WEB EXCLUSIVE

Edouard Malingue has made the long trek across Queen’s Road Central, down Pedder Road, and up Des Voeux Road Central. His new space—easily double the size of his old one, which boasted a clever OMA design by which office and auxiliary space surrounded a central, off-axis exhibition area—is designed by the young architectural practice Beau Architects. The general typology remains; storage, social space, and working areas are clustered around the walls and windows, leaving the space for art floating in the center of the floorplan. And indeed, the art floats: it seems to levitate off of walls themselves surprisingly light and thin, between an unfinished ceiling that betrays the infrastructure of the gallery and an unorthodox metallic floor, seemingly making contact with neither surface. It’s the perfect environment for the current exhibition, though the very things that make it unique could make it troubling for other kinds of artists.

The space is somewhat meandering, making use of right angles in stacked spaces to open up unexpected lines of sight and allow for juxtapositions beyond those planned into the program. Many of the brightest spots of Malingue’s program are included in this opening exhibition: there is Nuri Kuzucan, the painter of architecture whose facades and cityscapes are a perfect fit for the vertical environment around the gallery, and there is Jeremy Everett, the brilliant artist whose dusty pink fireworks around Hong Kong created true paintings for the city during his solo exhibition last year. Locally, the stable is represented by Joao Vasco Paiva, who exhibits a new installation based on handmade vertical blinds, and Ko Sin Tung, a new addition who contributes prints of digital objects and framed representations of pure light.

Edouard Malingue Gallery is already well-known for its representation of heavy-hitters like Laurent Grasso, Callum Innes, Los Carpinteros, Zhang Huan, and Jannis Kounellis; with this exhibition, it makes clear an ambition to forge its own aesthetic path and community as well, largely by nurturing emerging artists. This is a hard thing to do in Hong Kong, but the energy levels here are on point.

“Invisible Light” is at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, until March 7, 2015.