Le French May in Hong Kong this year hits a summery St Tropez-like moment with its opening exhibition. School of Nice - From Pop Art to Happenings documents the last major art movement in post-war France and illustrates Nice's remarkable contribution to the history of art in the 1960s and 70s. With all work taken from the city's Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC), the show features paintings, photographs, sculptures and objects, by artists who created so-called New Realism, considered Europe's answer to America's Pop Art. 

Among a bunch of significant artists, Yves Klein stands out, and there are a handful of his works on show. Klein may well be the most  strategically creative and playful artist since Marcel Duchamp. He lived a hard and fast life and died young at 34. Klein didn't so much break rules as ignore them, part of the Neo-Dadist school of art, dispensing with frames, making performative art, and producing works defined by his luminous, Cote d'Azur-influenced blue. And not just any blue but his own. Klein's creative rush was so profound he copyrighted the colour ultramarine IKB, or International Klein Blue, and produced shows of his signature blue monochromes, thereafter painting globes, sponges, busts of Venus - even wanting to paint Cleopatra's Needle blue. Showman, shaman, charlatan, prankster, inventor, marketer and more, Klein divided art opinion. To some he was an alchemistic genius but to others too full of his own artistic posturing, too Lah-di-dah in his Lah-Dada. 

At a solo show in 1957 in St Germain des Pres, Klein released 1,001 helium-filled blue balloons; in The Void, the following year, the gallery space in which he showed was empty, yet still it lured more than 2,500 visitors. His famous black-and-white photograph Leaping Into The Void in 1960, (viewable at City Hall) shows Klein suspended mid-air seemingly in flight. He was, but the friends holding a tarpaulin to break his fall were erased from the image. 

1960 also marked the year of Klein's most discussed work, Anthropometry of the Blue Period. On March 9, at 7pm, Klein walked into the International Gallery for Contemporary Art at 253 Rue Saint Honore, wearing formal evening clothes. Three women, nude, walked behind him with three pails of blue IKB paint. Simultaneously, a chamber-music orchestra played Klein's composition Symphony Monotone Silence, one chord held for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of total silence. Reports of the event mention one guest heard uttering a parody of Sacha Guitry's witticism on Mozart. "Oh, privilege of the genius! After a piece by Klein, the silence that follows is also signed by him". 

For the next 40 minutes Klein guides the creative ritual of the three human brushes, smearing their bodies with IKB, and rolling them on the floor  pressing their bodies against the paper and thus, imprinting their "anthropometrics" on it. "What is art for?" one of the audience members asks Klein. "Art is health!" he responds to everyone's amusement. 

Why Klein's obsession with the colour blue? Blue, he used to say, evokes the sea and the sky, the utopian and the infinite; all the most abstract things in tangible and visible nature. Klein was experimental in all. He used wind, rain, gold and fire to compose so-called cosmogonic art. He tried to demonstrate that art is nothing if it is not thoroughly unrealistic. It was his passion. Like the remarkable quality of his ultramarine IKB paint, his work seems alive, it shimmers. Klein once said: "At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity."  See this true-blue chromatic devotion while you still can, in which Klein created a utopian art category all his own: Infinitism. 

Until May 27, Exhibition Hall, Hong Kong City Hall, 9am to 11pm, Monday to Sunday. Free Admission

Image: Pigment Par Bleu, © Succession Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris