Stanley Shum: Love is All you Need

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Stanley Shum is one of Hong Kong’s newly-bred visual artists. He is adept in applying bright-coloured bands, hues, shadows and construction to create an overall atmosphere. Through a virtual scene and natural overlapping of sights of mountains and plains, Mr Shum leads spectators into a resplendent and yet vast new world.

This exhibition presents Mr Shum’s interests in and concerns about relocation, the order of power and changes in regional culture.

From his family background, Stanley Shum looks at the changes in social development. He presents a combined visual story of himself and his social groups. He uses his father’s swimming from China to Hong Kong, his childhood memories and his family’s emigration as his creation background and the breadth of this exhibition. He hopes that, in this confusing and scary social situation, people will reshape their genuine identities, reflect on their personal and social relationships, and explore a new picture of life in the new world.

The light and yet extremely heavy exhibition slogan “Love is all you need” is the core of this exhibition. It is a new understanding and introspection of “love”, which is simple and yet complex. It touches on the struggle of where affection should heed in the new era.

”Love is all you need” are lyrics of a single of the Beatles of the U.K. . The song exhibits how people treat one another with optimism, positivism and simplicity in the new hippies’ era. It emphasizes the human strength of mutual-care and supporting one another unconditionally.

The exhibition will disambiguate this song’s lyrics and introduce another perspective. It will argue that love is necessary in a restrained society and query whether the affection is genuine and whether there is room for choosing love and affection.

The exhibition kicks off with a painting 《Game》. Stanley Shum re-enacts Henri Matisse’s works “Dance II”. He changes the happy, harmonious, light and boundless-effort dancing scenes. Through the addition of a symbolic system, power and a golden badge-shaped shuttlecock made of stainless steel, “never-dropping shuttlecock” is a game of the most simple and direct standards. In the game, participants are requested to cooperate or compete under well-established rules to achieve the objectives. And the game of “two men with three feet”, with the two men hand-in-hand, doubtlessly will soul up the difficulties of such a game. The naked person, who is playing the game, conceals the mutual competition and constraint in his social group. In his latest exhibition, Mr Shum adopts many classical lyrics and verses from books, which complement the related visual elements. His latest paintings touch upon multicultural connotations. Nevertheless, visitors can easily feel that his works suffuse quiet emotional thoughts, which experience the city’s pulsation.