For the past eight months, many art and cultural events have been cancelled due to social unrest. And now we have added concerns over the coronavirus to worry about. Most of Hong Kong’s big performing arts venues are run by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, and many events in those facilities have been cancelled in recent months, often with hours to spare. On Tuesday, the LCSD announced the closure of its leisure and cultural facilities and that all programmes scheduled at these venues are suspended until further notice.

British artist Rose Wylie says she doesn’t paint political issues, concepts, narratives, landscapes, or portraits”. She’s “painting a noun: a duck or a primrose leaf or a leg.”
Inspired by random images, often from newspapers scattered across her studio floor, she reconstructs them from memory, a technique that overlays new associations and elements, sometimes related to issues such as gender, beauty, celebrity, and art history. Wylie’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong at David Zwirner gallery, “painting a noun” showcases more than twenty works that illustrate how the process of memory assimilate and transforms the objects she represents.

In the words of Berthold Brecht, “the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depend on political decisions.” Politics permeates our social and personal lives, even dictating what we can do and say and how we live. In reflecting our world, art frequently reflects politics.
The eighth-month long protest movement in Hong Kong has ignited a burst of creative energy, new ideas and possibilities.
In an upcoming salon concert called “Songs in a Storm”, music critic Edison Hung, soprano Yen Yen Ng, pianist Ingrid Chan and guitarist Halen Woo are bringing us music related to radical social and political movements. They are here to tell us more.