Hong Kong, Madame Song, Icon of the Era, Pioneer of Modern China’s Art and Fashion in M+.. and More
Hong Kong
Madame Song, Icon of the Era, Pioneer of Modern China’s Art and Fashion in M+
Hong Kong M+ opened “Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China” on July 29. The exhibition will run through April next year.
Song Huai-Kuei (1937-2006), known as ‘Madame Song,’ introduced global and modern lifestyles and arts to China in the 1980s and 1990s, when the country was in isolation from the rest of the world during the Cold War and its aftermath. She was at the heart of exchanges between Chinese and foreign cultural figures, the fashion godmother who fostered Western-style fashion models and runways in China. She was at the center of the modernization of Chinese art and popular culture after the reform and opening up but was quickly forgotten after her death.
The exhibition chronicles her life and activities from the 1950s to the early 2000s and highlights her influence on China’s contemporary culture.
Japan_Hiroshima
Winner of the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize, Alfredo Jaar Holds Solo Show in Hiroshima MOCA
The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA) presents Alfredo Jaar’s (b. 1956) solo show through October 15. Jaar is the recipient of the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize. As Hiroshima was the site of the first atomic bombing in human history, the prize was established in 1989 to promote to a wider world the “Spirit of Hiroshima,” which seeks everlasting world peace through contemporary art. The prize announces its winner every three years.
Born in Chile, Jaar started his career in New York in the early 1980s, making a name for himself with his photography, light boxes, and public projects. Since his early practices, he has taken a journalistic approach based on thorough research on historical events, tragedies, and social inequalities around the world. His work is characterized by large-scale, multi-sensory installations that combine architecture, photography, video, and special effects.
His previous works were related to the Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1995 and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2013. The exhibition features a selection of his best-known works and new works related to Hiroshima.
China_Shanghai
Tosh Basco in Rockbund Museum, Shanghai: Paintings as Imprints of Body
Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum presents “No Sky,” a solo exhibition by Tosh Basco (b. 1988), through October 15. Basco is a Filipino-American artist widely known for performance works under the stage name ‘boychild.’ The exhibition presents for the first time works on paper, oil paintings, and photographs created by Basco over the past decade.
Basco’s drawings and paintings started from the limitations of video and photographs for documenting delicate and entangled movements. She draws by pressing her body against different surfaces and imprinting marks of her moving body wearing white paint, gold pigment, and theatrical blood powder.
The gallery is transformed into a blue stage, reminiscent of Basco’s studio and performance space. The paintings in the exhibition are tactile rather than visual. Basco invites the viewer to consider alternative sensory modes of representation and to question the primacy of the eye and the mind, of imitation and conception.
