Exhibition Review: “Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry”

Artist Donna Chiu; Curator Zhuang Wubin

Imagine yourself, sitting by the window while looking at a painting to dry. Time passes without the ability to know when the paint dries. The mood of helplessness and the feeling of passivity mirror artist Donna Chiu and her family’s diasporic journeys – the highlight of her solo exhibition at Lumenvisum, “Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry”.

Image courtesy of Zhuang Wubin

As you walk into the exhibition space, there is a gloomy and melancholy atmosphere. The works are mostly muted in colour and scattered in different corners of the space. They are often grouped in pairs as if they are landscapes that we passively see through a pair of glass windows. Next to the pair of old school tables and chairs, there is a pair of black and white, light and shadow abstract images. Donna mentioned that these images were taken during her home quarantine when she tested COVID positive. Side by side, the two images evoke a sense of “waiting for time to pass”, depicting nothing more than the shadows and light passing through the window blinds at different times of the day.

Image courtesy of Lumenvisum

Next to it is another pair of images. The image on the left is a blown-up black-and-white image of what looks like a “finger crossed” hand gesture. The image on the right is a stacked image of two identical images of what I presume is a body part. The top image is printed on matt paper and is torn with half remaining, while the full image underneath is printed on semi-gloss paper. The combination of these images as if indicating to me that no matter how fragmented the diasporic journeys are, there is hope that they will be okay. Other than photographic works, on the opposite ends of the space sits a pair of paintings. Her choice of colour paint and her repeating brushstrokes create a sense of heaviness. This tone connects with the rest of her photographic works and lingers throughout the space.

Image by Michelle Chan

I found myself slowing down when experiencing her works as if time became stagnant for layers of emotions to build up and then disperse. Perhaps it is the passivity of these abstract images that allowed me to pay more attention to the curatorial details and installation choices. There are a lot of textures involved. Almost all sets of image pairings use different types of paper and mounting. An image from the observatory is printed on foam board while others are printed on photographic paper. The photocollage and the Instax works are framed while others are nailed on the wall. Some works are mounted with big rustic nails, while others use round magnets. The “finger crossed” hand gesture image is only mounted at the top creating a curl-in bottom. With light effects, the shadow of the print introduces volume to a static image. I am unsure who decided these details, whether it is Donna, the artist, or Wubin, the curator. Perhaps the idea is translated from the layering and texturing in the artist’s collage works and paintings. Either way, the mix of different printing materials and installation methods adds a layer of materiality. It can enhance the audience’s experience of the artist’s expression of her diasporic journeys. 

For me, the most interesting part of the exhibition is the juxtaposition of the bookmarked pages from “a class-book of PSLE HISTORY for singapore primary six”, the text by Lee Kuan Yew, and Donna’s photographic work.

Some bookmarked pages from a Singapore Primary 6 class-book; Images by Michelle Chan

The textbook is for children under 12 years old. The pages clearly indicate that there was national education on the history of China and Hong Kong in Singapore back in the seventies. Children of the nation would learn simplified facts of Hong Kong’s or China’s history, such as “Hong Kong has been ruled by Britain since 1842” and “The Chinese Revolution started in Wuchang on 10th October 1911. The Chinese called it the Double Tenth Revolution”. At the opposite end of the exhibition space displays a loosely installed piece of paper, with a text by the prime minister then, Lee Kuan Yew, on 16 August 1959. It writes:

“But I suggest to you that the English-speaking students who will emerge in 10 or 20 years time from the English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools will be completely different – a completely different person from the English-educated persons of the past. They will not be deculturalised or devitalised. They will have vitality and confidence and a sense of dedication to our own country and our own people.”

This text is in fact an extract from the Singapore Government Press Statement released on the same day. It was part of the speech for Radio Singapore with the topic “The English-educated and the future”. The combination of the 3 pieces (the class books, the text by Lee Kuan Yew and Donna’s artistic works) makes me think about the national identity of Singapore. How is a sense of belonging to a place called “home” created in a national scale? And then, considering the artist Donna, a Singaporean citizen who has had several diasporic journeys, is not the product of the Singaporean school that educated the nation with common values and ideals. What would her experiences be and what feelings would she have?

The exhibition demonstrates the layers of inner conflicts and anxieties of the artist and her family’s diasporic journeys in multi-dimensional ways – from the artistic works themselves to installation choices and materials that reflect the political environment at that time.

Catch the exhibition before it ends.

