Heritage Museum Until Oct 9

It’s always going to be a challenge to present a cohesive and comprehensive survey of British art over the past 30 years within the span of a single room, yet this touring group show – which showcases a large selection of works from the British Council Collection, and has now arrived at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum after previously exhibiting in Sichuan and Xi’an – makes an ambitious attempt to do so, with intermittently on-the-mark results. Given the chosen timeframe, the exhibit expectedly focuses heavily on the Young British Artists movement, which took off in the late 1980s and dominated the 1990s, before quieting down in the past decade. The exhibition devotes a wall of space with information about the origins of the group, which has produced household names such as Damien Hirst, brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing and Sarah Lucas, all who are represented here. Their often-neglected contemporaries, meanwhile, give a collective presence that nevertheless looms over the room.

With the multitude of media on display, certain artists’ works feel closer to the heart of things than others. The painterly abstractions from the likes of Hume, Phillip Allen and Tomma Abts, all concerned with notions of form, figure and colour, or even photo-based works such as Keith Arnatt’s Brick and Helen Chadwick’s abstract polaroids of meat, which explore internalised landscapes, ultimately feel out of place in a show designed to highlight the times. Within the included time span, Britain has gone through Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana and enough economic and political uncertainty to fill out a metaphysical theme park; the most successful examples of British art in the show then are the few representatives which tackle the weight of their place of origin, whether native or adopted, head-on.

The German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who has called London home, delivers a compelling nine-photo essay in Concorde Grid, where classically composed snapshots draw as much attention to the eponymous supersonic airliner featured in the frame as they do to the subtly limned shades of the British urban landscape. Gillian Wearing’s photographic work from her Signs series shows real people diagnosing the times, and Sarah Lucas’ now-iconic self-portraits are as self-referential towards the artist as they are to the values of where she comes from. The timeliest piece of it all may be Mark Wallinger’s 1994 multi-video installation of a royal family procession in Royal Ascot, which best encapsulates the major achievement of British Art over the past two decades: it makes tradition and establishment appear absurd.

Matthew Wong