osage

Osage Gallery, Kwun Tong
5/F, Kian Dai Industrial Building
73-75 Hung To Road
Kwun Tong, Kowloon, HongKong

CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
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Press Release
Attention Arts and Features Editors

20 May 2011
For immediate release

Staged Fictions: Patty Chang, Ho Tzu Nyen and Adrian Wong
24.05.2011 – 2.06.2011 / 14.06.2011 – 18.07.2011
Reception: 27.05.2011, 6.00pm to 8.00pm
Artists: Patty CHANG, HO Tzu Nyen, Adrian WONG
Featuring: David Kelley
Curator: Pauline J. YAOMelons (at a loss), 1998, by Patty Chang, Single channel video

Staged Fictions is a group exhibition featuring three artists—Patty Chang (New York), Ho Tzu Nyen(Singapore) and Adrian Wong (Hong Kong)—whose works explore strategies of making and re-making
real and imagined narratives through film, video, performance and installation. Comprised of mostly video
and installation, the works featured in Staged Fictions are unified by their departure from singular,essentialist, or fixed points of origin. Instead they embrace moments of bifurcation, ambiguity andobscurity through blurring the lines between performance and choreography and real-life documentation.
Such contemporary processes of mythmaking are designed to unveil the construction of culture and thebody of ‘history’. As these predominantly filmic explorations reveal, invented encounters, imagined
histories and fabricated scenarios can overlap with the realities and attributes of our contemporarycondition, giving way to an ‘embodiment of making’ that is at once unavoidably real and eminentlyimagined.
New York artist Patty Chang is well known for her performative artworks which deal with issues of gender,sexuality, and identity. Using video as a method of documentation and interpretation, Chang’s
performances are marked by their visceral and confrontational nature, and often contain undertones of
discomfort leading to pain or distress. For Staged Fictions, Chang presents a recent piece filmed in
China’s Xinjiang Province and a new collaboration with David Kelley shot along the border zone of China,
Laos and Vietnam. Both similarly interweave moments of real trauma with disjunctive or fantasty-likenarratives that obliquely point to modernizing forces affecting the region. Staged Fictions represents thefirst time these works have been shown in Asia.
The two existing works by filmmaker and artist Ho Tzu Nyen in Staged Fictions meditate on thedialectical relationship between painting and cinema, the still and the moving image. Utama Every Namein History is I (2003), a short film that meditates on Utama, a legendary figure in pre-colonial Malay history
who is responsible for coining the name Singapore and whose questionable status suggests an
ambiguous multiplicity of possible identities. Ho’s spectacular Earth (2009) features some fifty actorsstrewn about a carefully constructed set resembling a modern day rubbish dump. A study in light,
composition and slowed movements luxuriously captured on film, Earth stages late renaissance Italianand French tableau vivant paintings as post-apocalyptic, disaster-ridden silent dramas.
Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong’s work crisscrosses disciplines of installation, design, performance, andtheatre; and engages in idiosyncratic fields of research that mine personal and collective histories. Shownfor the first time in Hong Kong, his video Umbrellahead, I Will Find You (2010) is a thirty-minute theater
production that was the culmination of a three-month intensive research project relating to urban
redevelopment in the Western district on Hong Kong Island. Wong’s video Sang Yat Fai Lok (2008) isalso the product of his research-based practice, this time into his familial ties to the Pearl River Delta,
namely his estranged great uncle who was a local television personality.

--END—ABOUT STAGED FICTIONSArtists:

Patty Chang, Ho Tzu Nyen, Adrian Wong

Curator:Pauline J. YAO

Venue:

Osage Kwun Tong

Address:

5/F, Kian Dai Industrial Building, 73-75 Hung To Road, Kwun Tong,Kowloon, Hong Kong

Tel:(852) 2793 4817

Exhibition Duration:

24 May 2011 till 6 June 2011 / 14 June till 18 July 2011

Reception:

27 May 2011 (Friday), 6.00pm

Reception Sponsors:

