Woaw Gallery is pleased to announce Around the World, Around the World, a major painting exhibition curated by co-founder of ATM Gallery – William Leung, featuring new works by artists from Europe, North and South America. The exhibition is on view from 24 September 2021 to 23 October 2021 at 5 Sun Street Wan Chai, Hong Kong.
Despite the current pandemic-related travel restrictions and lockdowns, Around the World, Around the World proposes a mobile look at contemporary art, and explicitly painting, from a global perspective. Inspired by Hong Kong’s multiethnic, diverse history and challenging current realities, the exhibition offers a decidedly transnational dialogue by bringing together artists from various countries, generations, and cultural backgrounds.
The title is an homage to the 1997 song of the same name by the French electronic/house band Daft Punk. The song’s only lyrics are “Around the World,” repeated exactly 144 times. The title charted in more than fifty countries worldwide, and thanks to its well-crafted chorus it became an unprecedented phenomenon of global communication.
All the featured artists share the desire to create and inhabit their own highly distinctive worlds by producing paintings that are entirely unique in style and content. Most of the works center on figures—sometimes human beings, other times abstracted hybrids or surreal, dreamlike organisms. Some of the pieces are markedly expressive and colorful, while others use a softer color palette and speak more delicately to the viewer.
The paintings communicate a painterly sophistication in constant motion, oscillating between elegance, refinement, and intricacy on the one hand and crudeness, naivete, and ostentation on the other. The exhibition is simultaneously brash and measured, accidental and deliberate, capturing various traits of a city at a moment of stark transition.