Trisha Shetty (Editor)

K11 Art Foundation

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Formation
  
2010

Founded at
  
Hong Kong

Founder
  
Adrian Cheng

K11 Art Foundation

Website
  
www.k11artfoundation.org

The K11 Art Foundation (KAF) is a non-profit art foundation registered in Hong Kong that supports the development of Chinese contemporary art from Greater China by providing creative incubation platforms to nurture young talents and brings them to the international stages.

Contents

History and mission

KAF was founded in 2010 by Adrian Cheng, one of the world's youngest billionaires, with a mission to raise the profile of contemporary Chinese art.

KAF aims to promote Chinese contemporary art, and to incubate young Chinese artists and curators through various platforms; with the extensive network and resources of K11 in Hong Kong and Mainland China, it offers the Chinese public a diverse range of programs and exhibitions through research, initiatives and partnerships that foster the appreciation of arts and culture in Greater China.

K11 Art Village

The K11 Art Village in Wuhan is an example of how promising young artists could establish themselves while making art accessible to all. This is achieved through the Artist-in-Residence Programme, which invites those with passion and a creative, unique thinking to the 11 artist studios in the village. The participants are able to cultivate their artistic accomplishments by making use of the village’s resources and networks. Programmes are also in place to give further support by bringing the artists’ works to the national and international stage.

The K11 Art Village hosts open activities and exhibitions for the artists-in-residence as well as features works of renowned artists to bring art into the community, so that the public could interact with the artists through various performances, screenings or talks.

The village will be relocated to the first K11 Art Mall in Wuhan opening in May 2017, equip with studios, exhibition spaces.

Exhibitions

Master of impressionism – Claude Monet

KAF organized, with the Musée Marmottan Monet, the first ever exhibition of Claude Monet in mainland China. The exhibition re-introduced Monet’s illusionistic style of what the artist sees rather than perceives and which gave birth to the Impressionist movement in the late 19th century.

The show included 40 original Monet paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, including the iconic Water Lily and Wisteria, and 12 original paintings by Impressionist artists Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Half of the Monet paintings owned by Musée Marmottan Monet, which has the largest collection of Monet's works in the world, were in the exhibition. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Musée Marmottan Monet and held at the Chi K11 Art Museum inside K11 Art Mall in Shanghai, from March 8 to June 15, 2014, and attracted 3409,000 visitors.

The China Symposium in The Armory Show

KAF supported the China Symposium that was held on the two most visited days (March 8–9) of the 2014 Armory Show, New York’s leading fair for contemporary and modern art.

The Symposium was held in conjunction with the Armory Focus: China section of the fair. It provided fresh insight into the dynamic landscape of Chinese contemporary art by showcasing a selection of 17 established and emerging galleries from mainland China and Hong Kong, many of which had never exhibited outside China before. The China Symposium brought together speakers from Asia and beyond, including leading artists, journalists, curators, collectors, gallerists, and academics for conversations that elaborated and clarified the state of Chinese contemporary art. It presented a comprehensive overview of the art scene in China for a general New York audience.

Inside China - L’Intérieur du GÉant

The exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Geant inaugurated a three-year collaboration between the K11 Art Foundation and Palais de Tokyo (Paris), dedicated to the discovery of emerging art scenes in China and France, with a series of presentations in both countries.

It was first exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) October 2014, and rotated to Hong Kong in 2015 with two new participated artists; in which it presented six Chinese artists in dialogue with five French artists. Artists included in the show were: Cheng Ran, Mathis Collins, Renaud Jerez, Li Gang, Edwin Lo, Jonathan Martin, Nadar, Aude Pariset, Wu Hao, Yu Ji and Zhao Yao.

The 2nd “CAFAM Future” Exhibition: The Reality Representation of Chinese Young Art

The exhibition was launched under a 3 years collaborative plan between KAF and Central Academy of Fine Art Museum (CAFAM), and this exhibition was devoted to discovering and supporting Chinese young art talents, which included over 90 Chinese artists. After the Beijing exhibition was held in January 2015, the Hong Kong exhibition was launched in May 2015.

