GROUP EXHIBITION

Time Voyager is, in this sense, not so much a looking back as a return, but a homecoming to the rooms where these practices first took root. The ten artists assembled here are not strangers to the gallery; their histories have grown alongside its own, from the inaugural presentation at Société Générale in The Landmark, Central, and the early presentations devoted to Hong Kong art in 1983 and 1984, among them Contemporary Vision of 3 Hong Kong Artists, featuring Hon Chi-fun, and a solo exhibition for Lui Shou-kwan, pioneer of the New Ink Movement, to the landmark Lui Shou-kwan & His School at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1995, and onward through the embrace of ink installation and sculpture in the new millennium. To walk through the exhibition is to retrace a shared history, one in which Alice King’s early instinct for the quiet conversations between tradition and the contemporary has proven remarkably prescient. The works on view carry that inheritance forward, each bearing the trace of a relationship measured not in seasons but in decades.

This final chapter of Then and Now thus completes a larger whole. Where Now, opening at Alisan Atelier in December, gathers a younger generation whose conceptual inquiries mark a departure from academic tradition. Time Voyager returns to the artists who first defined the gallery’s voice, and who continue to renew it. Together, the two presentations bear witness to a consequential shift in Hong Kong’s art history, from the ink-rooted sensibilities of the 20th century to the expanded terrain of the present. The gallery now frames this passage through the very artists who journeyed through it: for forty-five years, Alisan Fine Arts has not simply documented the evolution of Hong Kong art but has helped to write the city’s unfolding story.