Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968 Ha-Tien, Vietnam, now lives in Ho Chi Minh City)

Dinh Q. Lê continues his weaving of photographic images in a new series that focuses on the ancient Sumerian culture, now modern day Iraq. In Lê’s former series that focused on Cambodia he was fascinated by the greatness of the Angkor period 12th century Cambodia from which a highly intelligent civilization flourished. He moves now to the Middle East to the highly sophisticated carvings found on the remnants and ruins of ancient Sumer.  The Sumerians are recognized to be one of the first contributors of written word; which is just one facet representative of this highly civilized people.  Lê traveled to various world museums and photographed artifacts from ancient Sumer now housed in museum collections. As with the previous photos, Lê has taken images culled from the internet of Iraqi and Afghan citizens and interwoven these portraits with the relics from Sumerian civilization.

Dinh Q. Lê also exhibits a major installation at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Art Projects, Chai Wan, entitled Erasure and first commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, co-curated by Zoe Butt, Director of San Art.  Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Asia Society, New York; Singapore Biennial, Singapore; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston TX; The Drawing Center, New York; SF MoMA, San Francisco, CA; Busan Biennial, Busan, Korea; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Hayward Gallery, London, UK, among many others.  This year Lê will be featured in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany and the Kiev Biennial, Kiev, Ukraine.

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William Furniss (b. 1970 England, now lives in Hong Kong)

One of Hong Kong’s most trained and prolific photographers presents new works of water reflections. For William Furniss, Hong Kong’s nightly electric skyline is the epitome of our city’s brash and reckless energy but given time and reflection what is on display proves infinitely more complex and astonishing.

With these latest works, Furniss uses a combination of old cameras fitted with various lenses and a digital back, melding classic photographic intelligence with the latest available technology for shooting in near-dark conditions. He meticulously creates his images “in camera” and hand prints his own work.

This new series conveys more sensuality and tranquility than previous works offering an abstract and meditative imagery.
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Carol Lee Mei Kuen (b. 1963 Hong Kong)

Initially trained in Chinese ink painting in 1983, Lee’s works have demonstrated a unique sensitive observation.  Through these works on paper which the artist calls “Time Paintings”, the artist uses day light as her paint, and the shadows of everyday objects in her surroundings become her “brushes”.  As both an artist and a maternal figure, Lee carefully observes her two roles and how she relates to the various life forms within her surroundings - along with her family exists the insects, birds and plants around her in her home transforming her physical space into a land of endless imagination. Carol Lee Mei Kuen is a Hong Kong born artist and one of the most prominent contemporary artists in the city’s art scene. She has been exhibited in the Hong Kong Museum of Art for the HK Biennial, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Macau Museum, thrice selected for the Corning Museum Glass Review.

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Maya Hewitt (b. 1981, London)

British artist Maya Hewitt uses symbolic narratives to explore the notion of reality and fiction. The construction of unreal spaces in her paintings are presented as environments of connecting plots within a larger story reminiscent of children’s pop-up books and adventure stories. Within each piece elements drawn from everyday life are manipulated, woven and translated into fantastical worlds of vibrant color inviting the viewer into a wayward journey of heavily loaded escape.  Hewitt's paintings and works on paper contain both familiar and distant environments. These spaces house a web of connecting narratives lost somewhere between the occult and contemporary sub-culture. Here, history and artifact are dislocated, re-evaluated and reassembled to establish a new fiction. Within these scenes she externalises events occurring beneath the surface of everyday human interactions, spanning childish fantasy and adult interpretation.

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Ken Matsubara (b. 1949 Tokyo))

As part of the series The Possibility of Memory Ken Matsubara uses photos, movies, objects and collages to awaken the depths of people's memories.  While roaming through time and space, a sea of memories floats to the surface.

Ken Matsubara dissolves our sleeping memories from being frozen at the bottom of our hearts in his works made of antique objects, photographs and movies, which are imprinted with people's memories. Matsubara believes that memories are inherited from human to human through the DNA of microorganisms and that people can reach their common memories that cross over the world's various races and generations by awakening our own deepest memories.  He believes human beings are tied together by common memories and we may cross over our seperating boundaries by shared memories.

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Shi Guorui (b. 1964 Shanxi, China, now lives in Beijing)

Shi Guorui is a Beijing-based artist who takes large-scale iconic photographs with a technique called camera obscura using a pinhole camera and exposing the photographic paper to the light directly, thus each work is unique with no negative.  The making of each image takes many hours and is very labor intensive.  The photographs are often monumental in size from 3 to 5 meters long for which he has to erect a giant blackened tent where he hangs the photographic paper.

Shi Guorui’s interest in using the camera obscura method goes deeper than documenting monumental city scenes. In showing the cities, void of distraction, he steps into the realm of explaining or observing cultures from different social or political contexts.  The black and white images reveal a great importance from the negative reversal and large scale of the photo that challenges the viewer to look deeper into familiar scenery.  Shi Guorui explains that the process both serene and purifying. The making of his photographs is as important as the photos themselves. He looks at it as a spiritual and meditative process and appreciates the way it allows him to escape the ever-fast-growing world around us, especially in China today.

Shi Guorui has exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, De Young Museum, San Francisco, The Sigg Collection, Switzerland, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago among many others.

