Fine art of selling
THERE'S going to be more art in Hong Kong next week than there's been at any time in the past year when Art Asia, one of the world's newest and most successful art fairs, comes to town.
Leading galleries from around the world will be displaying more than US$400 million (HK$3.1 billion) worth of some of the greatest artworks available today at the Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre.
Among the 140 exhibitors are Hong Kong's Schoeni Art Gallery, Mandarin Fine Arts and Hortsman Godfrey Ltd. Schoeni will be promoting contemporary Asian artists such as Wang Yi Dong, one of China's most important artists in oil, avant-garde artist Xia Xing and Liu Da Hong, who has produced just one seven-panel painting in the last year, depicting the territory's 1997 handover to China.
The Shanghai-born artist Irene Chou, whose work has been seen by critics as Abstract Expressionism in ink, is being presented by Hortsman Godfrey.
Mandarin Oriental Fine Arts will be showing works by Henry Moore, David Hockney and Robert Motherwell, three of this century's best artists.
For the rest of this month at the gallery itself, Mandarin Oriental Fine Arts will be exhibiting a variety of works from the Ecole de Rouen, a group of painters working between 1880 and 1950 who earned their name for the passion with which they all painted their city, Rouen.
This school, including artists Joseph Delattre, Albert Legrip and Francois Depeaux, like the Impressionists, is characterised by the use of light and colour in the paintings. Although this group has been known for almost a century, it is only in the last20 years that it has started to earn an international reputation. ASIA Horizons Art Boutique in Lan Kwai Fong which specialises in the country's indigenous art is currently exhibiting ''The Beauty of the Vietnamese Woman'', a collection of nudes and portraits by modern Vietnamese artists (until the end of the month).
Vietnamese painting, as we know it, began primarily with the arrival of the French in the late 19th century and the foundation of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi in 1925 by the French painter Victor Tardieu. Today Vietnamese art fuses French influence with distinctly local subjects and themes.
This exhibition combines the French tradition of life drawing with the long-held reverence for the beauty of the Vietnamese woman. The paintings reveal a highly aesthetic spirit that has only recently been allowed to flower again.
ONE of Australia's top selling artists abroad, Pro Hart, is having an exhibition of 40 of his paintings at the Australian Showroom in Wan Chai's Harbour Centre until November 18.
Most canvases depict the Australian outback and beach scenes, bursting with spontaneous life and colour. Some of the paintings on show also depict life in Hong Kong as the artist has worked and exhibited here since 1975. THE Japanese doll is the subject of this month's exhibition at The Nishiki Gallery in Exchange Square. The history of doll-making was inspired by Japanese folk tales and literature and the desire to immortalise certain traditional ideals, like the dignity of defeat.
The fine craftmanship of the dolls is particularly demonstrated in the way the heads are made - in wood and covered in 15 layers of oyster shell paste to give them an exquisite translucent effect. The Samurai dolls, for example, are decked in many layersof fine silk representative of 11th century court garb, or the warring period of the Kamakura with armour and miniature metal weapons.
UNTIL November 30, Alisan Fine Arts, in Prince's Building, is staging its fourth exhibition of Chuang Che's works. Abstract in style and done predominantly on rice paper, Chuang Che's paintings are seen as some of the greatest examples of the marryingof Eastern and Western art. The artist says that his point of departure was the Chinese tradition which he combines with abstraction for ''its infinite possibilities.''
