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Travels With My Wife: Painting Hong Kong from the Water and Air
23 March, 2021 - 10 April, 2021
James Yuncken
Travels With My Wife: Painting Hong Kong from the Water and Air
23 March – 10 April 2021
hours:
Tuesday – Friday 11am to 5pm,
Saturday 11am to 3pm
Good Friday CLOSED
Easter Saturday 11am to 3pm
admission: Free
…overwhelmingly industrial…somehow nevertheless romantic…
Travels With My Wife is a new series of small paintings by James Yuncken, exploring bustling harbour and airport scenes in Hong Kong.
My wife travels to Hong Kong about six times a year for work. I go sometimes to keep her company.
I didn’t expect a mega-city, an international finance hub to be fertile territory to paint. But first the airport – an artificial island in the South China Sea which sets a multitude of airliners against clouded mountains rising above chilling rows of apartment towers in one direction, or a host of dredges and ships in the other – and then the harbour where ships of all shapes, sizes and ages, overwhelmingly industrial, grubby, somehow nevertheless romantic, inhabit a haze, tropical and industrial where everything is just a bit unclear. I had to paint all that!
James Yuncken is a Melbourne based artist, working from a studio on Smith Street in Fitzroy.
James has exhibited frequently in Melbourne and Canberra since 1989.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2018 Improvisations, St Vincent’s Residency: Drawings from Caritas Christi, St Vincent’s Gallery, Fitzroy
2017 Represented 45 at 45, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2015 The Drawing Room, Prints, Drawings and Bas Relief, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2014 Places Nearby, More Inner Melbourne fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2012 Walking to Work, Melbourne, Inner East fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2011 Vox Pix, Voices and Images Together Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville
2010 Travelling North, Journey to Cape York fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2008 Abstraction and Space, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2005 Formal Considerations, 257 Church St, Richmond and On-line
2003 Sense of Place, SPAN Galleries, Melbourne
2001 Presence/Absence, SPAN Galleries, Melbourne
2000 Represented 8 x 8, Roar Studios, Fitzroy
1999 Represented 8 x 8, Roar Studios, Fitzroy
1998 Represented 3rd Annual Summer Show, Galerie helengory, Richmond
1997 First Steps, Galerie helengory, Richmond
1996 Represented A Four Art 19 ninety-six, Westspace
1995 Studio Landscape Exhibition, Smith Street Studio, Fitzroy
1993 Represented Swan Hill Print and Drawing Show
1992 Represented Studio One’s ’92 Pressing Annual Show, Spiral Arm Gallery, Canberra
1990 Represented Sun, Smoke and Steel, Studio One touring exhibition Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle
1989 Images in Different Genres, Dorette’s Bistro, Canberra
Travels with My Wife
My wife likes to travel. Travel is her great escape, from the daily grind of earning a living, to a world of places, experiences and romantic atmospheres that bring joy to her soul.
In 2018 Sophie’s journey to Hong Kong was different and she needed some support. This time it was travelling to work. Finding an everyday life in a foreign environment where you have no established friends or local connections is not the romance of travel. It’s a little daunting. I found myself – for first of many times – on a plane to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong – China: One Country, Two Systems: The Asian Century. An Asian mega-city, an international finance hub sporting an array of architectural show pieces promoting various brand-egos.
But what made an impression on me and what led me to paint was –
The airport: An artificial island in the South China Sea has spectacular views of cloud covered Lantau Mountain and its form signals China. The mountain is guarded by rows of apartment towers lined up like soldiers. Imagining a life there sends a shudder down my spine. Look in the opposite direction, beyond planes, runways, hangers, terminals and you’ll see the sea and ubiquitous clouds, haze, ships and busy swarms of dredges.
The harbour: The water, where ships come and go as they have, ever since and even before the British freebooters, thugs and drug runners stole it at gunpoint. Those same ships I saw from the airport, all shapes, sizes and ages, but mainly the grimy, ships of work and commerce, old, new, big and little.
What I found was, I guess, what was ever there: the gateway to southern China, to trade and riches.
A haze sits over it all: the tropical haze, the industrial haze. Everything is just that little unclear …