A last day in Hong Kong
It was the last day of a brief layover in Hong Kong. While my travel companions enjoyed a beer in the afternoon sun along the West Kowloon waterfront, I felt an irresistible pull toward one building: M+, Herzog & de Meuron’s striking structure, its façade catching the fading light. There was a peculiar beauty in stepping inside as the sun began to sink – the city glowing outside, the museum radiating a different kind of luminosity within.
I started with the Sigg Collection, one of the most important holdings of contemporary Chinese art outside the mainland. Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador, collected with an eye not just for aesthetics but for documenting the seismic cultural shifts of China’s recent decades. The works there feel like a visual diary of a nation in transformation: bold, experimental, restless.
From there, I walked into Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, and then further into the Focus Gallery, where Yang Jiechang’s Hundred Layers of Ink filled the space.
M+ has described how the work was originally shown in the ruins of a church, light falling in through a broken roof. Here, too, the museum’s design echoed that moment: the piece was illuminated by a shaft of light from above, as if history and architecture were conspiring to re-create its first presentation. Standing there, I felt not only the gravity of the ink’s accumulation but the weight of memory, silence, and time itself.
The surface seemed almost black, but as my eyes adjusted, it revealed subtleties – like a landscape that emerges only after you’ve looked too long.
Moments of Transition
I left the gallery awed, carrying the image with me into the evening sun. As we watched the sun set, prepared to soon head to the airport, news arrived that a close friend was about to become a father. The timing felt uncanny: one life moment ending, another beginning.
Months passed.
Then, one evening in Switzerland, art and life intertwined again. I was in Fribourg at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, attending the vernissage of Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition with my father. He had exhibited in the very same space the previous year, a moment that had rekindled my own connection to art.
While we were sharing a beer at Les Arcades after the vernissage, we followed an online auction unfolding in Geneva. Lot after lot came and went until, suddenly, the work from Yang Jiechang’s Hundred Layers of Ink appeared. I placed a bid. Nervous glances at my phone, the chatter of the bar around me, my father nearby…“GEWONNEN”.
Layers woven together
When I hung the painting with him, it felt like the strands of many moments were woven together: the final day in Hong Kong, the shaft of light in the Focus Gallery, the end of a vacation and the beginning of new chapters, the vernissage in Fribourg, a shared beer, and a family bond that has always tied me to art.
What struck me is how perfectly this mirrors Yang’s practice. For him, each layer of ink is a conscious act, a repetition that builds into something opaque yet resonant. For me, the painting became a metaphor for life itself. Our experiences are not single events but layers – a vacation sunset pressed against the memory of a museum visit, a father’s exhibition layered with a son’s rediscovery of art, the nervous thrill of bidding woven with the ordinary joy of drinking a beer.
Standing before the work now, I am reminded that we are all made of such layers: deliberate and accidental, visible and hidden. Time accumulates on us the way ink accumulates on paper – slowly, silently, until depth itself becomes the only image.
Artists in the article
Yang Jiechang 杨诘苍
- Born 1956, Foshan (China); lives in Paris and Germany.
- Known for Hundred Layers of Ink (1989-1999), created by repeatedly layering ink on Xuan paper.
- Exhibited in Magiciens de la Terre (1989), Venice Biennale (2003), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013-2014).
- Works often explore spirituality, repetition, and transformation.
Chiharu Shiota 塩田千春
- Born 1972, Osaka (Japan); based in Berlin.
- Works with thread installations, performance, and objects.
- Her art addresses themes of memory, absence, and human connection.
Beat Fasel
- Born 1954 near Fribourg (Switzerland); painter and art educator.
- Studied art education at the University of Bern under Gottfried Tritten (1976-79).
- Explores layers of life, time, and natural aging through collage, acrylics, and textured materials.
- His works often highlight the beauty of imperfection—scratches, patina, and traces of change.