Marzo To

(25 April – 29 June 2003)

Opening hours: Mon-Fri 10.30 – 1700
Sat-Sun 12.00 – 17.00
ADMISSION: FREE

Instant Art is an exhibition in which for the first time traditional Chinese rice paper hand scrolls and hanging scrolls used to feature modern pictures composed with a mixture of the latest technology and traditional brush-work, in London. The result is a surprising mixed-media of digital pictures and painting.

Always fascinated by paradoxical phenomenon, Marzo To chooses this unique media to illustrate the confusion resulting from the clashing of western pop culture and classical formats, both permeated by the technology of their respective era, vis-a-vis the traditional Confucian way of transmitting wisdom from generation to generation.

"Taking a break from my oil paintings, which still try to hold on to the belief in originality and memories, my new project is an experiment on new relations among art, the artist, and daily lives. Dangerously balancing between being a critique of modern life and politics yet reflecting passively on fleeting phenomena, Instant Art is my effort at reaching a different synthesis between art and the self. It may be seen as an erasure of the self on the surface but it is also the self's invitation to peek into transient realities. My goal is a sudden enlightenment that will (albeit fleetingly) shatter the clustered world of things and objects, and expose the abyss lying underneath"

Marzo To.T.K.

A Chinese artist from Hong Kong Marzo To studied at the Nationale Academy of Fine Arts, Paris, during the late 1980's before becoming an Artist in Residence in the Hong Kong Arts & Performance Arts Academy in the early 1990's. He has since exhibited extensively in Hong Kong, Paris and also Egypt. Instant Art will be his first exhibition in the United Kingdom