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

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Press Release

26 July 2011
For immediate release

Attention Arts and Features Editors

To Be Continued– Hong Kong

Imagined Geographies

12.08.2011 – 21.9.2011
Reception: 12.08.2011, 6.00pm to 8.00pm
Osage Gallery, Kwun Tong

13.08.2011 – 11.9.2011
Osage Gallery, Soho

Artist: Roberto CHABET
Curators: Ringo BUNOAN and Nilo ILARDERoberto Chabet’s ‘To Be Continued: Hong Kong’ brings together selected works by the artist from the1980s to the present that utilize his signature materials - plywood, metal sheets and other commonand found objects. Highlighting process and the provisional nature of these materials, the exhibition
illuminates a key aspect of Chabet’s practice, which gives precedence to the fugitive and contingent
nature of art.

Included in the exhibition are works from ‘To Be Continued’, a landmark survey exhibition of Chabet’splywood works that was first presented in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore - La Salle
College of the Arts last January 2011. In these works, Chabet uses plywood panel boards, a material,
which has become not only the surface and support of his paintings and installations, but to a large
extent their subject matter and content.

Chabet pays homage to the breakthroughs in representation by the early avant-gardes and similarly
extends the use of ‘real materials in real space’. By doing so he dissolves the barrier between art andlife and creates art that cuts through illusion. His aporetic use of objects and shelves attached onto
wall panels blurs the distinction between the two-dimensional space of painting and the threedimensionality of sculpture, presenting itself not just as a substitute for reality, but is actually reality
itself.
His seemingly ‘purely’ geometric and abstract plywood constructions reveal finer hints. Often hewould juxtapose them with particular everyday objects that would appear and re-appear in his otherinstallations and become part of his familiar inventory of anxious objects—neon lights, clocks, boats,shells, clipboards, mirrors, maps, tables, parachutes, globes, walking canes, billiard balls—apparently
random yet linked by the idea of temporality, process, voyage, and a fascination with history, time andspace.
Displacement and shifts in meaning are recurring undertones
in Chabet’s vast body of works, and are heightened especiallyin his ‘diptych’ installations and companion pieces such as‘Intermediate Geography’, a two-part installation first made in2005, which is re-installed for the second time in Hong Kong
this year. The work is a study of textures, angles, precisionand contradictions, and other dichotomies. Here Chabet
contrasts the blankness of raw, unpainted plywood boards
with the undulating sheen of galvanized iron sheets andcombines these with neon texts, a body bag stuffed with avelvet comforter, a photograph of a secret police archive
reproduced in a book, paintings of the Unabomber’s cabin,and several upturned houses whose insides are lined withmirrors.
‘Onethingafteranother’ (2011) is Chabet’s largest and mostrecent installation using GI sheets laid out on the floor,industrial emergency lamps and neon texts - objects of physical and metaphorical illumination.
Referring to the post-war utterance of Donald Judd, the work echoes the idea of seriality andprogression in Minimal art, while signifying a continuum, which is constantly re-called, re-ordered, reassembled - always in flux.
Similarly his new series of drawings, ‘Imagined Geographies’ (2011), exhibited simultaneously inOsage Soho, manifest an internal volatility, a precariousness that can be seen in the quivering pencil
lines that delineate and demarcate spaces. Also installed one after the other, they reveal a processthat belies our understanding of place, which for Chabet is neither fixed, nor predetermined, rather it
is a fluid, ambiguous field that points to an elsewhere.
Roberto Chabet’s ‘To Be Continued: Hong Kong’ is presented by Osage Art Foundation incooperation with King Kong Art Projects Unlimited and is part of the ‘Chabet: 50 Years’ year-longseries of exhibitions in various venues in Manila, Hong Kong and Singapore throughout 2011 - 2012.
The series is organized by King Kong Art Projects Unlimited, an independent artist group based inManila, in celebration of Roberto Chabet's fifty years of pioneering conceptual work and his role inshaping Philippine art. For more information, please visit www.kingkongartprojects.org.

