Composition, Repetition

Research Postgraduate Seminar

Composition, Repetition: On Materiality, Ha Bik Chuen’s Prints and Motherboards

Date: 7 December 2021 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Venue: CPD 2.45, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Speaker: Michelle Wong, PhD candidate, HKU

Abstract

This presentation introduces the ongoing PhD project on the late Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen (b.1925, Guangdong, d. 2009, Hong Kong). A self-taught artist who did not receive any academic training in art, Ha’s prolific creative output includes works across media as prints, sculptures, ink and mixed media paintings, and collage books that were discovered posthumously. The archive he left behind includes 50 years’ worth of exhibition documentation and ephemera, including photographs of over 2500 exhibitions that he took inside and outside of Hong Kong. This presentation focuses primarily on Ha Bik Chuen’s prints and print matrices which he called motherboards. It analyses the iconography and the production process of both motherboards and prints, to explore how Ha as a self-trained artist experimented through composition, materials and repetition.