HONG KONG, March 13 — An exhibition opening this month at the M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong will look at avant-garde experimentation in gender identity in 1980s and ‘90s Hong Kong popular culture.
“Ambiguously Yours” will examine androgyny, camp and gender ambiguity through more than 90 works by pioneers in costume design, music, film and print media.
The show will focus on the 1980s and 1990s, when Hong Kong’s film industry was the third largest in the world and its Cantopop stars were famous throughout the region. Works by popular performers including Roman Tam, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui will demonstrate the widespread success of Cantopop and the experimentation and risk-taking in gender representation it encouraged.
Film’s role in reflecting changing attitudes to gender will be seen through clips and stills from a variety of films, from arthouse to comedy, including Stanley Kwan’s ghost story Rouge (1988) and Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), as well as narratives drawing on Western and Chinese theatre traditions of role-play and cross-dressing.
The success of Cantopop and Hong Kong film led to a blurring of boundaries between art and commerce, as performers’ popular appeal was harnessed across platforms though the work of stylists, graphic designers and photographers. “Ambiguously Yours” will depict this phenomenon through covers of City Magazine and the more recent 100Most magazine, showing how the magazines’ design has dealt with societal norms, and through album covers, featuring works from designers and artists such as Alan Chan and Wing Shya.
In the final section of the exhibition, the M+ collection will be at the forefront — including collages by Japanese pop artist Tanaami Keiichi, Ming Wong’s interpretation of Malay cinema, and the gongbi paintings of Wilson Shieh — showing the influence of popular culture on art.
“Ambiguously Yours” will run from March 17 to May 21 in the M+ Pavilion, a space in the West Kowloon Cultural District that is hosting the exhibitions of M+ — Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture — until it opens in a new building in 2019 as one of the world’s largest museums of 20th- and 21st-century visual culture. — AFP-Relaxnews
