Hong Kong Museum of Art Until July 17

The Hong Kong Museum of Art presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date for Ha Bik-chuen, the late artist of the late Cantonese modernism movement. Born in Guangdong in 1925, the self-taught Ha stayed in the aesthetic discourse of outsider art (long before it had been recognised on this side of the world), even after his 1957 move to Hong Kong and subsequent entrance into a nascent community of professional artists.

The exhibition samples most of the significant stages of Ha’s late-blooming career, even if its interpretive arrangement does little to clarify its progression and cross-fertilization, choosing instead to present it as a canonical assembly of objects. An ideal viewer would be uninitiated in the oftentimes surprising and meandering narratives of formal experimentation in Hong Kong art in traditional media, since the Lingnan school; and if he/she has anything to learn from this survey of work, it’s that the trajectories of artistic practice (which brought the modernist movement in southern Chinese art to an end and allowed for the possibility of contemporary cultural practice) are inextricably linked to the waxing and waning fortunes of the media and tradition.

Ha is best known within the local art establishment (which, intimidating though it may sound, consists of little more than a dozen closely-linked professors, curators, and journalists) for his mixed-media two dimensional work, most of which orbits the twin conservative poles of ink painting and calligraphy. Although this local clique might beg to differ, expert historians of Chinese art since the 1911 revolution, particularly from its south-east Asian branch, will find little of interest in terms of innovative formal experimentation here.

It is this vaguely derivative, or, at the very least, reactionary body of work that continues to fascinate those looking for the aesthetic value of beauty and arcane debates over brushwork, but Ha spent his later years (1997-2009) working on a set of sculptures that would have been revolutionary – had they been produced in the 1980s. The Bamboo and Waste series, familiar to many, both reconfigure their titular substances into uncannily human-like figures that have little to say about materiality, but would have made a fascinating companion to the 85 New Wave in the mainland.

As history stands, perhaps they serve primarily to balance the more regimented leanings of the last decades of ink painting; a more nuanced curatorial narrative could do wonders here, particularly in terms of exposing the enlightening humour and play that underscore so many otherwise stifling moments in the history of a dying modernist tradition.

Robin Peckham