HdM Gallery is pleased to present a solo project by artist Sanyu (1895-1966) at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 from March 26 to 30. The exhibition of more than 20 works on paper, all of which are being shown for the first time in Hong Kong (and in Asia), focuses on Sanyu’s works in the 1920s, which was also the most creative and dynamic period of Sanyu’s career in France. 

Sanyu was born in 1895 in a wealthy merchant family in Nanchong, Sichuan Province. He studied painting and calligraphy with his father and the famous calligrapher Zhao Xi. In 1921, Sanyu went to France to study with the help of his brother where he chose to take courses at the Acad.mie Libre de la Grande Chaumi.re in Montparnasse. In 1929, his work was recognized by the collector and art dealer Henri-Pierre Roch., who in the space of four years bought a large number of Sanyu’s oil paintings and sketches and became his most important mentor. The “exotic techniques” of Asia enriched the European continent’s fantasy for an “alternative realm”, and similarly, “Parisian life” fulfilled the East’s yearning for “enlightenment”.

In 1932, Sanyu joined the Storm Society at the invitation of Pang Xunqin to help the development of China’s modern art movement. Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and Wu Guanzhong were inspired by Sanyu and Xu Beihong, the first generation of artists who studied in France after having settled there. It is undeniable that Sanyu played an important role in the trend of “going to the west” and “crossing to the east” in the field of art. At the same time, in the 1930s and 1940s, due to his failing marriage and brother’s eventual death, the combined pressure of his finances and his personal life made Sanyu fall into despair, as did his move to live in the United in the 1940’s. But he finally returned to Paris in the early 1950s. In 1963, Taiwan’s Minister of Education Huang Chi-lu visited Sanyu in France and invited him to teach at Taiwan’s National Normal University. However, for various reasons, this return trip did not take place. Three years later, Sanyu passed away in his Paris home.

Sanyu’s line drawings absorb the exaggerated deformation and planar characteristics of Fauvism. His use of ink and wash replaced charcoal. The casual and flexible lines of the sketches let the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape find a Western way of interpretation. In his works on paper, the artist simplified the details of the characters and weakened the three-dimensional body characteristics with plump limbs, which became his own unique style, in order to capture the body movements of the characters more quickly. In the works exhibited this time, we can see that Sanyu, a young man who had just arrived in Paris, made bold experiments when faced with the free creative environment of the Acad.mie de la Grande Chaumi.re. This learning experience laid the foundation for Sanyu’s aesthetics. In the remaining forty years of his painting career, he continued to depict the permanent theme of “nudes”.

Established for more than 16 years, HdM Gallery has been committed to the exchange and coexistence of Chinese and French cultures. As a bridge between Chinese and French cultures, the gallery has paid continuous attention to outstanding artists from East and West. The gallery also exhibited the works of modern abstract ink master T’ang Haywen at the 2024 Basel Art Fair in Hong Kong. All the works of Sanyu exhibited this time originally come from the collection of Henri-Pierre Roch., and were later purchased from his widow by Mr. Jean-Claude Riedel. HdM Gallery’s collaboration with the estate of Jean-Claude Riedel has made this exhibition possible.

Sanyu has exhibited in important international art institutions such as the Palais des Tuileries, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Mus.e du Louvre, the Maastricht Museum in Germany, the National Museum of History in Taipei, the International Institute of China, the Mus.e Guimet in Paris, the Mus.e d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Mus.e des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. His works have been collected by by institutions such as the Mus.e Cernuschi in Paris, the National Art Museum of China, the National Museum of History in Taipei, the Fubon Art Museum in Taipei, the Long Museum in Shanghai, the He Art Museum in Shunde, and the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing.

Address
Booth 3D21, Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong, China

Artist
Sanyu

Exhibition Dates
March 26 – 30, 2025

Website
https://hdmgallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/hdm_gallery

Contact
d@hdmgallery.com
+86 10 5978 9320

About HdM Gallery

Created in 2009 by Hadrien de Montferrand with the support of Laurent Dassault and Olivier Hervet, HdM Gallery specializes in all disciplines of contemporary art – painting, sculpture, video and installation – with a particular focus on Chinese artists. Based in Beijing, it opened a project space in Paris in 2021.

The gallery is dedicated to supporting recognized artists from different horizons; most of its Chinese artists are in the early stage of their career and the gallery promotes their work abroad. International artists on the other hand are more established and the gallery mainly attempts to raise awareness of their work in China.

Besides its normal exhibition program, HdM Gallery participates in art fairs in China and abroad including Art Basel Hong Kong, Art021 Shanghai, Art Brussels and Art Geneva, produces academic catalogues, and organizes institutional shows for its artists.

About Founders

Hadrien de Montferrand has long served as a bridge between the Art worlds of China and Europe. His more than seven years at various auction houses and Art institutions included roles as marketing director for ARTCURIAL, the largest French auction house, and for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Laurent Dassault , an entrepreneur to the core, helped to found Arquana, continental Europe’ s leading horse auction house, in 2006. His entrepreneurial spirit extends to his charitable activities as well: Laurent serves as the administrator of the “Friends of Pompidou Museum’ s Association” in Paris, and heads the development committee for the auction house ARTCURIAL.

Olivier Hervet graduated with an MA in Classics from Oxford University in 2008. After working for Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery since its inception in 2009 where he developed the gallery’ s network of young collectors, he became a partner in 2012 with the goal of opening a second space in China.

(Text and images courtesy of HdM Gallery)

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time”, an exhibition of recent films and video installations by Ho Tzu Nyen. This is the esteemed artist’s second exhibition with Kiang Malingue, showcasing three independent bodies of work: “Night March of Hundred Monsters” (2021), O for Opium (2023), and a suite of more than forty “Timepieces” (2023). Timepieces was first shown at Ho’s recent mid-career survey show, Time & the Tiger at the Singapore Art Museum, which subsequently travelled to Art Sonje Center, Hessel Museum of Art, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, next to be shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in November 2025.