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Huang Rui (b. 1952 Beijing)

In this new body of works, Chinese Artist Huang Rui explores the relationship between text and color, language and visual experience.  Words used as idioms provide a multiple perspective in interpretation and understanding, creating extra layers of appreciation. Huang Rui’s works concern the irony in text. He is particularly interested in the relations of text in three aspects: its original meaning, its meaning in historical context, the interpretation by people in current times.  He looks into what is concealed within these words and visualizes the abstract meaning.  As he transforms the text and language into sculptural form, it unveils the multi-facets within the words drawing multiple interpretations.

Huang Rui is a thought-provoking artist and is one of the most influential figures of his generation working in China.  He is one of the founding members of the STARS  (Xing Xing) group, which is recognized as one of the first avant-garde artist’s movements in China developed in the late 70’s. His work often deals with text, context and how color can enhance meaning.  It is imbued with literary, poetic references and implicit socio-political messages.

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Wang Keping (b. 1949 China, now lives in France)

Wang Keping is one of the most recognized sculptors from China and is included in most historical texts about Chinese contemporary art.  In 1978, his brazen sculptures were the first voice of criticism toward the Chinese regime, a bold statement for a young artist at the time that led to his eventual exile to France.  Today his work is less concerned with social and political issues and he concentrates on the beauty and purity of forms.  His wood works stand alone in greatness among today’s sculptors internationally.  He is so in touch with the wood which he works with that he allows the relationship between himself and the object to be a collaboration of sculpting between the harder and softer bits, incorporating the essence of the life within the wood to be seen in the final artwork. Wang Keping was one of the most active and outspoken members of the Stars Exhibition (Xing Xing) of 1979,  opening the doors for future generations of art in China.

His works have been exhibited in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Musee Maillol, Paris, The China Institute, New York, The Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, The Sigg Collection, Switzerland, Musée Zadkine, Paris among others.

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John Young (b.1956 Hong Kong, now lives in Melbourne and Hong Kong)

John Young (Young Zerunge) was born in Hong Kong and moved to Australia in 1967.  Young’s bi-cultural upbringing and interest in philosophy has made his works a rich mix of considerations blending technology and painting into hybrid forms of synthesis. Part of the Hong Kong diaspora of artists having great success abroad, John Young is one of Australia’s most acclaimed painters. He has a rich sense of color mixed with simple forms that investigate Western late modernism, post-modernism and how technology brings new discourse into play.  This new series of paintings are experimental mindscapes, which draw heavily on pre-modern Chinese and Western archaic sentiments. In the Cardinal Paintings, pre-modernist representation and genres are pitted against the everyday technological world picture of a mediated reality enveloped within melancholia.

John Young has had more than 60 solo exhibitions and 160 group exhibitions.
His works were included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition on Australia in New York. In 2005/2006 a survey exhibition covering 27 years of work was held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art,  Victoria, Australia.

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Sopheap Pich (b.1969 Battambang, Cambodia, now lives in Phnom Penh)

Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich manipulates rattan and bamboo – materials ubiquitous to traditional Khmer farming and crafts – into large-scale organic forms. By transposing an everyday material into sculpture, he spoke to an emerging audience in a country where the notion of contemporary art was, and still is, largely unknown.

Buddha of a Scarred Land, part of his Buddha series – seeks to challenge the memories of the artist as his family had to hide in Buddhist temples from the countryside during the Khmer Rouge raids.  The lightness of the texture contrasts with the gravity of the subject to create a subtle and substantial sculpture. Pich’s technique and concepts have evolved organically as he becomes closer to both his medium and country. Pich creates large free-flowing biomorphic sculptures and installations, which impress by their fragility and seeming weightlessness.  Interweaving stories into an intricate maze of rattan, Pich has become one of Cambodia’s most prominent contemporary artists.  Pich will be shown in  dOCUMENTA (13) in June 2012 in Kassel, Germany.

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Petroc Sesti (b. 1973 London)

10 Chancery Lane Gallery is excited to introduce British artist Petroc Sesti to Asia. Elan Vital is a hydrosphere of optic fluid with a computer motor turbine on a stainless steel plinth.  Petroc Sesti’s work straddles the boundaries of art and science with an enchanting hint of alchemy.  He seeks to explore the art of subtle motion vs. stillness in relation to intense emotion and transcendence.

The vortex within Sesti’s work hypnotizes and attracts the viewer by reflecting on the ever-changing spiral motion and by inversing the perspectives around it. The result is a complex yet meditative sculpture of a rare pure aesthetics. By bringing together mediums from the science glass industry and state-of-the-art engineering, Sesti achieves a work of art that seeks to open a dialogue equally engaging to the contemporary visual art field and to the world of architecture.

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Xiao Lu (b. 1962 in Hangzhou, China, now lives in Beijing)

Acclaimed for raising a gun and shooting her work in the National Art Museum of China in February 1989 and immediately closing down the China Avant-Garde exhibition, Xiao Lu is today considered as one of China’s most influential and provocative female artists.

The Love Letters series is inspired by the artist’s bitter experience of taking herbal medicine to keep her healthy during pregnancy. She composes with charcoal and Chinese herbal medicines to write about her inner thoughts and most genuine sentiments.  Each enclosed letter takes the form of a secret. The piece acts as a catharsis for self-healing through the abstract expressions of a narrative.

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