Close Menu
Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers
    • Week 11 Editorial
    • Losing My Religion: Elegies from an Atheist who desperately wants to believe in God
    • The Islamic Spirituality of Romanticising your Life
    • Loss, to which I return often.
    • My Name is Anonymous and I’m an Alcoholic
    • Modern Chaos
    • Time Machines: The Architecture on Campus
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    • Writing Comp
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Wednesday, May 14
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    • Comedy
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    Honi Soit
    Home»Culture

    ART: “Before the Rain” is Patchy at Best

    4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s exhibition pitters and patters through two overly ambitious levels.
    By Jack SteynFebruary 8, 2017 Culture 3 Mins Read
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    WHAT: Before the Rain
    WHERE: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

    WHEN: Closes 19th March

    Before the Rain, a free introduction to the art of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, sets its sights admirably high. Its gallery copy assures the reader not only that the exhibition ‘examines the 79 days Hong Kong stood at a standstill in 2014 and reflects upon the 190 years that proceeded its occurrence’ but also addresses the city’s future and deals with ‘the more complex wider debate of the region.’ This would be a tough enough ask for, say, an entire floor of the MCA, so it’s certainly a challenge for a small split-level gallery in Haymarket.

    The stairs in the split-level gallery, with documentary photos of the Umbrella Movement lining its walls.

    The exhibition’s ambitions are let down by its inconsistent voice that abruptly shifts from the highly concrete to the highly conceptual midway through the exhibition. The ground floor is impressively furnished with a full-sized market stall of the type Umbrella protesters organised under, as well as a sprawling series of line drawings reproducing, categorising and locating the many temporary structures built during the occupation. However, the austere top level signals a return to a more traditional, cerebral gallery experience. Most of the artworks on display here step away from the protests themselves and deal with broader ideas surrounding law and bureaucracy in Hong Kong.

    The tension between abstraction and contextualisation wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, but there just aren’t enough artworks for the exhibition to fuse the styles of representation, so its attempts to both tell the story of the protests and engage in wider thematic questions remain disappointingly incomplete. Before the Rain’s conceptual pieces are too oblique and lengthy, their descriptions often so overwrought that they serve as a crutch rather than an explanation. If you don’t know very much about the Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong going in, you will probably learn more from what the curators have written than from what the artists have produced.

    There are nevertheless some highlights. Yuan Goang-Ming’s video piece The 561st Hour of Occupation records the student occupation of Taiwan’s parliament in their related Sunflower Movement. With two long, slow camera movements he eerily, poignantly captures the occupation and its aftermath. Sarah Lai’s dual installation/performance piece Demarcated area forces viewers to navigate security guards with crowd-control bollards, cleverly transforming the gallery space to recreate a restriction of movement by government forces.

    Barrier setup that recreate a sense of government restriction. image credit: Art Guide

    Many of the other artworks have their moments too, but the exhibition would have been better served by a considerably tighter focus and a firm commitment to either the visceral, documentary side of the artmaking or the more conceptual, theoretical side. It’s interesting to see the range of ways regional artists have responded to the 79 days of occupation. But their voices never end up coming together; they are too few in number, too disparate in their concerns, and too difficult for an uninformed viewer to understand. They do not speak boldly enough about the reasons they’re all under the same banner.

    It’s strange that this exhibition, ostensibly about a highly successful, highly important protest, has all the hallmarks of a failed one instead.

    4a centre for contemporary asian art asian art before the rain hong kong umbrella movement

    Keep Reading

    The Islamic Spirituality of Romanticising your Life

    Loathing the Glebe Markets

    This Place Smells Like Piss, Beer, and Macho Men

    Homesick Forever

    Charting a Course for Home: Hannah Kent’s ‘Always Home, Always Homesick’ (2025)

    A Cacophonous Calamity of Queer Community: The Wedding Banquet (2025)

    Just In

    A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers

    May 14, 2025

    Week 11 Editorial

    May 13, 2025

    Losing My Religion: Elegies from an Atheist who desperately wants to believe in God

    May 13, 2025

    The Islamic Spirituality of Romanticising your Life

    May 13, 2025
    Editor's Picks

    A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers

    May 14, 2025

    We Will Be Remembered As More Than Administrative Errors

    May 7, 2025

    NSW universities in the red as plague of cuts hit students & staff

    April 30, 2025

    Your Compliance Will Not Save You

    April 16, 2025
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2025 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.