Guided Viewing: "Art Machines: Past/Present" with Dr. Isabelle Frank, Director of the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery

The HKU Museum Society is pleased to visit the exhibition Art Machines: Past / Present with Dr. Isabelle Frank, Director of the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery at City University.

Art Machines: Past / Present, curated by Professors Richard Allen and Jeffrey Shaw, explores the long-standing connection between artmaking and machines. The history of artmaking and the history of tools and technology are inextricably linked because the technology makes possible what can be expressed. If there is one idea that visitor should take away from Art Machines, it is that technology is not an impediment to the making of art but a condition of its possibility. To this end, the curators have assembled 34 artworks by 25 artists who create artworks with and through machines (be they mechanical or computational). Well-known Hong Kong artists such as Maurice Benayoun, Carla Chan, Daniel Howe, Joseph Chan, Tobias Klein, Vvzela Kook, Hector Rodriguez, Stanley Wong (anothermountainman), and Ip Yuk Yiu (among others) unveil the rich and widely ramified range of expressive possibilities that machine-based art affords.

Dr. Isabelle Frank focuses on curating exhibitions that combine technology and the arts and bridge Western and Asian cultures.  An art historian by training with a PhD from Harvard University, she first taught at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and was then Associate Dean for Academic Affair at The New School, and Dean at Fordham University’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies.  She has published on Italian Renaissance art and decorative art as well as edited many exhibition catalogues for the City University Exhibition Gallery, including Cabinets of curiosities, Art Deco. The France-China Connection, and most recently Leonardo da Vinci: Art & Science, Then & Now.