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A trendy brand specializing in art and design, favorite of celebrities in Beverly Hills GP DEVA Frontier Art & X-Power Gallery opens a flagship store in Hong Kong.
Lee Sun-Don, participating artist of the 59th Venice Biennale, exhibits with Asia’s first female artist trio Ma Sing Ling to celebrate the grand opening.
- With profound Chinese cultural embeddedness, Taiwan always brings surprises to the world in humanistic and artistic developments. In the arena of art, there is the international-renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre; in the cultural industries, the Eslite bookstore is certainly an attraction. For the art and design, it is the GP DEVA‧Frontier Art & X-Power Gallery, an international group devoted to promoting art and bringing art to everyday life. Incidentally, while the Eslite established a branch bookstore in Causeway Bay in August, in September GP DEVA celebrated the grand opening of its flagship store, in Hong Kong, after setting up branches in Beverly Hills and Shanghai in recent years.
Distinguished from other international brand names in leading fashion trends and producing high quality goods, GP DEVA especially highlights the value of art – “with art to enrich life” and “with art to advance the quality of dailiness.” To infuse the essence of art, it invites the 2009 Venice Biennale’s participating artist, the so-called “Oriental Picasso of the 21st century,” Lee Sun-Don to be the Art Director. With Lee’s artistic vision and creativity, GP DEVA builds its Hong Kong flagship store into a space combining art with fashion, blending modernity with traditional aspirations. One can always expect to see the finest goods in the store, ranging from exquisite jewelry to art-inspired furniture, fashionable but elegant merchandise for home décor, and pure essential oils for skincare. You can even enjoy the aesthetics of contemporary art here. It is a place where every guest can indulges herself/himself with sensory and spiritual pleasure.
GP DEVA first established itself as a world-class brand name with a skincare line characterized by using only the finest pure botanical essence. In addition to continuously developing new formulas with powerful potency, GP DEVA is also creative in upgrading the package of the skincare to the level of art. For example, the Lotus Romance series introduced in 2011, formulated with India’s lotus pink oil and sandalwood heartwood essence, is designed with a pink glazed bottle embossed with lotus totem – the bottle itself is no less than a work of art. It is no wonder that many of its loyal users are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming Saint-Lotus series.
From skincare, GP DEVA has expanded its business to include also refined jewelry, leather goods, bone china, and hand-made art-inspired furniture – all of these are infused with Totemic Energy aesthetics developed by its Art Director Lee Sun-Don. There is necklace inspired by Lee Sun-Don’s Totemic Energy painting of “Booming and Blooming” series, giving the original painting a three-dimensional splendor; there are also leather goods and luggage set imprinted with Lee’s “Black & White” series, bringing an aesthetic touch to one’s travel along the road. The handmade exquisite plate set carved with Lee’s painting of “The Buddha-Lotus for Grand Propitiousness” is another good example, showing how art can be integrated into everyday life. Lee’s “Take a Seat” painting series was even made into functional furniture through the hands of the most experienced master carpenter in Taiwan. Crafted with the traditional mortise workmanship, the furniture is a work of art , an art “jumping out of the painting frame.” The former mayor of Beverly Hills, Vicky Reynolds, appreciates this art-inspired furniture set very much and has become one of the collectors.
Apart from bringing art to everyday life, GP DEVA is also characteristic of its scope of globalization, as best represented by the operation of X-Power Gallery, which is part of the GP DEVA group. With branch galleries set up around the world, X-Power Gallery was established to bring dialogues between Chinese culture and western art. With its unique insights, it has successfully brought many talented artists to the international stage, including Lee Sun-Don, the first Asian artist invited to hold an oil painting exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2009. A more recent case is X-Power Gallery’s represented artists TT Tung from Taiwan, Liu Baojun from China, and Asian first female artist trio Ma Sing Ling being selected into the 159th Autumn Exhibition organized by the Royal West of England Academy (UK). Ma Sing Ling, drawing great attention from many of Taiwan’s significant collectors, has even won the first prize in the 57th Annual International Open Juried Art Exhibition entitled “Bold Expressions.”
To celebrate the grand opening of the Hong Kong flagship store, X-Power Gallery of the GP DEVA presents a special exhibition featuring the artworks by Lee Sun-Don and Ma Sing Ling. Lee Sun-Don, winning "Lorenzo il Magnifico Award" at the VII Florence Biennale 2009 and forty or so recognitions from major international juried competitions, is remarked by the international-renowned Italian art critique Achille Bonito Oliva as a “super avant-garde artist.” As to Ma Sing Ling, their talents are perfectly manifested in their “Form of Unity” series – a series created to bring out the magnificence of unpredictable dynamics of the free flow of paints, with brushworks commended “as stunning as Chang Dai-chien’s splash-ink paintings.” Truly amazing.
With the flagship store of GP DEVA‧Frontier Art & X-Power Gallery set up in Hong Kong, it surely will spur new fashion trends and open another door for art lovers and connoisseurs to savor a wider variety of international contemporary art.
