time in the making. M+ has local, regional and global significance,” said Paul Gladston, a specialist on contemporary Chinese art at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. That said, it’ll have to “come to terms with finding ways to negotiate these problems in ways that are familiar in the mainland. It’s a fact now.”
In March, when M+ executive director Suhanya Raffel maintained during a media tour that it would not shy away from controversial works, Henry Tang, the district chief of West Kowloon wasted no time in clarifying that all exhibits would be subject to the purview of the National Security Law, which was imposed by China in June last year.
The legislation criminalises activities Beijing deems to be subversion, terrorism, collusion with foreign forces and secession with punishments of up to life in prison, and critics say it has ‘decimated‘ Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms.
The law “limits what M+ can do, and gives the perception that it limits what M+ can do,” Gladston told Al Jazeera. “That’s problematic.”
During a private tour of the museum last week, Doryun Chong, Chief Curator of M+, was asked about how his job had changed compared with when he was first appointed in 2013.
“The ground has shifted,” he said, “Things have changed a lot. There’s a lot of expectation and scrutiny.”
The same year, the largest ever exhibition of late American artist Andy Warhol was on tour in Asia, and while his Mao silkscreens were banned from Beijing and Shanghai, they were exhibited in Hong Kong.
This year, just a few months before its grand opening, the museum released a statement saying a photograph by exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei showing Ai flipping the bird in Tiananmen Square in Beijing would not be included in any of the inaugural exhibitions.
The statement was widely seen as a climb down by the museum’s executive director in the face of withering attacks by pro-Beijing politicians. A description of the 1997 work, Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen, is on the museum’s website, but there is no picture.
That is not all.
Over the past few months, attacks fuelled by state-controlled media on a range of artistic endeavours – from documentary screenings to newspaper cartoons – have all but snuffed out the freedom of expression that was once prized in Hong Kong.
After being called out as “a troublemaker” in a pro-Beijing paper in August, outspoken songwriter Adrian Chow, who is well known for composing political Cantopop, quit his hard-won seat on the city’s art development council.
“I’m worried Hong Kong is being ushered into the dark ages,” said Chow, “it’s inevitable art development will be affected.”
‘Playing safe’
Just a few weeks ago Danish artist Jens Galschiøt was rallying against the eviction and possible destruction of the Pillar of Shame, which commemorates the bloodshed of the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
The sculpture has stood on a university campus since the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 following more than a century of British rule, but officials recently have ordered the pillar be removed. Reports on Friday said Galschiøt was seeking legal protection to be able to return to Hong Kong to collect the work.
Now all eyes are on what will remain missing from view at M+, with officials stressing that only a small fraction of the 6,000-piece collection can be displayed across the 17,000 square metre (183,000 square feet) exhibition space at any one time.
A founding gift of more than 1,500 artworks – including a few by Ai – from Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China and private collector, forms the core of M+’s collection. It seems likely some of the pieces from Sigg’s collection, forbidden by the security law, will remain in the seven-storey concrete-clad storage facility facing the museum.
Meanwhile, filmmakers in this erstwhile Hollywood of the East are facing ever more scrutiny. Under the pretext of COVID-related crowd-control rules, officials are being deployed as moles to infiltrate private screenings and shut them down.
At least three new documentaries on the 2019 pro-democracy movement have been banned from local release.
Film director Kiwi Chow circumvented the prohibition with his new film Revolution of Our Times by holding a premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as a last minute surprise addition to the programme and then selling the rights soon after to a European distributor. Anticipating troubles with Hong Kong authorities, Chow destroyed all raw footage.
However, for those artists whose works must circulate locally, self-censorship is becoming a strategy for self-preservation.
Newspaper cartoonist Justin Wong confessed that he is steering clear of risky content and hewing close to safer subjects, but acknowledges that even playing safe might not be enough.
“Of course, if people are hellbent to heap sin on me, they can make a mountain of any Mickey Mouse I draw,” Wong said.
Art
Unique art collection on display – CTV News Vancouver
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
Art
Niagara quilt expo to explore history of modern art form – Welland Tribune
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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