M+ Screenings: Forty Years reveals history of Chinese contemporary arts

Building on the success of the first M+ Screenings, M+, the museum for visual culture at the West Kowloon Cultural District, launches M+ Screenings: Forty Years this March, which is organised in conjunction with the exhibition M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art. Comprising eight moving images works, the programme examines the evolution of Chinese contemporary art over the last four decades. 

M+ Screenings: Forty Years will take place from 11 to 13 March at Broadway Cinematheque in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. It will present works by seven renowned film makers and artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo - Cina, Wen Pulin’s Seven Sins, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen, Hu Jie’s Artists of Yuanmingyuan and Kan Xuan’s Art for Sale. 

“By way of a chronological structure, M+ Screenings: Forty Years is rooted in the idea of revealing certain key backgrounds, moments, and trends of the relatively short yet fascinating history of Chinese contemporary art,” said Yung Ma, Associate Curator of Moving Image at M+, who is curating the series. “The diverse selection opens up further possible reading into this particular history, from perspectives that are at times shifting, contradictory, and aligning all at once.”

The programme will open with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo – Cina (1973), which is a rare non-official visual record of China during the Cultural Revolution. It will be followed by Wen Pulin’s Seven Sins (1989-2009), a documentary on seven performances in the 1989 groundbreaking exhibition China/Avant-garde that changed the face of contemporary art in Beijing. 

The works produced in the 1990s include the fictional films of Frozen (1996) by Wang Xiaoshuai and An Estranged Paradise (1997-2002) by Yang Fudong, as well as three documentaries featuring Chinese artists and exhibitions amid the rise of globalisation: Hu Jie’s Artists of Yuanmingyuan (1995), Kan Xuan’s Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies & Delusion (1999) and Art For Sale (1999). Representing the present, we have Tao Hui’s The Dusk of Teheran (2014), an artist video that transcends the concept of boundaries and time, in a nod to the heyday of Hong Kong’s pop music scene. 

“As distinct as they are from one another, the works presented in the programme clearly show the sheer speed of how artmaking in China has changed in recent decades, as well as the astounding amount of related ingenuity and creativity that emerged during this time,” said Doryun Chong, Acting Director of M+. “In presenting the second edition of M+ Screenings as a dialogue with M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art, M+ is incomparably positioned to tell the full story of the evolution of Chinese contemporary art since the Cultural Revolution. M+ strives to address this complex subject through various interpretative approaches befitting our identity as a twenty-first century interdisciplinary institution.”

Highlighting the diverse nature of moving image, the year-long M+ Screenings will develop a number of upcoming screenings, each with a different theme that will keep its contents timely, relevant, and interesting for Hong Kong’s cinema-going public.

Tickets are available from today. Programme details are available on the website: www.westkowloon.hk/mplusscreenings

Remarks

Venue: 
Broadway Cinematheque (Prosperous Garden, 3 Public Square Street, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon)

Tickets: 
Standard Tickets - HK$85 per screening; 
Concessions (Children, Seniors and Students) - HK$65 per screening; 
bc VIP Member Tickets - HK$68 per screening.

How to book: 
Online - www.cinema.com.hk; 
Telephone - 2388 3188; 
In Person - Tickets are available at the cinema’s box office and self-service ticketing machines.

For online and telephone bookings, a handling fee of HK$8 (Mondays to Fridays) or HK$10 (Weekends and Public Holidays) per ticket will be levied.