Known for critically reflecting upon the construction of history, myth, ideas and identities by working across a range of media in the past two decades, Ho continues to explore subjects as diverse as yōkai (monsters, demons, or spectres as they are known in Japan) and its intertwining with histories of Japanese Imperialism; the history of the opium trade; and the concept of time in particular manifestations. “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time” is a structured exhibition that alludes to trailokya or the three realms, the religious division of the world into three domains: the netherworld, the earth, and heaven, allocated to the three-storied building of Kiang Malingue.

In the place of the netherworld, “Night March of Hundred Monsters” is an ongoing project that is directly inspired by the Japanese folkloric tradition of envisioning a horde of monsters parading through nocturnal darkness. For the two “Night March of Hundred Monsters” video installations that are shown in a quasi-cinema setting made specifically for the exhibition, Ho has observed the tradition and compiled, in his signature style, an animated encyclopaedia of monsters in which each individual yōkai is carefully depicted. In his picture scroll, however, one sees not only legendary monsters such as the Kitsune (Fox Spirit), Kappa (River Sprite) or Tanuki (Raccoon Dog). A number of historical Japanese individuals who participated in the occupation of the Malayan Peninsula during World War II, including General Tomoyuki Yamashita and the wartime secret agent Yutaka Tani—both of whom were widely known as the Tiger of Malaya, have found their way into Ho’s bestiary. Ho further complicates the structure of the origin stories by identifying the monsters in historical events: The Illusionary Monk, for example, is identified as the many Japanese soldiers who metamorphosed into monks in the last days of World War II. Another fabled creature, Mokumokuren (Many Eyes of the Screen), is described as an analogy for the Thought Police in George Orwell’s 1984. These creatures remain firmly embedded in the everyday imagination, imputed into the realm of popular culture through Japanese media such as anime and manga.

In the second story, O for Opium, Ho revisits the history of the aestheticisation of opium and the opium trade, presenting an intricate image of the substance. The artist layers an array of visual materials atop each other: Archive footage of the opium trade in the Golden Triangle region; scenes from films in which opium plays a significant role, including Once Upon a Time in America (1984)and Rouge (1988); and an animated index of opium-related objects composed of smoke. These overlapping layers demonstrate the ambrosial, phantasmagorical effects of the substance, with history unfolding like a hazy, opiate-laced dream. First shown at the Thailand Biennale in 2023, O for Opium is a poignant treatise on the power, movement, and glorification of opium, a unique colonial instrument that helped shape the modern world.

The last story, which addresses the heterogeneous quality of time, consists of forty-three individual screen-based “Timepieces” that explore multiple temporalities. Co-commissioned by Singapore Art Museum, Art Sonje Center, and M+, in collaboration with Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Sharjah Art Foundation, the works are presented on customized screens that render time physical, testifying to time’s paradoxical materiality, elasticity, and relativity. Pondering time as an ethereal thing that is paradoxically all-encompassing, Ho also ensures that individual “Timepieces” are ontologically different: from one-second animated videos in an eternal loop, to applications—such as Perfect Lovers (Gonzalez-Torres) or C4 (Harrison’s Clock)—running on a 24-hour cycle that computationally corresponds to local time, fastened steadily to lived realities. The suite of “Timepieces” is an accompaniment to Ho’s major installation T for Time (2023), presently on view at Mudam Luxembourg, contemplating our contemporary experience of time as rooted in European concepts of linear progression, regulated by the Gregorian calendar, and networked by computers. Ho’s ambitious project raises the question of whether it is possible to reclaim the unassimilated experiences of time that were manifest in Southeast Asia prior to the influence of the West. As described by Ho: “In many ways, the challenge of this project was how the multiple can be composed, and how these different kinds of times can coexist without hierarchy and without collapsing into an empty pluralism.” 

Opening Reception
Thursday, March 20, 2025 | 6 – 8 PM

Address
10 Sik On Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 12 PM – 6 PM

Artist
Ho Tzu Nyen

Exhibition Dates
March 20 – May 13, 2025

Website
https://kiangmalingue.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/kiangmalingue/

Contact
office@kiangmalingue.com
+852 28100317

About Artist

A plethora of historical references dramatised by musical scores and allegorical lighting make up the pillars of Ho Tzu Nyen’s complex practice that primarily constitutes video and installation. Features in their own right, each work unravels unspoken layers of Southeast Asian histories whilst equally pointing to our own personal unknowns. Permeating Ho’s work is a pervasive sense of ambiguity, theatricality and unease, augmented by a series of deliberate literary, art historical and musical references. 

Ho Tzu Nyen has been widely exhibited with one person exhibitions at Mudam, Luxembourg (2025), CCS Bard, New York (2024), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022), the Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg (2019), Kunstverein, Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2018), TPAM, Yokohama (2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012) and Artspace, Sydney (2011), amongst others. He also represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024, New York (2024), Thailand Biennale 2023, Chiang Rai (2023), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022), Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2022), 13th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Busan (2019), Aichi Triennial 2019, Toyota City and Nagoya City (2019), Home Work 8, Beirut (2019), Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah (2019), Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2018), National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2018), Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Dhaka (2018), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016), Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016), Times Museum, Guangzhou (2013), and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012). He has participated in numerous international film festivals including Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (2012) and the 41st Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes International Film Festival in France (2009). He was an Artist-in-Residency at the DAAD (Berlin) from 2015 to 2016, and the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012 to 2015).

(Text and images courtesy of Kiang Malingue)