ARTWALK- DRINKING AND SOCIALIZNG IN THE NAME OF CHARITY

Last night I participated in the Artwalk- a fantastic yearly  charity event where you buy one ticket and are entitled to entrance to dozens of galleries where there’s an unlimited supply of sponsored wine, finger foods, desserts and nespresso. This year there were 62 galleries involved and donations from the proceeds go to the SoCo foundation.

You don’t need to be particularly cultured to appreciate the joy of walking on a fresh spring night from gallery to gallery sipping wine, enjoying tapas and socializing with friends. Art appreciation also gives you a great excuse to talk to complete strangers and make some new friends in the process!

I started my stroll at the Wanchai Arts Center where I picked up my ticket. I’ve never been there before and it was great to discover an under-utilized art space in the heart of Wanchai. The Arts Center has high ceilings, scattered artworks at the entrance, in the lobby and in the stairwells. When I got up to the gallery on the 4th floor, I found student based video, illustration and installation artworks which were totally interactive and hands on. There were things you could draw on, a video jukebox, things you could push and touch and beams of light that you could project on an empty wall.

I was hungry and thirsty so I headed to the bar where they were serving a beautiful red wine sponsored by Soho wines. I had breadsticks wrapped with prosciutto ham, some cheese and chocolate and I was fueled up and ready to move onto Central to start the gallery hop.

The next stop was Fabrik Art Gallery on D’Aguilar Street near Lan Kwai Fong. The gallery is small, bit its artists are huge! I met the lovely proprietors and chatted with them about the prolific artists they brought in for the Great British exhibit. I was particularly drawn to the shiny crystal-encrusted skull by Damien Hirst. Fabrik has had guerilla exhibits at the Arts Center before which I was sad to have missed.

Apparently one of the gallery’s owners commissioned famed local artist Simon Birch to do a piece featuring the likeness of his partner for their fabulous new flat. This and other valuable art pieces adorn their new living space. Art is the icing on the cake- a perfect topping to a superbly appointed abode. The presence of Art in someone’s home brings great inspiration and joy to its owners. It’s not merely decoration; rather it has great significance to its owners and is a terrific conversation piece for when you have guests over!

Next, we moved on to Wellington Gallery on Wyndham Street where there was a bold and bright collection of contemporary paintings and sculptures. Because the gallery is located at the junction of LKF and the Wyndham Street, the gallery was packed all night. A steady stream of tipsy visitors flowed in and out and I got to meet a load of people over several glasses of vino. There were a few men who used ARTwalk as an excuse to wear outrageous get ups- yes I mean the straight guys- and they got quite a bit of mileage for their peacocking efforts.

The curators did a great job of running around explaining the artworks and educating the merry revelers on what they didn’t know about the artists or artworks. Many of the artists being shown at Wellington are renowned members of the Mainland China modern art scene.

Following that, we floated down to The Opera Gallery which, shockingly, is a gallery I had never been to before. It always looked so commercial to me from the outside, hence I was never tempted to enter, but what they were showing inside was quite daring and interesting. There’s something very distinctly Hong Kong about Opera Gallery.

Instead of white walls and polished concrete floors, they have wooden floors in an almost black color. The artworks are shiny, blingy, bold and colorful. There were large rolled up US dollar bill sculptures and there was a table full of gold. There were also bright neon paintings and sculptures of wide-eyes girls doing frivolous things. The series looked almost cartoon-like. Mixed in with that was modern Chinese art and in the dimly lit back room, with black walls and stark spotlighting, there were some classic masterpieces worth loads of money- including a Chagall.

Here I ran into a few bankers who were seriously looking into collecting some art- however they knew nothing about what would be valuable. They couldn’t operate on their knowledge of art, or the artists, they only wanted to invest.

At Red Soho on the same night they were holding a Beauty and the Bankers party- however I suspect there were more Bankers on the Artwalk then at that party. If any girl was looking to dig for gold, she could have done it easily by scoping for these yuppie ‘art investors’ that didn’t have time to get out of their suits from work! Perhaps that gold table and the sculptures of the rolled up dollar bills would have been perfect for Beauty and the Banker couple!

We cabbed it over to Schoeni Gallery on Old Bailey Street where one of the helpers said the crowds were coming in waves. There would be waves of tipsy people, and then there would be moments of calm. I walked in during one of the calm moments and had a chance to gaze at my favorite piece which was a kind of multi-layered lightbox in blue hues with a big fly hovering over some nuclear wasteland of an old Chinese town. It was captivating. Schoeni was showing a big variety of artists. There was everything from modern contemporary urban art, to some of the more well-known Chinese modern artists and they even had a few illustrations and of course the light box works.
 

Our last stop was the Soft Death exhibit at the Osage Gallery. This illustration and painting exhibit by Louis Cordero was all blood guts, and brains oozing out by either ear. It was comic-bookish and the details put into the artworks were really cool (if you’re into that morbid Goth stuff). It was like a bad acid trip in black and white. As the brochure said- it was repulsive yet strangely captivating. You had to respect the genius behind it.

Judging by the crowd gathered around the Nespresso station, it seemed the actual ‘walking’ was beginning to tire some of the art walkers. By then, my feet were also about ready to die a Soft Death as I had worn impractical shoes for the event. So we decided our night of art, wine and witty banter would end somewhere where we could get a real meal.

See all the photos from the Artwalk here.

For those that missed the Artwalk, you might be interested in going to the Art Fair which is being held the 27th-30th May. It’s a very similar atmosphere except all the artworks are all under one roof instead of scattered at several galleries.
 

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