A Wider Horizon

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ora-Ora’s autumn exhibition, titled A Wider Horizon, is broad and inquisitive. World-renowned cross-cultural artist Peter Doig is presented alongside artistic luminary Rosamond Brown. Other acclaimed Greater China-based artists include Halley Cheng, Chan Keng Tin, Stephen Wong and Xiao Xu. The show will open at Ora-Ora in Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun on 3 October 2024.

Two featured works by Peter Doig and Rosamond Brown are markedly different. Figure in Mountain Landscape (The Big…) (1998) by Trinidad-based Peter Doig is a radiant yet disorientating work of stubborn resilience. It places the artist at the centre of the painting, at the misty heart of a landscape, and securely positioned within the painterly, plein air tradition. The oil on paper work takes its cue from a photograph of Group of Seven’s Franklin Carmichael, whilst also calling to mind Romantic landscape paintings such as Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, or the subsequent The Wanderer (2006) by Yue Minjun. Peter Doig spent much of his childhood in Canada, and the snowy mountains are a key part of his artistic topography, alongside the vibrant colours and sunshine of his adopted home of Trinidad.

British-born artist Rosamond Brown has been a major figure in the Hong Kong arts scene since arriving in the city in 1964, at the core of a fruitful dialogue between western and star local artists such as on Chi-fun, Gaylord Chan and Cheung Yee. Her Great Wall III (1989) reflects the great inspiration which China had on her landscape painting. In this swirling composition of light and shadow, we look from above at a tawny, arid canvas, on which undulating clouds and filtered light are dynamically projected. The inviting path of the Great Wall beckons us in the right foreground, before leading us on a twisting quest towards the mazily-hued purples of the distance. The sharply meandering wall finds its parallels in the surrounding hilly peaks, a route of simultaneous challenge and harmony.

The exhibition underlines the panoply of landscape possibilities, and the freedom the landscape offers. With its roots in antiquity, landscape painting found urgently adroit exponents in the 17th Century, as French artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin furthered nature’s cause as protagonist rather than mere backdrop. Landscapes defy categorization, ensuring their continued relevance in the artistic canon. Landscapes are a terrain of the natural world and of the psychological, offering harmonies, unexpected commentaries and unpredictable flashes of realism or abstraction.

Ora-Ora presents a show of unique juxtapositions, placing Hong Kong artist Halley Cheng’s A Tree in Jordan Valley Park, Main Entrance (2014) into conversation with Doig and Brown. For Cheng, the tree is a thread from classical Chinese painting, as well as being a mascot for his occasionally irreverent engagement with the ancient world. The outsized tree, which seems to burst out of the page, becomes an insertion of himself into the empty space, a contemporary arrival into a classical scene.

The exhibition includes paintings by leading contemporary artists from Asia, notably Hong Kong-based Chan Keng Tin and Stephen Wong, and Beijing-based Xiao Xu. A colour contrast ensues as the magically evocative solemnity of Xiao Xu’s mystical Lotus Mountain I (2023) collides with the cyan hues of Chan Keng Tin’s Settle Our Spirit Elsewhere towered over by cloudy mountain-tops. The eerie verticality of the twilight cypress trees within Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s The Passenger (2012) underscores the landscape’s ability to mirror a dreamscape, mood, alienation or uncalm mental state.

The landscape in A Wider Horizon is a forum, a salon and a haven, spanning time and distance, linking the ancient world with the modern, the figurative with the abstract, and the west with the east.