Art review: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan/James Furneaux/Hugh Buchanan

Published on Monday 18 May 2009 21:34

TOMMY GA-KEN WAN: CRACKING TWIGS **** RICEFIELD ARTS AND CULTURAL CENTRE, GLASGOW JAMES FURNEAUX: A RETROSPECTIVE **** PEACOCK VISUAL ARTS ABERDEEN ENLIGHTENMENT: THE LIBRARY PAINTINGS OF HUGH BUCHANAN *** OLD TOWN HOUSE, ABERDEEN

WALTER Benjamin compared the act of losing oneself in a city to being in a forest. "Signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet." There are the signs read by the flneur, the traces by which we navigate the modern, urban world.

The travel writer Jan Morris describes Hong Kong as "our era exemplified", a melting pot of cultures and contradictions, East and West, wealth and poverty, stunning natural beauty and some of the most densely populated streets in the world. A city, Morris says, to be felt rather than described.

All of which makes Tommy Ga-Ken Wan's exhibition at Ricefield Arts & Cultural Centre in West Graham Street, on the edge of Glasgow's Chinatown, highly ambitious. But the young Glasgow-based photographer, whose father is from Hong Kong, follows his own fascinations and doesn't flinch from the challenges.

He brings us contrasts: glassy skyscrapers and dingy alleyways, the formal shapes and quiet interior of a temple, the bustling, dazzling neon streets. In a newsagent's shop, presiding over a colourful mix of Western and Chinese magazines, a dog has its paws folded on the counter like any other bored shopkeeper.

This anthropomorphisation aside, almost all of Ga-Ken Wan's photographs include figures. They are rarely his primary subject, but we experience the city along with them: the children at the window of the cable car, the smoker snatching a moment's peace in the alley behind a restaurant. His black and white portrait of a wizened old mask-maker is a fine work but it belongs in another category: the image causes us to look at him, not with him.

These are images which capture not just Hong Kong, but something of the modern urban experience, and it is a promising photographer who has both the eye and the technical skill to illuminate such fleeting moments.

James Furneaux is a flneur of a different kind. His patch is Aberdeen, and his accomplished paintings, drawings and prints are almost entirely unpopulated, preferring to draw their character from the texture of the city itself. He, too, works in a range of styles, some dreamy and evocative, others illustrative and documentative, while portraits in oils flag up another facet of his talent.

Furneaux, who studied for a year as an architect before switching to fine art and becoming an art teacher, has been documenting his city for several decades, spanning the modern redevelopment of much of Victorian Aberdeen and the arrival of the oil industry. Some locals have come to regard the sight of him on his sketching stool as a herald of imminent demolition. The prettiest of these works, with pristine granite and the flowers for which the city is famous, were commissioned by the Aberdeen Tourist Board. But Furneaux is at his best when he is off piste, investigating back alleyways, or peering over rooftops at rows of misshapen chimney pots.

He sees the prosaic beauty in the dovecotes of the pigeon fanciers in Constitution Street, and the patchwork of a tenement wall exposed by demolition in Trinity Lane. A masterful etching captures the dome of His Majesty's Theatre, framed by an old slate roof and the rungs of a fire escape.

Something of Furneaux's precision and draughtsmanship is echoed in Hugh Buchanan's watercolours of library interiors currently on show in Old Aberdeen's 18th century Town House, just a few hundred years from where construction is beginning on the university's new 57million library.

Libraries are places of the imagination, where we go among dusty books with a spirit of discovery and seek to conjure other worlds. But, in and of itself, there is not much to see in a library – therein, perhaps, lies its power – so any artist seeking to capture it in paint must pay homage both to its prosaic appearance and its potential as a place of dreams.

Light is important in these images, and the watercolour medium favoured by Buchanan offers a way of conveying light which saturates in sepia, like the afternoon sun catching dust motes in its golden beam. Unfortunately, on the kind of day Aberdonians call "dreich", with no help from the interior lights, they did not look their best.

Buchanan, an Edinburgh College of Art graduate who has sought out libraries in universities, public buildings and stately homes, and includes a new interior of the gothic-styled Divinity Library in Aberdeen. He has an eye for evocative detail – the back of an ornate chair, a diamond-shaped grille, but there is something a little too mechanical about his renditions of shelves upon shelves of books.

He has conveyed the spirits of books in close-up studies: frayed bindings tied together with ribbon, scraps of paper marking the place of a previous reader, but these works are not included here. The majority of the paintings here evoke the kinds of libraries one sees in stately homes and formal buildings, identical bindings ordered to impress which are still unopened 100 years later: imposing but passionless and, even for the booklover, oddly uninviting.

&149 James Furneaux and Hugh Buchanan until 30 May; Tommy Ga-Ken Wan until 31 May.