As Time Folds: Ivy Ma Solo Exhibition
Artist: Ivy Ma, King Chu Curator: Evelyn Char Organiser: ACO Date: 4 June - 1 July, 2018 Opening Hours: Thursday to Sunday, 2-8pm (by appointment on Tuesday to Wednesday) Venue: 6/F, Foo Tak Building, 365 Hennessy Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
"As Time Folds", the sixth solo exhibition of Hong Kong artist Ivy MA King Chu will be presented by ACO in June 2018. It will be her first solo since "Last Year" (2015, Gallery Exit), and will present a major shift in her artistic practice. Ma’s previous works have crossed the boundaries between myriad mediums, such as painting, photography, video, installation and objects. Some of her important pieces in recent years, such as the image series Last Year, Numbers Standing Still, and Gazes all feature a similar strategy of ‘drawing intervention’, in which she extracted images from various sources, such as portraits of youngsters in the Umbrella Movement and the films of Ozu Yasujiro, and intervened the surfaces of the images through drawing. The meditative acts of both erasing and drawing are at once ways of creating a dialogue with the images and their contexts, and also her personal means of disrupting historical discourses. In the end, rigorous traces were left behind, and the texture and meaning of the images were permanently altered. In 2017, Ma set off on a journey in search of a new direction in her artistic practice. She broke out of previous frameworks, primarily by discarding pre-existing images. This time, her point of departure is experimentation with various materials, which led to a series of abstract works. The new works completed this year feature a range of materials, including charcoal, graphite, wooden boards, paper, stainless steel sheets, curtain, pins and gold foil. These materials serve as an entrance, through which the artist traces an inward path to the raw urge to create. On the other hand, the purely abstract form covertly points to references drawn from everyday life. In "As Time Folds", one can also hear the echoes of several art historical moments: the tradition of monochrome painting starting from Malevich’s Black Square, the industrial materials and seriality of Minimalism, the tactility and material presence of Post-minimalist abstraction, and the anti-rational use of geometric forms of Neo-Concretism. The exhibition will be held in Foo Tak Building, Wanchai. In the past 15 years, Foo Tak has come to be recognised as one of Hong Kong’s most important cultural hubs. Located in the city centre, this old western-style mansion was inaugurated as a provider of cultural spaces in 2003, and since then has offered precious art making, exhibiting, administrative, exchange and event spaces for a large number of artists and cultural organisations. Ma was in fact the first artist to establish a studio in Foo Tak - she made many early works there between 2003 to 2007. At that time she often roamed around Wanchai in search of suitable materials for her works, and she has somewhat returned to this mode of art making with this new show. By returning to Foo Tak after all these years, she quietly walks into a fold of time… ● Related programme "Before/after Foo Tak": Talk by Ivy Ma, May Fung and Longtin Shum Registration: https://goo.gl/N2tdb6 Date/time: 16 June 2018 (Sat), 5 - 7pm Venue: ACO, 14/F Foo Tak Building, 365 Hennessy Road, Wanchai "Intra-/Extra-material": Two-way chat by Ivy Ma and Kurt Chan
Registration: https://goo.gl/fXdwTa
Date/time: 30 June 2018 (Sat), 6 - 8pm Venue: 6/F Foo Tak Building, 365 Hennessy Road, Wanchai
About the Artist Ivy Ma (b. 1973) received her MA Degree of Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art, University of Leeds in UK, 2002, BA of Fine Arts (Painting) at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)/ The Art School, Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2001. She is a visual artist specialising in mixed media works and a lecturer at the Hong Kong Art School. Her works are frequently exhibited in Hong Kong and beyond, and in 2005 they were selected for the Hong Kong Art Biennial. She has previously taken part in various workshops and residency programmes in Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Åland Islands. She is a recipient of Hong Kong Contemporary Art Award - Young Artists Award, and Asian Cultural Council’s Lee Hysan Foundation Fellowship, which allowed her to stay in New York in 2008. Her works are collected by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. Website: ivyma.net About the Curator Evelyn Char (b. 1985) is a writer and art critic based in Hong Kong. She graduated from the University College London with a B.A. in History (2007) and M.A. in History of Art (2010). Currently operating mostly within the parameters of contemporary art and literature, her scope of work encompasses writing, editing, research and curating. She has previously taken part in a research project on experimental art in 1980s Hong Kong, and has jointly curated the projects ‘Mind the Gap’, ‘Talkover/Handover 2.0’ etc. She is the co-author of the book on Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial - Farmer’s Horizon, editor of Paratext, and a member of the group ‘Articipants’. facebook: charyinglam
About Foo Tak Building Foo Tak Building looks traditional and ordinary. It is a typical commercial/residential building having 14 floors with two units on each floor. Since 2003, there have been 18 units leased to art and cultural entities at a sponsored rate through ACO (Art & Culture Outreach); the rental is much lower than the market price. Just as important, ACO exercises low degree of management to leave more room for self-discipline being exercised by the sponsored art and culture entities. ACO has stipulated only a few rules and allowed all kinds of ideas / creations / experiments / plans / actions / organizations to seed, grow, practice and perform here. The 6/F project space has become an extension of 14/F ACO Bookstore, it operates as if a gallery, providing alternative opportunity to showcase artists’ works and to promote art collecting to public. *Foo Tak Building art and cultural entities are managed by ACO
For all press enquires, please contact Ms Law or Mr Lin on 2893 4808 or hello@aco.hk.