A collaboration between Schoeni Art Gallery Hong Kong and UKadapta London.

Vernissage: 6:30pm – 8:30pm, 13 November 2008

Exhibition: 14 November – 10 December 2008

Venue: Main Gallery, 21-31 Old Bailey Street, Central, Hong Kong

Schoeni Art Gallery is delighted to launch our latest satellite project Adapta, in collaboration with UKAdapta, London. This project will focus on what has recently been coined as ‘urban’ art - or as we like to call it “21^st Century Contemporary Art” - with the idea to bring this rather unnoticed genre to the Hong Kong public. Adapta will bridge the gap between the understanding of this global urban art movement, creating dialogue and focusing on cultural exchange. We aim to demonstrate, educate and provide a wealth of inspiration especially for the youth of today, through exhibiting works from this talent-pool.

Adapta’s first project will be held in November 2008, with a launch exhibition in Hong Kong called Attention Spam. In this day and age, visual media plays an indispensible role in everyone's lives, almost to a point of saturation. One could consider it as visual spam. For its exhibitions, Adapta filters through the multitudes of visual pollution to find and exhibit the best pieces of contemporary art, and in this case, art emerging from Britain, showcasing some of the best pieces of contemporary art by 5 UK based artists.

The urban art movement derives from graffiti which began in the late 1960’s in New York and Philadelphia. Since then the genre has expanded and grown into a cross-cultural phenomenon with significant socio-cultural impact, developing into ‘street art’ which encompasses all artistic incursions into the urban landscape, including a wide medium of stencil, stickers, posters, airbrush, etc… One can see ‘street art’ as a new “renaissance” and explosion of creativity, new ideas, and talent, with all artists using the public space as a huge museum. Street art is a form of creative expression and a statement of identity; it is special because it is a form of expression that has the ability to be shockingly evocative, providing rawness that challenges the viewers directly and affects their aesthetic sensibilities. It is art that thrills. Urban art has become a burgeoning phenomenon which is no longer ignored by the art establishments being recognised and taken in by museums, galleries, curators and auction houses alike. This has allowed artists more time to develop and solidify their work, thus narrowing down the fine line between fine art and street art by introducing a plethora of thoughtful and effective alternatives to artistic expression.

The Attention Spam Artists

Cyclops: Cyclops is an artist under the name of Luc Price, whose works can be found predominantly on the street as well as finding its rightful place in galleries. His iconic works can be identified from Manchester, Bristol to London. Price’s tribal fury combined with photo realistic imagery creates an impressive style of his own. He creates various characters from frenzied faces that survive in sync in the chaos of a woman’s hair to drone-like Cyclops - a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of its forehead from Greek mythology - whose presence becomes transcendent as Renaissance-like or saintly halos hanging overhead.

David Bray: David Bray graduated from Central St. Martins, London with a degree in Graphic Design in 1992 and has been a freelance illustrator since 1996 where he has developed an extensive portfolio of clients, including Harvey Nichols, MTV, Various Production, Puma, H&M, Vodafone, BBC Television, etc... His compelling works reveal his lifetime love of drawing and an active imagination. Bray creates intricate, time-consuming drawings, which explore emotion, utopia and a world of fantasy, mainly taking women and animals as his motif. A sense of continuity and evolvement within the creative process can be seen in Bray’s series.

D*Face: He completed a degree in Illustration and Design and worked as a freelance illustrator/designer at an agency whilst honing his street work. D*Face is the owner of Stolen Space Gallery, which has been at the forefront of the London contemporary art scene for the past few years. His aim is to encourage the public not just to 'see', but to look at what surrounds them and their lives. One of D*Face’s most celebrated icon is the D-Dog, a bomb like figure with two tiny wings on the sides. Recent examples of D*Face’s satirical and dark humour include his chosen ‘collaboration’ with H.R.H Queen Elizabeth II on a series of bank notes and the portrait of Pope Benedict XVI to commemorate his instatement.

Vesna Parchet: Vesna is the only female artist in Attention Spam exhibition. Being of German origin, she was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan until the age of ten. Her artistic training includes a BTEC Foundation Studies in Art & Design and a National Diploma in Printmaking at London College of Printing. For Vesna, “art is a reflection of life observations after all”, therefore she took 3 years time to travel around the world with the aim to enrich her life experiences. Cultural diversities and social backgrounds have always fascinated the female artist, being an important inspiration on her current work. Her artwork demonstrates a growing metamorphosis of her motif. Many of Vesna’s pieces express an almost abstract futuristic sensation because of her intention to portray the changes in society and surroundings in relationship to humans, their nature and their behaviour.

