Villepin is pleased to present Murmuration, the debut exhibition of Marie de Villepin in Hong Kong, marking her first major solo exhibition in Asia. The title Murmuration originally describes the enchanting gesture and roaring sound created by ballet birds in the sky in certain seasons. In a similar movement to these birds, Marie captures the energy of various worlds where her multifaceted practice has long experimented with intrinsic expressions through colours, shapes, and rhythm.

For Marie, the canvas is not so much a conventional painting material as an all-receptive medium, a tabula rasa, on which she lays down her diverse ideas and personal experiences, expressed more often by the harmony of colours than by any preordained meaning of figures. After spending much of her life abroad, moving from one culture to another, Marie began sketching, not only to capture the colour or emotion of a moment, but also to ward off the dizziness of frantic change in the passing of life and time.

Her paintings are expansive configurations of spatial experimentations that articulate abstraction as an ever-shifting field. She draws upon ideas from different states and times to explore the spatial relation of each form and the space in between. Shifting and unraveling layers of paint, each figure and shape appear and recede in a multiplicity of directions, drawing viewers among unknown territories and experiences.

In her works, music plays a key role generating a certain rhythm of swaths of brushstrokes that diverge and converge. Where does it begin? Where does it lead us to? Marie’s works explore the importance of mobility and memory, and the relentless changes in forms, where identities, communities, and technologies in this postmodern world can at once be aggressive, oppressive, and repulsive. Through her works, she questions the key issues of our time and introduces new paths through her imagination with its own words and music, in which motifs are repeated, rhythms impart textures, and sounds alternate with voids, stringing together chords and sublimating emotions.

Exhibition Opening: 17 November 2022 - March 2023
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

(By Appointment only)

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Throughout art history, from the works of Rembrandt to Modigliani, Van Gogh and Freud, the human face has long been both a source of attraction and repulsion, an expression of humanity and fraternity but also portrayed with primitive violence and savagery. Across all its figurative and abstract representations, the portrait has been used as a mirror to the world.

Igniting a conversation between the past and the present, The Loss of Human Face? explores the significance of human faces as seen through these five artists Francis Bacon, Adrian Ghenie, Zeng Fanzhi, George Condo, and Yukimasa Ida. Showcasing twenty major works in a transformed gallery space, visitors will be confronted with the bold canvases of these artists displayed in dialogue with each other. As one of the most influential portrait painters of the early 20th century, Francis Bacon sets the scene for the exhibition as his raw and unsettling canvases distort his subject’s faces while unveiling their inner psychologies. Ghenie’s portraits are likewise contorted in gestural brushstrokes to reexamine our collective history and memory, while works from Zeng’s ‘Mask’ series depict the social tensions and anxieties the artist observed in modern China. Conversely, Condo’s characters are rendered flat on the picture plane in grotesque and whimsical configurations, and Ida’s thickly painted canvases continue the historic medium with a futurist perspective. This exhibition will also be the first presentation of Ida’s work in Hong Kong. All these artists bring their contribution to the global understanding of what humanity means. Through their diversity and varied backgrounds, they reveal the intense rage, anxiety, passion, and ambition of our current time through their own unique visions.

Exhibition Opening: 2 June 2022 - October 2022
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

(By Appointment only)

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Villepin is delighted to announce its upcoming exhibition of the late Chinese French master Zao Wou-Ki, exploring the artist’s lifelong examination and reflection of Chinese inheritance. 

Following Villepin’s inaugural exhibition with the artist in 2020, Zao Wou-Ki: The Eternal Return to China continues the gallery’s ongoing research into his life and art. This presentation aims to uncover the complex facets and layers of his artistic journey from China, around the world and ultimately, back to his native homeland. Throughout the artist’s career, his relationship with China was omnipresent and permeated his work.

This curated presentation will feature exceptional and rarely seen works, including oil paintings, ink works, and watercolors. Through research into newly discovered archive interviews with the artist, this exhibition aims to shed light on a lesser-known aspect of Zao Wou-Ki and his relationship with China, its history and culture. Although he spent most of his career in Europe, China has always been close to his heart and served as a lifelong inspiration in his work. 

Exhibition Opening: 1 December 2021 - 22 March 2022
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

(By Appointment only)

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VILLEPIN is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring work by the Korean artist Myonghi Kang. 

Myonghi Kang’s idyllic canvases offer an intimate view into the elusive heart of her artistic pursuit: a faith in painting and drawing as a medium capable of profoundly reinforcing our relationship with the natural world. Moving with ease between abstraction and figuration, the artist reflects on questions of perception, embodiment and understanding, while offering viewers a new experience of time, space, and color. Through cosmic landscapes, her command of colors, marks and shapes convey a sense of exuberance, peace and joy. 

For over five decades, the artist has continuously sought new ways to represent nature on paper and canvas in a practice that involves painting, poetry as well as philosophy. The works on view in the exhibition vary dramatically in scale yet they share an immediacy that results from the artist’s familiar and fluent engagement with oils and pastels. The gallery will be transformed into a meditative sanctuary to complement the artist’s work, providing a hideaway from the hustle and bustle of city life, and allowing visitors to become immersed in her visual language. 

Exhibition Opening: 17 May 2020 - October 2021
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

(By Appointment only)

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Villepin presents its new show entitled ''The Art of Hope'', showcasing a group of painters from the New School of Paris, who became active subsequent to the Second World War.

The New School of Paris was a school for the exiles and adopted Parisians, a milieu of chosen rather than given identities. Zao Wou-Ki came from China, Jean-Paul Riopelle from Canada, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages from the north and south of France respectively, Hans Hartung from Germany, and Nicolas de Staël from Russia.

For each and every one of them, painting was a passion and even livelihood. They were members of a generation that experienced the horror of war, and whose lives and world views have been turned upside down by the outbreak of violence. Every painter exhibited here was at once a witness and a victim, each in their own way. All faced deprivation and humiliation, which metamorphosed into a desire to live, act, and paint, plunging them into finding trust and faith in humanity.

Today, in a world beset with crises, division, and trauma, we could maybe draw a lesson from these artists who clung to art as a means of survival, thereby guiding us towards the future with new energy and renewed confidence.

Exhibition Opening: 23 November 2020 - 9 April 2021
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

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Zao Wou-Ki represents the perfect symbol of reconciliation – Wou-Ki means ‘no limits’ in Chinese – a prescient forename for an artist who embraced different cultural identities without ever being beholden to one.

Villepin Gallery will open its doors with an exhibition entitled ‘Friendship & Reconciliation’, celebrating the late Chinese French artist Zao Wou-Ki, who was a close friend of the Villepin family. The exhibition will feature rare paintings by the artist from the 1950s to the early 2000s and will include a selection of oil paintings, Chinese inks, watercolors and private collection of the founders. An exhibition catalogue, featuring a presentation by Dominique de Villepin on the exhibition and an essay by Arthur de Villepin on the art of collecting, will accompany the show.

Exhibition Opening: 20 March - 31 October 2020
Space: 53-55 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong

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