Opening on the 13th of July, Carnival, an exhibition featuring artists Luigi Ontani, Zhao Gang and Matthew Monahan takes a look into the different “perspectives and shades of the human being, both as a figure and as an existence, as faces and as masks.”
Though the artists’ styles are extremely different from each other, all of them makes very interesting observations into people’s identity, as well as inspirations from old traditions, such as “allegorical, biblical and folkloristic figures” for Ontani, “anthropomorphic shapes” for Monahan and “Chinese tradition and Western classicism” for Gang. The sculptures, masks, and paintings are all “charged with rhetoric and a multiplicity of meanings”, where different kinds of uncanny portraits are created, whether with aluminum or gold leaves.
Challenging our own perceptions of ourselves, the Carnival questions viewers to “reveal and confront the various masks we use to adapt to different situations, how flexible are we? How many different versions of us exist?”
Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong
3d Floor Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong