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Photography in Southeast Asia IV: 
Donna Chiu – Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry 

Date: 31.03 – 30.04.2023
Location: Lumenvisum, L2-02, JCCAC, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei
Time: 11-1; 2-6pm Tues to Sun

On interracial families and identity formation

A review on the exhibition: m<other> by Kim Jee-Yun

While the research on ‘tracking Hong Kong visual traits’ is still on-going, I came across this exhibition m<other> by a Korean artist Kim Jee-Yun. The work on interracial families and the question on ethnic identity formation for the offsprings felt somewhat related to the fate and background of Hong Kong, a city of an intersection between the West and the East.

As I walked into Soluna Fine Art Gallery located in Sai Street, Sheung Wan, on the right there was a family portrait of Alia Eryes, the current CEO of Mother’s Choice, and her mother. And to the left by the stairs, it was the artist statement written by Dr. Vicky Lee, who wrote a book on Being Euasian: Memories Across Racial Divides. The tone sets in to focusing on mothers and femininity immediately, mirroring the theme of the exhibition. What drew my attention was the book shelf beside the artist statement. There were two archival images of Euasian family portraits in Hong Kong taken in 1900 and 1924 alongside Dr. Lee’s book. It gave me more context into thinking about the history of Eurasian community and how it all began in Hong Kong.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Little Edith Eaton says to herself, ‘Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? … I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.’

(Sui Sin Far [Edith Eaton] , ‘Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian’, 222) – Extracted from Chapter 2 of the book ‘Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides’. https://hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/pdf-preview/9789622096714.pdf

From the artist statement, it felt that the artist was more interested in the mothers, and their visibility and presence needed to be acknowledged more so than the fathers within the interracial families. I wondered, why not the fathers? Lee wrote in her book that, “Any European employee who violated the colonial etiquette by interracial romance was jeopardizing not only his career but was also risking ostracism…Kenneth Andrew recalled that the first document he had to sign was a promise not to marry a Chinese female (Langford, 1998)”. It feels as though the hostility of interracial marriage is mutual between mothers and fathers, so I wonder whether there was something else that the artist felt with mothers that needed to be acknowledged.

Looking at the images, the images of the mothers and their child often took place on the bed, or sofa or a corner of their home. Lying down, sitting or standing, they were stoic with seriousness or slight grin on their faces. Perhaps it carried on from the idea of traditional painting where wider smiles were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous”. Or perhaps the artist wanted the images to represent power and seriousness of these interracial families. Serendipitously, I met the artist on the day of visit. She told me her photographic process, “I asked them to find a place that is comfortable. For example, for a baby it would make sense to have the 2 hours photography session on the bed. I asked them not to smile, because this is documentary photography. During the shooting, I show them the photographs I took. The camera is a mirror to show them how they want to be represented. They changed their pose to adopt to that and we agree together on the final image.” The work became interesting in that it is a collaboration with the interracial families in creating a pictorial representation of how they want to be seen. And then what fascinates me is when the family being photographed have the power to control how they are being represented in images, their choices of poses can also infer how they want others to see them. The power of their presence becomes not only being who they are in front of the camera, but also how they want to be seen by others.  

From the clothing that the mothers wore, the objects, and surrounding environment in these portraits, all the works presented in this exhibition reflected social-economic privilege in the interracial families photographed. The artist mentioned to me that the choice of families are those amongst her network – friends, neighbours. Slowly she advertised on social media recruiting mix-raced families who want to be photographed. How is her method of selecting families to photograph affect the way audience understand and learn about the psychological and emotional depth of interracial families in Hong Kong?  Perhaps this is something to explore further too.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Amongst the photographs, one photograph of an Indonesian mother with her baby boy drew my attention. According to the gallerist, she was often mis-represented as the domestic helper. I wonder how her interracial marriage experience is in comparison with the others, especially in relation to the culture of this city Hong Kong. It was a shame that the exhibition only presented the images of family portraits. I felt the exhibition would have been more enriching if sound recordings of interviews about the families’ experiences of interraciality were included. I felt this would have given more layers to the body of work and to the theme that the artist wanted the viewers to ponder upon.

Community and Participatory Art: involving collective vision in the current art movement

Art no longer is solely an individual expression. Other than collaborative art-making, we are growing interest and sensitivity towards how art can be a connectivity tool to extend to the community and public engagement. While the classic way of making and enjoying art still has its own value, the placement of art has been shifting towards collaborative and participatory, whether it is within the creative processing in making the artworks themselves or to create public engagement when experiencing the artworks. 