[ENCL.]APPENDIX A: ABOUT THE ARTISTS
APPENDIX B: PRESS IMAGESAPPENDIX A: ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Patty Chang (b.1972, USA) is a performance and video artist and a nominated finalist for the Hugo Boss
Prize in 2008. Her work Flotsam Jetsam, 2007 (with David Kelley) is in the collection of the Museum ofModern Art and her recent work Minor (2009) was screened at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight series in2010. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She lives and works inNew York.
Ho Tzu Nyen (b.1976, Singapore) works primarily as a film and audiovisual artist. His first feature film,HERE, premiered at the 41st Director’s Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival in 2009. He has exhibited widelyin biennials and festivals around the world, including the Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), the Fukuoka Asian
Art Triennial (2005), the Singapore Biennale (2006), and the Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009) in Queensland,Australia. He has been chosen to represent Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale this June. He lives andworks in Singapore.
Adrian Wong (b.1980, USA) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performanceand film. Trained in Developmental Psychology at Stanford University, Wong later received his MFA in
Sculpture at Yale University and soon after relocated to Hong Kong. Wong’s work has been exhibited at
the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Hong Kong, Shanghai MOCA, and the Kunsthalle Wien. He is currently
exhibiting his solo exhibition, “Troglodyte See the Light” at LTD Los Angeles. He lives and works in Hong
Kong and Los Angeles.
Featuring:David Kelley (b. 1972, USA) is an artist working interchangeably between photography, video, sculptureand installation. He received his MFA from the University of California in Irvine and is a recent alumni ofthe Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Kelley's work has been shown ingalleries, museums, and theaters around the world. His project with Patty Chang Flotsam Jetsam (2007)
was exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 New Directors New Films Festival, inMassMoCA's Eastern Standard show and won the Golden Pyramid at the Cairo IMFAY Media Arts
Festival. He is currently Professor of Photography at Wellesley College. He lives between New York cityand Wellesley, MA.
Special Thanks to the Asian Cultural Council, NY and Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris for their support ofRoute 3

APPENDIX B: PRESS IMAGESMinor (2009) by Patty Chang
Single channel video

Sang Yat Fai Lok (2008) by Adrian Wong
Single channel video

Earth (2009) by Ho Tzu Nyen
Single channel video

ABOUT OSAGE GALLERYOsage Gallery is devoted to the exhibition and promotion of international and Asian contemporary visualarts, exploring the diverse and complex artistic relationships between the different regions of Asia, andbeyond that, of the artistic relationships between Asia and other parts of the world. Osage Gallery
represents some of the most exciting and significant artists in the region. The gallery also works closelywith international critics and curators to present exhibitions and projects that address themes and issues
relevant to our times.
In addition to organising major group and thematic exhibitions, Osage Gallery has organised solo
exhibitions by some of the most significant artists in Asia, such as Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Shen
Shaomin and Jiang Zhi from China, as well as other Asian artists such as Lee Kit (Hong Kong), Wilson
Shieh (Hong Kong), Nipan Oranniwesna (Thailand) and Charwei Tsai (Taiwan).
Osage Gallery is part of the Osage Group www.osageartideas.com encompassing the much-celebrated
Osage Art Foundation, Osage Art Consultancy and Osage Design.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Osage Gallery, Kwun Tong
Points of Ellipsis…
Curated by Arianna Gellini and Sonja Ng
Artists: Juan Alcazaren, Ranelle Dial, Roberto Chabet, Nilo Ilarde, Lani Maestro, Tozer Pak, Gary-Ross
Pastrana, Chris Villanueva and William Lim
24.05.2011 – 2.06.2011 / 14.06.2011 – 5.07.2011

Opening Reception: 27.05.2011, 6pm
Current Exhibitions
Osage Gallery, Soho
LSSIISLTENNTCurated by David ChanArtists: Poklong Anading
Until 20.06.2011
Please visit www.osagegallery.com for more information.

MEDIA ENQUIRIESJade Enge
Marketing Director | Osage
Email jadeenge@osageartideas.com
Telephone + 852 2793 4817