Word To Mother: Word To Mother is an English born artist who attended art school and studied illustration, beginning his artistic career in graffiti. Each piece, often painted on wood which he collects at random, looks like it took years to evolve as his unique layering skills meld to one another effortlessly. His sophistication in layering technique brings complex texture into his pieces, and each of them evokes a feeling of sentimentality and recollection. Inspired by social observation and nostalgic advertising, his relentless sketch book doodling has yielded some of the most inspiring drawings and paintings of the urban art scene. Word to Mother’s pieces reflect the artist’s sensitivity towards life and its environment.

Please also visit our website www.adaptagallery.com

Today Art Museum is proud to present Zhang Lin Hai’s solo exhibition, Stunned Speechless, at Today Art Museum in Beijing. The exhibition will feature both a body of new works previously unseen by Zhang Lin Hai, as well as a collection of his older works brought back from private collections worldwide. These artworks span from 2002 to 2008 - demonstrating the artist’s mastery in development of both his style and technique. Having collaborated with Schoeni Art Gallery since 2000, Zhang Lin Hai has met with growing international acclaim, with his works appearing in auction increasingly.

Born in Shanghai in 1963, Zhang Lin Hai was adopted from a Shanghai orphanage by his foster parents and at a tender age he witnessed the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. He suffered from various illnesses, including polio, and at the age of four he survived his sickness, only to be left with a crippled leg and hand. By the age of 17, Zhang ventured out from his small village into the city, where he began to develop his interest in painting which has led him to obtain degree in engraving from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1990. He has suffered many hardships before he fully established his artistic career. Zhang Lin Hai has exhibited globally, including the Chinart travelling museum show throughout major cities in Europe between 2002 and 2004.

Zhang’s oeuvres are easily recognised by his signature depiction of bald young boys wandering through, or flying over, an arid wasteland or countryside village. The scenes explicitly articulate feelings such as sadness, fear, a need for escape, stark shock or even bemusement. Zhang Lin Hai’s repeated arrangement of his motif displays a touch of sadness on top of nostalgia. In fact, these works are shaped by the artist’s past struggles and sufferings in life; the pain experienced after lifting up the veil of humanity and the desire of dreams within each growing person. The startling imageries within his canvases appear as if the episodes of Zhang’s past are constantly haunting the present.

“Zhang Lin Hai’s earliest sketches about stone walls and shaved heads were created in 1988, around the same time or perhaps even before Fang Li Jun completed his sketches. The difference between their works is that Fang Li Jun’s bald men are puckish, which helped him establish a reputation in the art world. Zhang Lin Hai is a timid, modest man, incapable of being puckish, so his work retains a quiet, and subtle style. On the inside, Zhang Lin Hai is very sensitive. His bad health has forced him to spend half his life in bed. He is fond of art, but his rocky road of artistic pursuit gave him a sombre spirit. The major theme of his work has always been the mountain village and the curious world outside of it. As in his “Dust” series created in 1999, whether the characters are indulging in thoughts, gazing in the distance, leaping in the air... the stony village plays its part in the background. All of his recollections of childhood are from the village; yet, does he belong in the village? His artistic aspirations, the vibrant Shanghai, his birthplace, his roots and his future all remain in question. His art is the result of the melancholic thoughts he had while being sick in bed. It conveys a deep sadness and dejection, and in between, a sliver of hope.”

– Li Xian Ting, Art Critic (2002)

Stunned Speechless is a continuation to the previous three-man exhibition, hosted for Zhang Lin Hai along with Wang Yi Dong and Cai Guo Qiang at MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Germany in 2005. The highlight of the exhibition will include Zhang Lin Hai’s first ever sculptural installations and a captivating monumental piece with a 12 meter length. In conjunction with the show a comprehensive and retrospective book on Zhang Lin Hai will be published by Today Art Museum’s publishing house. Their extensive collection of publications includes books on leading figures of the Chinese contemporary art movement, such as Yue Min Jun, Fang Li Jun and Yang Shao Bin.