“When I pressed down into the clay, it felt like I was giving it a heart.”

Tan Xuejiao, participant


In 2003, British sculptor Antony Gormley invited some 300 residents of Xiangshan village (now Huadong Town in Guangzhou city) to make approximately 200,000 sculptures out of locally sourced clay. He offered only three simple instructions: each figurine was to be hand-sized, capable of standing upright, and have two eyes looking just above the horizon. Otherwise, each maker was free to improvise on their own.

In the end, the sculptures would be assembled into a sea of upward-turned faces, a ‘field’ that reflected the mass of humanity and the region's vast territory. The collective work, titled Asian Field, would go on to tour China and sites around the world before entering the M+ Collections in 2015.

As Pauline Yao (Lead Curator, Visual Art) and young local art practitioners readied the installation for display at Antony Gormley: Asian Field in 2021, the artist and some of the original makers looked back on what the experience of moulding this mass of figures meant to them, accompanied by archival footage of the production process and portraits by Zhang Hai’er.

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Join us online on 11 May with British sculptor Antony Gormley in the inaugural session of the M+ Lars Nittve Keynote Lecture Series.  Register now

Presenting Supporter of M+ Lars Nittve Keynote Lecture Series: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Hong Kong
 

Video Transcript : Antony Gormley: Asian Field

“Nowadays, calligraphy seems to have little practical meaning in society. But we are interested in finding out what role calligraphy can still play in society.”

Zheng Guogu


Calligraphy Peach Blossom Garden (2004), for example, is a temporary garden installation. Calligraphy texts and Xuan paper have been transformed into a flowing river underneath a wooden bridge. The scene appears alongside fake peach trees and a wax waterfall. This meditative space subverts traditional methods of presenting calligraphy, reinventing the form through modern materials.

In this video interview, the three founders discuss how and why they started the collective, and their approach towards calligraphy as an art form.

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Video Transcript : Yangjiang Group: Subverting Calligraphy

“To paint is to create a space beyond words.”

Yeung Tong Lung

In 1990 Yeung Tong Lung established the Quart Society, now considered to have been the first autonomous art space in Hong Kong. It provided a platform for artists to show art outside of the mainstream and in particular to respond to the conditions of pre-handover, post-Tiananmen Hong Kong. As such, Yeung played a significant role in Hong Kong's avant-garde movement of the 1990s. Largely self-taught, he is part of a generation of artists recognised for their distinctly local response to modernism.

In this video, Yeung discusses different aspects of his practice—from abstract to figurative—and shares his thoughts about art and being an artist.

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Video Transcript : Yeung Tong Lung: A Space Beyond Words

“If you don’t give or take, what’s the point of life? If you give up something, the thing that you give up also shapes who you are.”

Leung Mee-ping


In the warehouse of Hong Kong artist Leung Mee-ping, you’ll find no shortage of discarded objects: boxes of sun-dried teabags and human hair, piles of stuffed animals, suitcases stuffed with sickness bags. Over the course of her career, Leung has collected thousands of these byproducts of human existence and repurposed them into artworks, finding meaning in the sheer scale of things that the world produces.

Leung takes M+ on a tour of her practice, from her warehouse space to community collection centres and landfills, reflecting along the way on the lifecycle of materials and the beauty that comes from sorting and understanding the things that we abandon.

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