Frog King Incheon Art in Residency Programme Exhibition

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Art Empathy and 1-Art Gallery jointly present you with the Frog King Incheon Art in Residency Programme Exhibition. Frog King was renowned for his performance art in his early art career and was also the first Hong Kong representative artist at the Venice Biennale. His artworks are full of frog symbols, and his condensed and packed presentation style is also part of his creations. After his stay in Incheon with lots of newly created works. He will return to the Cattle Depot Artist Village for a brilliant and charming art exhibition.

Frog King shows passion for life. He loves art. His calligraphy and paintings directly explained his simplicity and playfulness. His sense of humor also draws people to smile and sincerely deliver his funny thoughts in the enjoyment of life.

With the artist residency in Incheon for more than four months, Frog King continues to write with Chinese brush and ink. As he did early, Frog King pursued his internal affirmative and emphasis on one’s individuality expression. His writing was clean and speedy with ease, putting forward the challenges of contemporary calligraphy in terms of creative power. These latest artworks in Incheon give more insight into how to read calligraphy. The artworks are not only written from right to left, which is a Chinese calligraphy tradition. Reading from up, down, left, and right, readers thus have a new way of understanding the meaning of each word.

“Saoye” (penmanship) is a new word from Korean, demonstrating the complex relationship between calligraphy and art. Frog King was a calligraphy student from Lui Shou-Kwan who experienced a period when contemporary art was introduced into traditional calligraphy. Calligraphy possesses the function of recording and interpreting. It is also a form of art that the audience can observe and look at. Frog King’s calligraphy artworks utilize Chinese, Korean, and even English. He burnt his artwork with fire, further adding inspiration to “What form of art is calligraphy?”

From playfulness to creativity, the Frog King is not limited to concepts but also thinking out of the box. Frog King’s artworks are displayed in a packed style, without any framing and sometimes being folded. His action tells artworks originally developed from paper but is more than just paper. Let’s foresee what Frogtopia he will bring to Cattle Depot Artist Village Room 8!

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Frog King (Kwok Man-Ho) graduated from the art school and is one of the most important artists in Hong Kong’s art history. Since the 1960s, he has created multi-media artworks, more than thousands, and his live performances are influential. He was deemed an early pioneer of conceptual art in Hong Kong and also engaged in ink painting with the personal symbol of Frog King.

Since 1967, Frog King has exhibited his works and performances at more than 3,000 art events worldwide, including his exhibition at the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. In December 2015, M+, the Hong Kong museum of contemporary visual culture, invited Frog King to recreate his earlier work "Plastic Bag Project" on the Great Wall in 1979. This project is considered the first performance artwork to appear in China. Frog King has won many international awards, and museums, foundations, and private collectors have widely collected his works. Each of his works embodies the utopia based on his conceptual construction. He recently participated in the University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong , The King’s Inscriptions·Contemporary Interpretation exhibition and the "Art·Technology" exhibition Beyond the Singularity organized by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.