Para Site is pleased to present A Lecture, A Performance, and A Panel, three public programmes taking place alongside The World is Our Home. A Poem on Abstraction, our exhibition featuring works by Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Tomie Ohtake, and Tang Chang. This exhibition is part of Para Site’s series of groundbreaking exhibitions employing a speculative approach to the art histories that need to be written around our regions, and gathers a small but consistent body of works by Motherwell, Ohtake, and Tang, three abstract painters active outside of East Asia whose experimental practices incorporated artistic traditions of ink painting and calligraphy.

The three public events provide a wide range of perspectives and a comprehensive historical analysis of abstract art. Prof. Kurt Chan Yuk Keung explores the relationship between abstraction and contemporaneity, while artist Ip Wai Lung presents an intervention in the space by performing a repetitive gymnastic exercise in response to Bruce Nauman’s video performance in the exhibition. The series of programmes ends with a panel discussion that gathers experts sharing their insight and research on the individual artists’ works and discussing the aesthetic and political paradigms conveyed under the backdrop of the Cold War.

Kurt Chan on Abstract Art and Others
Jan 30, 2016 (Sat)
3:00 – 4:30pm

Professor Kurt Chan Yuk Keung talks about the relationship between the abstract art movement and contemporaneity, about how abstraction has been represented in different contexts throughout the past century, and about how it has evolved and mutated in today’s global circumstances.

The session will be conducted in Cantonese.

An intervention by Ip Wai Lung
Feb 20, 2016 (Sat)
3:00pm

Responding to Bruce Nauman’s video performance Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, artist Ip Wai Lung works with the passage of time and the restriction of body movement while wearing a rubber outfit and performing repetitive gymnastic exercises.

Panel Discussion
Mar 3, 2016 (Thur)
7:00 – 9:00pm

The panel discusses the works of Robert Motherwell, Tomie Ohtake, and Tang Chang as well as the international and national circumstances in the US, Brazil, and Thailand during the Cold War, in which abstraction was a key cultural pawn with ideological implications. The position, identity, and dislocations of the three painters in the exhibition, their political allegiances, intellectual influences, levels of reception and inscription in art histories, as well as their formal choices will be discussed by curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero, M+ Ink Art curator Lesley Ma, and independent curator and art historian David Teh.

The session will be conducted in English.

Para Site is financially supported by the Springboard Grant under the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

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The content of this program does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.