--END—ABOUT TO BE CONTINUED – HONG KONG
Artist:Roberto Chabet

Curators:

Ringo BUNOAN and Nilo ILARDE

Venue:

Osage Gallery, 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:

12 August – 21 September 2011

Reception:

12 August 2011 (Friday), 6.00pm

ABOUT IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIESArtist:Roberto Chabet

Curators:

Ringo BUNOAN and Nilo ILARDE

Venue:

Osage Gallery, Kwun TongTel:

45 Caine Rd, Lwr Ground Shop 1, Cnr Old Bailey St, Soho
Central, Hong Kong(852) 2537 0688

Exhibition Duration:

13 August – 11 September 2011

Address:

APPENDIX A: ABOUT THE ARTIST
Roberto Chabet

Roberto Chabet is a pioneering Filipino conceptual artist. Since his first exhibition in 1961, Chabet hasquestioned and critiqued modernity through his art, thereby establishing the foundations forcontemporary art in the Philippines. His works, ranging from painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, andinstallation, resist easy categorization and oversimplified binary systems espoused by modern thought.
Using mostly ordinary and found material, he insists on a more inclusive approach to art, a search for thesublime not just in abstract ideas but also in the immediacy of the quotidian and the commonplace.
Chabet studied Architecture at the University of Santo Tomas where he graduated in 1961. He had his
first solo exhibition at the Luz Gallery in the same year. He was the founding Museum Director of the CCPfrom 1967 - 1970 where he initiated the first Thirteen Artists Awards with a goal in giving recognition toyoung artists whose works 'show a recentness, a turning away from the past and familiar modes of artmaking'. He led the 1970s conceptual art group Shop 6 and taught for over thirty years at the UP Collegeof Fine Arts, where he advocated a kind of practice that gave precedence to idea over form. Since the1970s, he has also been organising landmark exhibitions featuring vanguard works by young artists, manyof whom are among the most active and innovative artists in Manila today. He is the recipient of the1972 Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the 1972 Araw ng Maynila Award for the Visual Arts and the 1998
Centennial Honor for the Arts.

APPENDIX B: PRESS IMAGES FOR‘TO BE CONTINUED – HONG KONG’ AT OSAGE GALLERY, KWUN TONG

Right:
PIER AND OCEAN (1996/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic and hinges, 243.84cm X 670.56cm X
365.76cm
Left:
BOAT (1996/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic, boat and framed drawings, 243.84cm X

609.6cm X 487.68cm

CARGO AND DECOY (1989/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic, wooden sawhorses,Dimensions Variable
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE 2.1 (1997/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic, metalpole, camouflage net, Dimensions variable
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE 2.2 (1997/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic, army
poncho, 182.88cm X 60.96cm X 15.24cm

Right:OBSERVATORY 1 (2002/2010) by Roberto Chabet Plywood, acrylic, photo paper with braille on clipboards,neon, 2 panels, 243.84cm X 487.68cm
Middle:PICTURES IN ORDINARY TIMES (1992/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Tree trunk, plywood, acrylic, metal

brackets, neon, 304.8cm X 365.76cm X 60.96cm
Left:
OBSERVATORY 2 (2002/2010) by Roberto Chabet, Plywood, acrylic, wooden boat, neon, frameddrawings, 243.84cm x 487.68cm x 121.92 cm

INTERMEDIATE GEOGRAPHY (2005) by Roberto Chabet, installation, Dimensions Variable

APPENDIX C: PRESS IMAGES FOR ‘IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES’ AT OSAGE GALLERY, SOHO

Roberto Chabet, Imagined Geographies (I.XXX) vi 2011, pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 cm
Photograph: MM Yu, Courtesy the artist, King Kong Art Projects and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Roberto Chabet, Imagined Geographies (I.XXX) viii 2011, pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 cm
Photograph: MM Yu, Courtesy the artist, King Kong Art Projects and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Roberto Chabet, Imagined Geographies (I.XXX) XXii 2011, pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 cm
Photograph: MM Yu, Courtesy the artist, King Kong Art Projects and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Roberto Chabet, Imagined Geographies (I.XXX) xxvi 2011, pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 cm
Photograph: MM Yu, Courtesy the artist, King Kong Art Projects and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

ABOUT OSAGE GALLERYOsage Gallery is devoted to the exhibition and promotion of international and Asian contemporary
visual arts, exploring the diverse and complex artistic relationships between the different regions ofAsia, and beyond 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 closely with international critics and curators to present exhibitions and projects that addressthemes 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 Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore).
Osage Gallery is part of the Osage Group www.osageartideas.com encompassing the Osage Art
Foundation, Osage Art Consultancy and Osage Design.
Please visit www.osagegallery.com for more information.

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Email jadeenge@osageartideas.com
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