Dr. Adrian Cheng and Mrs. Natalia Vodianova Arnault, co-hosts of The Children Ball.
Phillips is proud to serve as auction sponsor for The Children Ball on 21 March in Hong Kong, with our own Chairman of Asia, Jonathan Crockett presiding over the charity auction that evening. The offering includes a variety of striking artworks, made even more compelling by the opportunity to support the charity’s mission.
The WEMP Foundation and Naked Heart France have teamed up for the occasion to support a critical and often overlooked aspect in the care of children with special needs — their mental health. Two visionaries will co-host the evening: Dr. Adrian Cheng, founder of the WEMP Foundation, and Mrs. Natalia Vodianova Arnault, the noted model and philanthropist, who will represent Naked Heart France. Below, we highlight the variety of works to be offered at the event.
Parents and their children at the WEMP Foundation’s Positive Parenting workshop.
The funds raised during the event will be instrumental in supporting a wide range of programs and initiatives that benefit children with special needs and their families. These include expanding access to the latest effective and internationally approved methods of helping children and adults with special needs.
Danny Casale
Danny Casale, Alley Cats, 2023.
Danny Casale — also known by his internet handle @Coolman_Coffedan — creates humorous, stylized animations that engage with internet culture. His own internet presence began in 2007 when the artist discovered YouTube as a 12-year-old. His 2017 animated video “Snakes Have Legs” directly confronts misinformation on the web with Casale’s trademark humor and has amassed millions of views. Since then, the artist has continued to explore his recognizable animation style through several mediums, including the painting he’s donated to the cause here.
Alicja Kwade
Alicja Kwade, CC In-Between, 2020.
Alicja Kwade’s works create a space for viewers to question their place in the universe, starting with what immediately surrounds them. Her works transform materials, inviting viewers to recognize how their own subjective interpretations of reality are dependent on their understanding of cultural functions, language, and societal norms. These themes are on display in the otherworldly forms of CC In-Between — donated to the auction by Pace Gallery — in its use of surprising materials including pocket watch hands.
In 2019, she received New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s coveted Roof Garden Commission, creating Alicja Kwade: ParaPivot. Her work is held in several public collections around the globe, including Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California (LACMA).
Robert Nava
Robert Nava, 2 Chomps, 2023.
For decades, Robert Nava has developed his characteristic hybrid monster figures in the pages of his sketchbooks. When translated to painting, the skill of his draftsmanship remains clear, and the results are captivating, graffiti-like depictions that imagine lifeforms from other dimensions. Employing figures that range from the dragon-like to the angelic, he developed this style after eschewing aspects of his traditional training in the MFA program at Yale.
His 2023 work 2 Chomps — donated for the event by Pace Gallery — shows artist pushing his visual language to its very limits, building on the gestural abstraction of artists like Cy Twombly and imbuing the work with a sense of personal iconography akin to Jean-Michel Basquiat. His work been well received worldwide at numerous high-profile solo exhibitions, and his work resides in the permanent collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
Sophie von Hellermann
Sophie von Hellermann, Untitled, 2024.
This recent work by British artist Sophie von Hellermann — donated to the auction by Pilar Corrias — is emblematic of her painterly approach that fuses the imagery of her subconscious with the aesthetic of myths and fables. Her inviting and pastel-washed imaginary scenes are often installed together to evoke narratives that borrow from current events and canonical stories.
The city of Hong Kong was on the forefront of her mind when creating this work, as she explained: “I was imagining the boats in Hong Kong harbor, and the brilliance of panoramic views created by the city lights. I felt as though there was a beautiful affinity of these colors to the skies rendered in some of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings that actually resulted from a natural cause — a volcano eruption.” Hellermann is based in London and Margate and has exhibited widely throughout the United Kingdom and Europe.
Wang Yuyang
Wang Yuyang, The Moon, 2021.
An artist who is just as familiar with cutting-edge technology as he is with a palette of oil paint, Wang Yuyang’s work often questions the very nature of reality and perception. In his skilled hands, traditional materials — as utilized in this 2021 oil painting The Moon that he has donated to the auction — can be just as effective at exploring relationships between human experience and cognition as any artificial reality software. Often employing humor and satire, his works pose questions about our ability to observe, record, and remark on our experiences. The artist graduated from China Central Academy of Drama and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he currently teaches at the Academy’s School of Experimental Art.
Xia Yu
Xia Yu, Orchid 1, 2023.
The captivating works of Xia Yu are records of his observations of daily life. His works abound with the orchids, glass cups, and cranes that serve as background to his inner emotional landscape. Closely cropped and isolated in a space seemingly devoid of time, these works transcend the art historical genre of the still-life as modernized depictions of phycological interiority. The striking surface of his works is often grainy, akin to old film photographs, and his 2023 work Orchid 1 (donated for the event by the Hive Center for Contemporary Art) showcases the brilliant painterly skill required to achieve this effect. Born in China and currently based in Beijing, the artist graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2004.
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