Making a Statement

With an environmentally focused art exhibition opening its new private museum in Singapore in March this year, Parkview Group’s advocacy arm Parkview Arts Action harnesses the power of art to impact public perception and understanding  of pressing environmental issues, discovers Grace Ma

- Grace Ma

Towering steel installations reaching over 8m, the piercing gaze of an oversized shark’s eye and a rainbow-coloured morphed goldfish-shark sculpture are anything but subtle messages of the grim and cruel reality of shark finning.

These thought-provoking artworks are part of a global travelling art exhibition On Sharks and Humanity, which opens in March this year at the new Parkview Museum by the Parkview Group, a property investment and development conglomerate headquartered in Hong Kong, at its Parkview Square development in Singapore. The exhibition was initiated in 2014 under Parkview Arts Action, an arts organisation founded by George Wong, executive chairman of Hong Kong Parkview Group and eldest son of the late founder C S Hwang, to harness the transformative power of art to raise awareness of critical environmental issues.

An extensive and knowledgeable collector of Chinese contemporary art, Wong, who is also an honorary professor of the Nanjing University of the Arts, saw the exhibition as the perfect opportunity to showcase young and talented Chinese contemporary artists such as Zheng Lu and Liu Zining, while making a statement on shark conservation with colossal works of art.

According to exhibition curator Huang Du, the artists were first selected, then commissioned to create a piece that takes into account the exhibition space and topic. He says, “Through a variety of mediums, including installation art, painting, sculpture, photography and documentary film, the artworks challenge prevailing prejudices surrounding the deeply feared shark and showcase both the importance of shark conservation in protecting the marine ecosystem and the negative impact of unsustainable fishing.”