Contemporary Blue-and-White: Turkish Ceramics is an exhibition featuring some forty ceramics by by Mehmet Gürsoy and Nida Olçar, two award-winning contemporary Turkish artists. This is so-called “İznik pottery”; finely-decorated ceramics have been produced in İznik, the ancient Nicaea, since the last quarter of the 15th century.
Exhibition
Not only is The Silver Age: Origins and Trade of Chinese Export Silver a useful companion to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum exhibition of the same name, the catalog has enough material, extending well beyond the exhibition, to be a valuable volume in its own right.
This special exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of History makes considerable use of audiovisuals, especially video, which have the dual advantage of not requiring insurance and holding the interest better than, say, incomplete pots which, however interesting, can also be somewhat dry.
A photograph captures an instant frozen in time; old photographs therefore take on a higher significance precisely as a record of the past. Photography was born roughly at the same time that Hong Kong entered world history in the early 1840s; the emerging British colony soon attracted photographers of international repute on their first trips to Asia, and local photography studios were already being set up in the 1850s.