In the Show – 3rd January 2012

In “Vision of Nature, Lost & Found”, eight artists’ show their perspective of nature in an Asian context. The exhibition is part of the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s guest curator programme, now in its third year. This time the curator is the director of the Mori Art Museum, Fumio Nanjo.

“Lost and Found” is an exhibition about nature and art.So is “Ex Libris”, an exhibition of paintings by Australian artist James McGrath which is showing at Cat Street Gallery until 29th January. In 2010, James was given access to an ancient library in Prague that holds over 125,000 volumes of the world’s finest philosophical and religious texts. As a result he created the series called “Ex Libris”, in which centuries-old books and manuscripts form a backdrop for images from nature.

Pedro Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In” is a departure for the Spanish director in the sense that it combines his usual obsessions with elements of a horror or sci-fi film. Antonio Banderas works with the director for the first time in 21 years to play a mad-scientist protagonist who has been trying to create a new and tougher human skin. He’s been experimenting on a young captive woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), who he is moulding to fit his requirements. For much of the film, Vera wears a skin-coloured body stocking that looks like a second skin, and practises yoga to maintain her sanity. And then, one day, a man in a tiger costume breaks into the house. Well, it all sounds at least a little offbeat. Gary Pollard reviews it.

For the past month the local video and new media art collective Videotage has been presenting the One World Exposition, which ends on the coming Sunday. Curated by Isaac Leung and Li Zhenhua, it’s an umbrella project that brings together artists from Hong Kong and the mainland for symposia, exhibitions, artist’s talks, performances and screenings of Chinese media art.

And we end this week’s show with the Japanese art of Noh theatre. It’s full of stylised movement and music, and – of course – those famous masks. For some of us though, it’s not so easy to understand what’s going on. Last summer, two theatre groups, the Oshima Noh Theatre and the international Theatre Nohgaku, joined forces to give non-Japanese speakers in Hong Kong a better chance to understand the art form.