Significant Forms: Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong
Significant Form showcases the depth and breadth of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art, bringing this diverse field to audiences in Hong Kong. Co-curated by Adeline Ooi, formerly Director Asia for Art Basel, and produced in collaboration with three of Mumbai’s leading galleries – Chemould Prescott Road, Jhaveri Contemporary, and TARQ – this group exhibition brings together the work of eleven artists, spanning from the post-Independence period through to the present day.
South Asia is a region of profound cultural, national, ethnic, and linguistic complexity, shaped by traditions that have long coexisted in productive tension. Nearly two centuries of British rule and colonial influence imposed new political and social structures before the seismic events of 1947 brought both triumph and tragedy: the end of colonial rule and the emergence of independent nations arrived alongside Partition, one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in history. For artists coming of age in the ensuing years, the pain and questions raised by Partition became defining experiences.
Emerging from the 1980s onward, a subsequent generation of artists extended their inquiries in new directions. Attentive to political developments, material histories, intellectual heritage, power structures, and the shared inheritance of the planet, among other subjects, their work addresses concerns that are at once local and transnational. Mithu Sen (b. 1971) destabilizes language itself, her undecipherable scripts exposing the latent hierarchies embedded within linguistic assimilation and power structures more widely. Vishwa Shroff (b. 1980) turns to architecture, isolating fragments of colonial-era buildings in Mumbai as vessels of memory and historical change. Jitish Kallat (b. 1974) and Soghra Khurasani (b. 1983) look in turn to landscape and environment: Kallat exposes tarmac and thermochromic pigment to the elements, allowing his works to become active indexes of atmospheric change, while Khurasani's incised woodblocks trace a landscape shaped equally by memory, migration, and her experience as an Indian Muslim.
A highlight of this exhibition, continues with two artists for whom traditional technique becomes a source of contemporary meaning. Desmond Lazaro (b. 1968) trained in Rajasthani miniature painting under the guidance of a master painter and continues to develop pigments and intricate compositions according to inherited cosmological and spiritual principles.
The artworks gathered in the exhibition reveal the varied engagement with histories, places, memories, and identities enacted by the region’s artists over the last seven decades. The range of encounters on display – shaped by experience and interaction across different cultures and geographies – indicates how instances of transnational and local exchange can generate friction and overlaps through which new forms of expression emerge.
