From the Art School — Selected Graduate Works
Artist: CHAN Kong Yi Polly, CHEUNG Yick Kan, TSUI Hok In Jason
Date: 3/9-29/10/2019
Venue: Jockey Club Atrium, G/F-4/F, Hong Kong Arts Centre
Curatorial Statement
From the Art School: Selected Graduate Works
Academic training is the general tendency of contemporary art: most artists active today ─ visual arts, performance arts, music or literature ─ have received formal education in arts, some even had obtained postgraduate degrees. In a world in which knowledge is highly esteemed, it is necessary that contemporary art develop along with the growth of art academies.
The most prominent feature of formal art education is systematic training. This must not be mistaken for spoon-feeding or imitations. Rather, students will be introduced to many diverse theories and methodologies besides their training in artistic skills and techniques, including critical thinking, formal and stylistic experimentations, inter-disciplinary strategies, art history, social studies, professional practices, and so on. English scholar Victor Burgin put forward the concept of ‘heuristic’ education in 1982, aiming “to provide the student with a wide range of facts, and a number of critical tools, in the interests of developing an informed capacity for independent thought.”
Here we showcased three graduate projects by artists who had studied the BAFA programme jointly offered by the Hong Kong Art School and RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. All three alumni had studied photography as their major, but the themes they explored are varied, touching on issues that are social, regional and conceptual. What they had in common is the criticality of their thinking process, and the readiness of their stylistic explorations. For the purpose of showing the uncertainties in life, Polly Chan Kong Yi invited the viewers to take a gamble on what they will see; Cheung Yick Kan had a life-long interest in To Kwa Wan where he was born and grew up, in his photographs he used the ‘window’ as his metaphor to talk about the past and the future of the district; finally, Jason Tsui Hok In was showing fewer and fewer uniformed workers in his sequence, and asked us to rethink the meaning of ‘going to work’.
Edwin K. Lai
Senior Lecturer and Subject Coordinator (Photography)
Hong Kong Art School