10 Chancery Lane Gallery is proud to present Hong Kong artist Lewis Lee in a solo exhibition entitled “The Tale of Beas River” at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. The exhibition consists of a new series of paintings and an installation of relics to commemorate the historical legacy of the Hong Kong-China borderland that runs along the Beas River.
Lewis Lee is an artist who is tied to the geographical stories of land and its connected meanings. He grew up in Hong Kong’s Sheung Shui area near the Hong Kong–Mainland China border. He grew up watching the buildings of the now megapolis of Shenzhen emerge out of the landscape viewed from the rural borderlands on the Hong Kong side. Like many Hong Kongers, he is the son of a mainland Chinese immigrant. His father arrived in 1980 crossing through the barbed wire at Ta Kwu Ling, the starting point of his life thereafter. Lee likes to roam the hinterlands of Hong Kong’s border area reimagining the landscapes as a part of Hong Kong history and how the idea of being a “Hong Konger” emerged after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China when the British colonial government established a border prohibited area in 1951, creating a barrier similar to the Berlin Wall. Formally isolating the people of both regions with a serpentine river serves as a natural barrier, separating opposing ideologies in the air. The concept of "Hong Konger" began to take shape from that moment.
The exhibition combines paintings and various found object installations, merging real and fabricated "historical relics," creating a space in the bustling streets of Central that blurs the line between reality and fiction, reflecting the current environmental situation in Hong Kong through a romantic pastoral lens.
