13 January - 09 February Gilded Youth
Link to artist's website
Jonathan Thomson lives the expatriate life-style. A gentleman in Hong
Kong whose history reaches back to Adelaide where he studied economics
and even further back to the ship yards of Whyalla.
A trip to London landed him in art galleries and sent him back to uni where he studied art history. That lead to a job with the Australia Council and then an invitation to help Hong Kong set up their version of the Australia Council, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In cashed up Hong Kong Jonathan landed at the top end of town.
With the change from British to a Chinese administration in 1997 Jonathan moved on, became a freelance curator, an advisor and a journalist, writing for Ian Finlay-Brown’s magazines, Asian Art News and World Sculpture News, which is where I met him. Like Finlay-Brown he wrote about Asia and the art made there from the point of view of a privileged outsider, alertly discussing a culture that seems willing to meet the west, only halfway.
More travel and a CV too long to list left Jonathan with the time to make art. And this is the product. An example here drawn from a body of work that takes the shadows falling across the beauty of youth as it’s subject, that and the merchandising savvy that markets youthful beauty as the commodity, gilded youth.
This show has an air, somewhat Louis Vuitton- sleekly beautiful, effortlessly digestible that sets it apart from the here and now, rendering it unmistakably desirable. It promotes, at least for me a meditation on fashion, on “this year's model”- a critique offered by the insider who, like the expatriate adopts a view as skeptical as it is enthralling. He will meet his subject but only half way.
Link to artist's website
A trip to London landed him in art galleries and sent him back to uni where he studied art history. That lead to a job with the Australia Council and then an invitation to help Hong Kong set up their version of the Australia Council, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In cashed up Hong Kong Jonathan landed at the top end of town.
With the change from British to a Chinese administration in 1997 Jonathan moved on, became a freelance curator, an advisor and a journalist, writing for Ian Finlay-Brown’s magazines, Asian Art News and World Sculpture News, which is where I met him. Like Finlay-Brown he wrote about Asia and the art made there from the point of view of a privileged outsider, alertly discussing a culture that seems willing to meet the west, only halfway.
More travel and a CV too long to list left Jonathan with the time to make art. And this is the product. An example here drawn from a body of work that takes the shadows falling across the beauty of youth as it’s subject, that and the merchandising savvy that markets youthful beauty as the commodity, gilded youth.
This show has an air, somewhat Louis Vuitton- sleekly beautiful, effortlessly digestible that sets it apart from the here and now, rendering it unmistakably desirable. It promotes, at least for me a meditation on fashion, on “this year's model”- a critique offered by the insider who, like the expatriate adopts a view as skeptical as it is enthralling. He will meet his subject but only half way.
- Tony Twigg
