Kurt Chan 陳育強 Hong Kong, b. 1959

Born in Hong Kong in 1959, Kurt Chan Yuk-Keung is an artist, an educator and a prominent figure in the development of the Hong Kong contemporary art scene. Chan obtained his BA from the Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1983; and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, United States in 1988. He has participated in over 100 exhibitions, including the 51^st Venice Biennale and the 2^nd Asia Pacific Triennial. Chan was the chief editor for Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook, and taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for over 25 years. He is now an advisor of Asia Art Archive and the Yale-China Association. He lives and works in Hong Kong.

As an artist, Chan is widely recognized for his experimentations in mixed media, ink and calligraphic works. In the 1990s, Chan established his unique concept of “domestic aesthetic” – a response to the limited space that Hong Kong artists confront, offering new ideas to develop conceptual installations in a constrained environment with creative tools invented using unrelated found objects from daily life.

Chan learnt Chinese calligraphy at a young age. The fine art heritage and aesthetic of Chinese ink art has a life-long impact on Chan’s artistic practice. In the past decade, Chan continues his attempt to push boundaries and create new experimentations with the traditional art form. He reinterprets the historical calligraphy practice by deconstructing structure, leaving behind the dots and lines that form the characters. His script retains the mind of the Chinese literati whilst emphasizing the instinctiveness of Western abstract expressionists.

Recent exhibitions include “To Paint the Written World”, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2023; “Sky Rains Grain”, “By the People: Creative Chinese Characters”, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2022; Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong, 2022; “Perhaps words - Bone. Skin and Dust.”, Touch Gallery, Hong Kong, 2021; “New Horizons: Ways of Seeing Hong Kong Art in the 80s and 90s”, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2020. Chan’s works are in many public and private collections across Greater China, including the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.

Forthcoming in November 2023, Galerie du Monde will be presenting a solo exhibition of Kurt Chan, featuring the artist’s latest trial of merging eastern and western approaches of painting – an imagination of landscapes on earth before mankind.