Hanart TZ Shows Lam Tung-pang's Whimsical Landscapes

Written by Yang Anxiong Monday, 10 October 2011 22:37

Hong Kong.- Hanart TZ is pleased to present "Lam Tung-pang: Long View Under Scrutiny" on view at the gallery from October 14th through November 30th. What might be the subject of Long View Under Scrutiny? For Hong Kong-based artist Lam Tung-pang, it is a whimsical landscape crossing over time and proximity, filled with found images and objects on plywood with Lam’s own painting. His work is poetic, humorous, allegorical, and full of surprises. Developed as an extension of the Diorama series presented by Hanart TZ Gallery in 2010, "Long View  Under Scrutiny", exhibits new work that continues Lam’s contemplation of self and environment.

By investigating an acquired perception of memory in comparison to reality, Lam placed one of his most personal and iconic works, "Fold" (2006; London), created while he sojourned in London five years ago, alongside with his most recent creations, including "The Youngest and the Oldest" (2011, Hong Kong), a work on five-panel plywood completed in his Fo Tan Studio. Such juxtaposition depicts an arch of the artist’s versatility and imagination, to manifest within and beyond himself to the society and its cultural context. The most intriguing aspect is to witness how Lam illustrated this sense of identity through a conscious turn of mind and direction. "The Youngest and the Oldest" represents a harmonic disjunction in form and substance that mapped his anxiety of the present. Lam’s transformed from a conceptual artist to a cultural translator, which visualizes today’s Hong Kong in a post-1997 and pre-2047 era. 2011 marks the ten years anniversary of Lam’s professional artist career. He left for London to pursue a master’s degree in 2003. When he returned to Hong Kong in 2007 and set up a temporary studio in Beijing upon his return, it had been exactly ten years since the handover. In the vacuum of its cultural identity between two eras, Hong Kong inevitably finds itself at both the birth and the loss of its own voice. This shifting is evident in  Long View Under Scrutiny.


For Lam, the four years he spent in London, along with a short-lived Beijing studio, enticed him to confront the cultural dislocation and the resulting angst. The chronicle layout provides an insight to Lam’s consciousness, as well as what invoked and redirected his later work on the choice of cultural context and use of object, form, and material.

Hanart TZ Gallery was founded in 1983 and specializes in promoting and exhibiting contemporary Chinese art and is a leader in its field. Hanart TZ Gallery has exhibited many internationally recognised Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong artists and has organised significant exhibitions of the Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming, at the Singapore Art Museum in 1986 and Place Vendome in Paris in 1997; China’s New Art Post-1989, a major retrospective of the Mainland Chinese avant-garde artists was shown during the 1993 Hong Kong Arts Festival and then toured the USA between 1995 to 1997; and A Strange Heaven, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese photographic art from Mainland China, Taiwan and Kong Kong in Prague in 2003. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.hanart.com/

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