In recent months, there were several exhibitions that revolve around this theme which are worth discussing. 

I. Mountain No Mountain

https://nodisciplinelimited.hk/mountainnomountain/

A jointly presented project by LCSD and the Wan Chai District council, the project is curated by no discipline limited, inviting six artists to create community art experience as a way to use art to connect to the community. 

“In communities, art is not only functional or a mere tool for problem-solving. Community arts can also widen our senses and experience. Once our mindset changes, the surroundings and even ourselves are open to a broader world.”

The prelude exhibition at Our Gallery, Wan Chai was a way to introduce the work by the six participating artists, using different media, to create the community art experience in the coming months. 

Our broom, by Luke Ching, was a memorable one as I participated in the workshop which led me to think more deeply about brooms and street sweepers through our experiences in making the brooms and creative sweeping. Through embodied experience in creating symbols or Chinese characters made by fallen leaves, we are inspired to widen our senses and as a collective look deeper into the issues around brooms and unlock their possibilities. Here, the artist involved the community and the public in the actual artistic processing and in making the artwork itself. The other five artworks also use a similar methodology but through different mediums. For example, in the prelude exhibition, Lawerence Lau, uses “a chain of dialogues”, to invite the public the write their questions that they may want to ask if they meet a stranger in Wanchai on a notebook, and write their answers to the previous questioner. Using sound as a medium, he will continue with this methodology on the streets of Wanchai in the coming months and create a music gathering at the end with people who participated.

I look forward to seeing how the finished work will be presented, if they may, to the public once again or whether the work is left to be ephemeral and to be experienced live only.

left: Our Broom by Luke Ching, photo by Luke Ching, middle: instruction for “A Chain of Dialogues”s by Lawrence Lau, photo by Michelle Chan; right: notebook of “A Chain of Dialogues” by Lawrence Lau, photo by Michelle Chan

II. Serendipity in the Street 

https://www.taikwun.hk/en/programme/detail/serendipity-in-the-street/838

Curated by Tai Kwun Heritage team, along with a researcher team and design partner One Bite Studio, seven artists were invited to use art to respond to what has been observed around the Central and Sheung Wan neighbourhood. The exhibition adopted “Modernologio”, an everyday life observation practice originated in Japan, as the research method to identify the interconnections between people, space and activity. 

Here the exhibition becomes a documentation or a way of showing the findings from the social research made around Central and Sheung Wan neighbourhood, with artworks such as drawings, sketch statistics, short films etc as representations of the findings. Although the exhibition also revolves around the community of Central and Sheung Wan, the value of the exhibition is in the objectivity of presenting a specific community through the work of art. The majority of the artworks is passively engaged with the public, with one section that invited the public to draw their own imagination on how to reuse the prison yard space in Tai Kwun. 

For me, this is definitely not participatory art and I’m not sure whether I can call this community art either. There’s definitely a stir within the art world to shake things up in how we define art and how we present art in exhibition spaces like Tai Kwun. 

III. Hongkongers Archives of 100 objects

https://www.facebook.com/香港百物檔案館

Initiated by artist Kong Yiu Wing, this exhibition was an extension of his previous work built from 2019 where the artist invited the public to donate objects that pertains to the theme “HongKongers”. Personal objects including household items, relics of the movement, old photos, documents, multimedia, 3D model etc becomes an archive for the HongKongers, so to speak. Here the value of the work rests upon being a preservation of a history of the community’s subjectivity about Hong Kong. 

From collecting items to creating a system to archiving these objects, every step of the way becomes a question to decide how much to insert the artist’s curation and how much to leave it open to public participation. And further, is this a question that should only be addressed to the artist himself or can we inspire the public to think together?

At the talk, there was a lady who picked up the documented files and started correcting mistakes. She expressed her disappointment with the mistakes she found in those documents. I wonder, instead of standing in opposing position to point out what was wrong, can we, as artists and curators, inspire the public to involve in bettering the archive in a collective way? And can we, as the public, question ourselves in how to contribute to bettering the archive? 

I look forward to see how this project evolves, and wonder the direction that the artist will take as the sole holder of this archive, yet also represents the community of Hong Kong. 

a documented file of an egg tart mould, photo by Michelle Chan

The Bare Life – Philippe Grandrieux

Empty Gallery – one of my go-to galleries in Hong Kong which displays edgy contemporary artworks that are not exclusive to visual arts but other forms of medium or even crossing boundaries to other forms and media.

