This exhibition is a special exhibition about Hong Kong by a local artist Elaine Chiu. The exhibition will feature a wide range of local artworks, providing visitors with a unique and immersive experience.
Exhibition date: 19 March – 3 April, 2024
Venue: 3/F, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
Curated by Dr KK Chan, co-founder of Artecal Foundation
Guided tours will be available for various partners and organisations to enhance the experience and knowledge of local art to the general public.
The curator Dr KK Chan comments that “I am delighted to organize this unique exhibition for the talented Elaine Chiu. She grew up, was educated and started her art career in Hong Kong. She has drawn collectors’ and media’s interests about her usual subject matter: Hong Kong, its landscape and heritage. After COVID, she has been thinking about the position of Hong Kong and exploring its relationship with the world in this new series “The World Map from Hong Hong”. To give back to the society, Elaine is very generous to make a donation from the sale proceeds to Hong Kong Arts Centre to support its development of local art.”
Exhibition Statement
The World Map from Hong Kong showcases Elaine Chiu's latest series of paintings and drawings that explore the post-COVID urban landscapes in Hong Kong. The experience of lockdown towards the pandemic urged an artistic reflection upon unity and balance. Here, Elaine imagines a new order and balance on her canvases, attempting to find solutions by painting a new “world map” from Hong Kong’s perspective.
In her paintings, she looks at how Hong Kong and the world are reshaping and repainting the borders this year. Using tectonic-plate-shaped colour blocks, she depicts cityscapes that decode and abstract into grids and pixels, reassemble and integrate into plates. Each unit represents different power and traits, inspired by her five siblings, fighting for space and coexisting in harmony on an imaginary “World Map”.
Presenting together the drawings series Decoding Cityscapes displays the artist's approach to extracting and comparing cityscapes, using squares as rhythm-measuring units. She examines a neighbourhood’s unique frequencies, palettes, patterns and culture through the process. It demonstrates the artist’s attempt to balance abstraction and figuration, Chinese and Modern, which aims to continue the modernist and post-colonial dialogues in Hong Kong.
About the Artist
Elaine Chiu, b.1996 in Hong Kong. Works and lives in Hong Kong.
In her work, Chiu explores the concept of parts and unity of urban landscapes, through grids that decode and abstract into pixels, reassemble and integrate into plates, offering an in-between perspective to unity that blends modern Eastern and Western visual languages. Informed by her early on-location sketching experiences in the districts affected by the urban renewal of Hong Kong, in her paintings, she decodes and remeasures the rhythm and frequencies of neighbourhoods, reexamines traditions, organic cultures, digitalisation and technologies in urban environments and cities' way forward.
Her works are in the permanent collections of The University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, K11 Art Foundation, Société Générale and Cathay Pacific. Elaine attained her bachelor's degree in art history and sociology at the University of Hong Kong in 2018, receiving the Talent Development Scholarship from the Hong Kong SAR Government Scholarship Fund. She was enlisted in Forbes 30 under 30 Asia in 2023.