SINGAPORE.- The Parkview Museum Singapore announces the opening of the exhibition, Challenging Beauty-Insights into Italian Contemporary Art, featuring the most representative works of the late Mr. George Wong's Italian Contemporary Art Collection. Curated by the internationally acclaimed curator and art historian Lorand Hegyi, the exhibition, is the first major Italian contemporary art exhibition in Singapore and will open to the public from 17 March to 19 August 2018. The exhibition was presented at The Parkview Museum Beijing before its Singapore presentation.

Challenging Beauty-Insights into Italian Contemporary Art reflects the fascinating, complex and eclectic Italian artistic practices from the 1960s until today. The exhibition presents a number of fundamental works of artists from four generations spanning the artistic movements of Arte Povera, Transavantgarde, New Roman School, as well as artistic positions of younger generations, which emerged during the 1990s and 2000s.

This presentation of the late George Wong’s art collection in Challenging Beauty— Insights into Italian Contemporary Art, offers a special view on contemporary creation in the diverse fields of artistic practice. It also takes into account the geographical specificity of each movement: from the conceptual experiments and the radical revisiting of avant-garde idealism in the so called Arte Povera, the re-emergence of metaphorical images and of eclectic and ironical subjectivity in painterly practice of the Transavantgarde and the highly intellectual artistic approach based on the reinterpretation of cultural metaphors and the tradition of Mannerism in the aesthetics of the New Roman School (also known as Ultima Generazione). The last part of the exhibition offers a view on younger middle generation and young artists. The works of the younger generation from the North of Italy are partly influenced by the tradition of Arte Povera, partly by new tendencies of figurative painting and sculpture, which address issues related to simulacrum and improbability; the works of younger artists from Rome and the centre of Italy display a certain influence of the ironical, philosophical aspects of the tradition of the "New Roman School".

While the exhibition does not aim to exhaustively cover the entirety of artistic production that characterized Italian contemporary art from the 1960’s to the most recent developments, it does have the ambition to show the richness, complexity and eclecticism of Italian contemporary art and its influence at a global level.

Taking into account the specificities and differences among tendencies, schools, groups and personalities, this exhibition manifests the collector’s individual choice, personal tastes as well as his perception about beauty and responsibility of contemporary art.

The exhibition demonstrates how artists forged new identities from deeply rooted practices by focusing on the artistic praxis, often defined by a strong cultural specificity, that has managed to achieve international recognition and to expand and elaborate on transnational narratives.

The exhibition Challenging Beauty—Insights into Italian Contemporary Art, guides us through a rich, complex, exotic and picturesque garden where nostalgic narratives are mixed with seductive, ironical and critical approaches. The late George Wong’s art collection of Italian contemporary art is a completely singular, specific, unique collection in Asia, which reveals Mr.Wong’s enthusiasm for Italian culture. The selected and presented artworks manifest a deep, true, solid engagement with universal human issues as well, as a fine, sophisticated, intellectually elaborated and extremely complex vision on history, faith, the artist’s competence and responsibility, the relation between individual experiences and collective value systems, between innovations and conventions.