Contemporary Art at Maxxi

Near the entrance to Maxxi, the Zaha Hadid-designed art museum

After we had our fill of classical art at Galleria Borghese, we took a completely different turn and went modern at Maxxi, a national museum of contemporary art and architecture in Flaminio district in Rome.

Inside there are numerous staircases and rooms to enter

The museum is also appropriately housed in a building designed by the late Zaha Hadid, who was chosen from among 273 candidates from around the world.

We didn't really get a good look of the outside, but inside it was very sleek, lots of curves and straight lines, nothing symmetrical either.

While the building was a piece of art in itself, the contemporary art was hard for us to understand! There were lots of strange videos one would see at Art Basel and leave you wondering:

a) How did you come up with this idea?
b) Why did you come up with idea?
c) What does this mean?
d) Does it really take art to another level?

Chinese characters and French words written in sheet metal

When we visited Maxxi, the exhibition "African Metropolis. An Imaginary City" was on. Again most of it we didn't really understand, but a few pieces were very interesting.

One of them was called "Wo Shi Feizhou/Je Suis Africain by Francois-Xavier Gbre. It's a series of mixed media, but what was particular interesting was what was written on sheet metal.

It was a triptych of three dark pieces of sheet metal and there were Chinese and French words written in three columns.

The ones on the far left were Chinese characters in simplified Chinese, followed by French words, then more simplified Chinese characters in parentheses. For a Chinese person living in Africa, this was a kind of cheat sheet. The word they wanted to say was on the far left, but was pronounced in French like the characters on the far right.

A close-up of the words and pronunciation!

For us who could read some Chinese this was very funny but also interesting!

Another work we liked was a photograph by Kiluanji Kia Henda with the title "Le Merchand de Venise" or the Merchant of Venice.

In the description the artist pays homage to the play by William Shakespeare by having a Senegalese musician dressed in brightly striped clothing and on his arms are what at first glance look like designer bags, but in fact are fake; this is his way of trying to make a living in Venice, much like many other African street vendors.

Henda's photo looks striking at first, but when you realize what is going on it's actually very ironic, but in a subtle way.

The Merchant of Venice by Henda

We pretty much finished going through the museum in an hour and waited for others in our group by hanging out in the museum shop that also had a cafe that served fantastic coffee for 1.50 euros!

Afterwards we took the tram back to Flamino metro station and then took the train back to our hotel.

Women Through Annie Leibovitz's Lens

An exuberant portrait of former First Lady Barbara Bush

Photographer Annie Leibovitz has an intimate exhibition on in Hong Kong until next Sunday called Women: New Portraits. She specifically chose a location that was hardly a comfortable gallery or centralized spot.

But for me it was convenient because it was in my neighbourhood, in an industrial building in Kennedy Town.

Photographs were exhibited side by side with no captions!

We had to register our names first before going up an old school elevator where you had to manually close the doors before it would move.

On the third floor of the building was an empty shell of something, a large area hollowed out, gritty and a bit stuffy. On the far end of the room were her portraits that seemed scattered in a random order.

Near the middle of the room were three screens set up in a semi circle, and chairs forming the other half of the circle for people to sit and watch an on-going slide show of Leibovitz's numerous photographs of women over the decades.

There were photographs of Meryl Street, the late Zaha Hadid, several of Hillary Clinton several years ago, former First Lady Barbara Bush, Malala Yousafzai, and a string of supermodels from the 1980s, like Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Amber Valletta and of course Naomi Campbell.

Four Las Vegas showgirls before and after

The pictures on the far wall were not large format photographs and they were placed close to each other, so visitors were all crowded trying to look at the pictures. The captions were not placed next to the pictures, so you had to keep looking at the program to find out who each person was.

This was the most frustrating part of the show, not being able to quickly find out who the person was so that one could either look up their biography in the program or move onto the next image.

For an exhibition shown in Hong Kong, it was disappointing to only see two Chinese faces -- and they weren't even from the city. One was Wendi Deng Murdoch taken post divorce last year -- is she still relevant? And Yao Chen, an actress and microblogger on Weibo.

Leibovitz's famous photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Nevertheless we were happy to see portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi, Jane Goodall, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, chef and restaurateur Alice Waters, and tech executive Sheryl Sandberg. Caitlyn Jenner was there too...

We also got to see the intimate photograph of a naked John Lennon wrapped around a clothed Yoko Ono, hours before he was shot and killed on December 8, 1980, and next to it a portrait of Ono a year later, profoundly changed.

There's also an intriguing set of eight photographs. They show a quartet of Las Vegas showgirls wearing their costumes and full make up, and then black and white photographs of them before their transformation. The differences are so stark -- shows what a lot of make up and razzle dazzle can do!

I quite enjoyed looking at the portraits projected on the screens, though there wasn't much time to take in the images before they moved onto the next one.

The determination and femininity of the late Zaha Hadid

But this also demonstrated how many photographs Leibovitz has taken over her decades long career, and in many cases how each portrait reflects each subject's personality.

Women: New Portraits by Annie Leibovitz

3/F, Cheung Hing Industrial Building

12P Smithfield Road

Kennedy Town

Until June 26, 2016

Tower of Cool at PolyU

PolyU's Innovation Tower looms in the skyline at dusk

The other day I had a chance to take a peek inside the new Jockey Club Innovation Tower on the campus of Polytechnic University.

The unfinished stairways have a sculpted look to them

There's no mistaking the building when you see it -- a large white structure that seems to have no sharp angles and feels like it should be in some futuristic community. Oh wait -- aren't universities supposed to be projecting into the future?

It was designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid who was the first woman and Muslim to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. She describes the fluid character of the building is "generated through an intrinsic composition of its landscape, floor plates and louvers that dissolves the classic typology of the tower and the podium into an iconic seamless piece."

Still unfinished, but the building has undulating waves

While the striking structure is easy to find on campus, getting there is trying as the usually clear signage at Poly U was virtually non existent to get to Innovation Tower even though it's on the map.

However, once you get there, the building -- which still has yet to be finished by March -- is white, clean and open in the foyer. There are temporary exhibitions in this new home for the university's School of Design, and offices, meeting rooms and work spaces upstairs.

We watched some construction workers on the ninth floor putting the finishing touches on a sculpted stairway, and one was periodically blowing dust our way which made us feel like we needed to wear masks!

Inside bamboo scaffolding prove useful here

Nevertheless, it was interesting to see bamboo scaffolding used in the space -- the workers going up and down them like monkeys -- which was a nice Hong Kong touch to the otherwise white space.