Jewish Artists in Hong Kong and the Possibilities in Mixed Media
A new report from Jewish Times Asia highlighted several artists in Hong Kong exploring Jewish identity.
Mixed media – including photography, textiles, painting and video – opens possibilities for storytelling. Sculptor David Rosenthal says each layer in a mixed media piece can tell a story, showing how Jewish identities are built layer by layer.
Local synagogues and the Jewish Arts Collective of Asia have partnered with art galleries and schools for community exhibitions. The Jewish Community Centre hosted an exhibition that featured Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore based artists. Hong Kong’s artists are exploring traditional symbols like the menorah and Torah scroll in modern contexts: incorporated in digital art, as light installations, and stitched into fabric.
Why mixed media can tell stories so well
The interplay of textures, material and narrative can voice complex identities. Artists draw on their Jewish heritage and environment to weave together histories, migrations, religious memory and day-to-day life. In a mixed-media work the visible layers – whether photographs of family members or animations of ritual objects, for example – become metaphors for how Jewish identity is acquired, inherited, reshaped and transported. Rosenthal’s remark that “Every layer tells a story” speaks directly to this notion: the multi-material piece is not just aesthetic, it is a map of lived experience.
Jewish mixed media through the decades
The use of mixed media by Jewish-heritage artists has evolved over the 20th and 21st centuries, reflecting changing technologies, diasporic contexts and artistic concerns. Some celebrated artists include:
Toba Khedoori (born 1964), of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, is known for large mixed-media paintings on waxed paper combining fine drawing with expansive fields of negative space. Khedoori earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
Rhea Carmi (born 1942) is an Israeli-American artist whose mixed-media work uses box-springs, tar paper, twine and paint to construct layered abstract pieces that carry a sense of memory and materiality.
Siona Benjamin, born in Bombay and of Jewish Heritage, combines painting with multimedia and montage, bringing together Judaic iconography , South Asian miniature styles and mixed materials to explore hybririty and identity. Benjamin now lives in the New York City area.
While the medium was more often painting or sculpture in early Jewish art, scholars note that by the 1980s video art, photography and installation began to appear more often. Paintings are still widely created and valued in Jewish homes; many contemporary pieces are available online. Those interested can go to the Israeli Judaica web to see Jewish religious paintings, including abstract art and Kotel paintings, among other works.
How the Hong Kong movement adds to Jewish art
In Hong Kong the artists working through mixed media bring unique conditions: a city that is highly globalised, which hosts a small but active Jewish community, and where cultural hybridity is part of everyday life. The partnerships between synagogues, schools, galleries and artists make the pieces more than studio works – they become community-based projects in which identity and locality can be expressed and experienced. The fact that Jewish identity is being explored in this East Asian context speaks to the diasporic reach of Jewish art.
Main Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-painting-of-a-man-standing-in-front-of-a-fire-zlwUGCt_d3g