Edouard Malingue Gallery is excited to present two exhibitions at the gallery’s Tin Wan studio this May. On the occasion of Galleries Curate: RHE, we are pleased to present a group exhibition, Shape of Water, showcasing works by Chou Yu-Cheng, Ko Sin Tung, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lai Chih-Sheng and Wang Wei. Additionally, we are delighted to present an exhibition of Nabuqi’s works, showcasing for the first time the artist’s silkscreen prints, sculptural works from A View Beyond Space series, and a new sculpture Game and the Importance of the Joints, created in 2020.
Galleries Curate: RHE | Shape of Water
The Galleries Curate is a collaborative project designed to express the dynamic dialogue between individual programmes, presenting a total of 21 exhibitions concurrently on the online platform and the exhibition spaces of the participating galleries from January until May 2021. RHE is the first chapter of this collaboration which loosely addresses the theme of water in geographical, political, economic and metaphorical terms, and reminds us that through water, we are all connected.
Responding to the overarching theme, Edouard Malingue presents the exhibition Shape of Water. As the only participating gallery based in China, Edouard Malingue aims at enriching the reading and interpretation of water from different perspectives that are equally pertinent: water has for long been a unique subject in the history of Chinese art, as both an essential artistic material, and a subject matter of cardinal importance. Five artists from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan regions of China participate in this exhibition; attentive to the geographical, political, historical and cultural backgrounds of the gallery’s locus, they present artworks that deal directly with the flowing, rolling theme of water.
For its duration, the exhibition is available both online and at the gallery’s Tin Wan studio. The gallery looks forward to initiating and being involved in more long-distance curatorial projects across galleries to come.
Nabuqi
For more than a decade, Nabuqi has been recognised for her persevering exploration of profound and uncanny sculptural and spatial forms. Signature series of works, including A View Beyond Space (since 2015) and The Doubtful Site (2018) in their slender or flattened gestures, directly confront the space and those within. The works included in this exhibition demonstrate the artist’s resoluteness at an early stage and her remarkable technical precision.
Exhibited for the first time, is a number of silkscreen prints based on Nabuqi’s small-scale drawings on paper. Since 2013, the artist has been creating with ink or acrylic small-scale drawings. A number of which has grown into large-scale sculptural or installation works; many of the drawings, however, remain as self-sufficient and independent artworks, contextualising the artist’s other series in reserved, undisclosed ways. Most recently, Nabuqi transforms some of the delicate, private drawings into silkscreen prints, revealing a number of surprising themes and hermetic contemplations and the artist’s distinct understanding of painting elements such as flatness, colour and compositional matrixes. Shown for the first time, the series responds actively to the manifestation of figurative forms and theatricality in recent works such as Do real things happen in moments of rationality? (2018), and further affirms the central position of scale and measure in Nabuqi’s long-term practise.