Event Horizon

Event Horizon is one of the most extensive global public art installation projects that display large-scale public sculpture installations by English artist Sir Antony Gormley. KAF is the lead partner of Event Horizon of Hong Kong station which presented by the British Council in November 2015.

31 sculptures by Antony Gormley were installed across a kilometer wide zone of Hong Kong Central and Western district at both street level and building tops. Hong Kong was the first Asian city to stage those sculptures following presentations in London, Rotterdam, New Work, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design was a three-day academic conference co-organized by KAF, the University of Leicester and UK Trade & Investment during 13 – 15 November 2015.

The conference drew together museum professionals, museum designers, gallery and exhibitions curators and museum design researchers internationally, to explore and discuss new approaches to the future developments in design for the cultural sector through keynotes presentations, papers, panels and workshops.

Media—Dalí

KAF co-operated with Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation to launch the temporary exhibition Media-Dalí from 5 Nov 2015 to 15 Feb 2016 at Chi K11 Art Museum in K11 Art Mall in Shanghai. 240 original works and media works by Salvador Dalí were carefully selected from over 4,000 artworks and archives in Figueres, Spain.

The Media-Dalí exhibition was in dialogue with two shows, Shanghai Gesture and Our Real, Your Surreal, each exemplifying the legacy of surrealism within contemporary China.

Shanghai Gesture included three of China’s most mature and wide-ranging contemporary painters: Wang Xingwei (simplified Chinese: 王兴伟; traditional Chinese: 王興偉), Zhou Tiehai (simplified Chinese: 周铁海; traditional Chinese: 周鐵海), and Zhang Enli (simplified Chinese: 张恩利; traditional Chinese: 張恩利).

Our Real, Your Surreal presented a selection of emerging Chinese artists hosting a cross-genre exhibition. It included installations by Wang Xin, Zhang Ding, video pieces by Lu Yang and Ye Funa and works by painters Geng Yini and Wang Buke. These younger artists worked on the edge of the real and surreal, using mediums across paint, photography, performance and new media.

WE: A Community of Chinese Contemporary Artists

Presented by KAF at at Chi K11 Art Museum in K11 Art Mall in Shanghai, WE: A Community of Chinese Contemporary Artists featured over 50 artworks spanning across a wide range of medium such as painting, sculpture, installation, performance art and theatre performance, the exhibition showed the diverse individualistic thoughts and spirits of the many contemporary Chinese artists working today.

The show's divided up into four main parts: Perception/ Experience; Substance/ Language; Phenomenon/ Event; and Theater/ Performance. A program of lectures and interactive performances has been taking place in the basement spot weekly during the exhibition.

Online course with MoMA: Seeing Through Photographs

In 2016, KAF and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) jointly launched a free online course Seeing Through Photographs (Chinese version) plus a series of educational programmes, to promote a deeper understanding towards the history of photography among art enthusiasts in the Greater China Region.

KAF also set up an experience center in K11 Art Mall in Shanghai in order to promote the online course to a wider audience.

Other exhibitions

  • Billboard Project - Felix Gonzalez-Torres - On view at tram shelters: Date: 02.03.2015 – 29.03.2015, On view at K11 Art Mall: Date: 09.03.2015 – 17.03.2015
  • The Tell-Tale Heart - 12.03.2015 – 17.04.2015
  • Chai Wan Mei Art and Design Festival 2015 - 14.03.2015 – 15.03.2015
  • Tianzhou Chen Solo Exhibition – 24.06.2015 – 06.09.2015
  • Cinematheque. Venue: chi K11 Shanghai Art Museum – 16.03.2015 – 31.05.2015
  • Collaborating organizations

    Among its prominent international collaborations are the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Musee Marmottan in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Armory Show in New York, Institutes of Contemporary Art, London (ICA), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Gala - Salvador Dalí Foundation.

    The K11 Art Foundation has organised more than 200 exhibitions and workshops across the world, hosted events at chi K11 art museums, chi K11 art space, international museums and other KAF pop-up spaces.

    Other collaborators include:

  • Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University
  • China Central Academy of Fine Arts
  • College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University
  • College of Fine Arts, Hongik University
  • References

    K11 Art Foundation Wikipedia