Philippe Grandrieux “The Bare Life” is currently exhibited from end of Sept til end of November. The text from the gallery describes the work really well.

“The performance in The Scream resemble an uncanny mixture of religious rituals, and choreographic workshop.  The affective intensity of these performances has only been heightened by Grandrieux’s decision to both to completely surround the spectator with images, and to introduce a slight delay of video, producing an effect no unlike the temporal blurring of which accompanies accumulated sensation. A sequence of 11 staggered projections surround the viewer within a purpose-built chamber, confronting them with a quivering multitude of naked bodies….

Bodies convulse and flail in an object choreography which oscillates between moments of surprising tenderness – the nearly automatic self-soothing activity of a body humming, rocking and whispering to itself – and moments of brutality – manifested not only by the titular scream, but also clawing, twitching, groveling of a body in distress.”

“The 3 single-channel work deals with the theme of anxiety – also explore the enigma of the human body and our relationship to our own materiality. Installed as life-size projections within the architecture of the gallery, each work present a human figure(s) enveloped by cover of darkness, moving according to an obscure logic beyond our comprehension.”

The works definitely confronts the viewers of their relationship with their sensations by being enfolded within the performer’s act. That confrontation sort of led us to awake our bodies as well and become extremely aware of how they respond to different stimuli. Visually striking and enigmatic, somehow disturbing too with the performer’s body almost felt as if she was not present, only with bones and skins moving according to the choreography. There were moments of her body postures which felt as if she was an alien, especially when the light source is not a warm but a fluorescent tone.  All in all, a mind-bending piece of work.

 

 

Snapshots of the single 3-channel projections @ Empty Gallery

A Room of Resistance – Yim Sui Fong

I really forgot how I come across these exhibitions in Hong Kong, but what moved me to find out what this exhibition is about was the question of one of Yim Sui Fong‘s works,

“How distinguished does an individual’s existence has to be before he merits a chronicle of his own? What if it’s merely that of a watchman, looking after something — a rickety hut on a slope, a nondescript warehouse by the sea — that has long been relegated to the margins of history?”

“人要如何偉大才應被記錄下來？如果他的工作只是看管或作一個見證？木屋和倉庫，有人為它記下歷史嗎？”

The exhibition starts with a carefully mounted individual bookshelf that holds the book “the man who attends to the times” for viewers to come in, take it out, and read it on the bench that was placed by the side.

It opens the dialogue of the exhibition on what it is meant by resistance – referring to a kind of tiny resistance, pinches of reverse action in everyday settings – whether these tiny resistance, these seems insignificant reverse actions or moments of uncertainties are worth documenting, and if so, what are they and what can they bring to us.

And then the walk takes one to see the work “Against Step” which is a collection of video recordings of passer-by’s unconscious little movements or mental states. The work is questioning whether active and continuous change of our body movement can avoid “gait identification” which aims to identify people and assign them a score for classifying them into categories. To add layers to this work, Yim also asked a dancer to continuously dance with only 1 instruction, which is to dance against her personal style and achieve the status of “no self”. The dance was filmed and projected on the large white panels against the wall.

Up until here, I get what she wanted to do. The exhibition was interesting and focused. And then, I feel it lost me with the other pieces. There was a piece of work called “Moments” which is hundreds of recorded conflicting moments within the 48 hours around the handover collaged into a one big lightbox panel, with lenticular printing. Quite literally, you can see how one moment moved to the next because of the lenticular printing technique, though I thought the link with the theme is too literal and loose. I wasn’t sure whether the focus of the exhibition wants to discuss more in the political direction, or in the psychology direction – which is what “The Hymn of Disquiet” wants to talk about, and in line with “Against Step”.

“The Hymn of Disquiet” is a visual result / recording of a workshop which invites the public to utilise restless emotions to obtain motivation for creation. The participants spent time in a remote place together and practiced various actions to encounter uncertainties. Personally I feel the content of this performative interaction is very rich, but was slightly disappointed with translated visual executions or works as the richness of the content was gone. And finally there was a sound installation piece which I felt was just something Yim wanted to experiment. It didn’t provide much depth to the exhibition of “resistance”.

Saying that, the most fruitful piece I got from this exhibition and the artist talk was the discussions with Floating Projects, an artist collective based in Hong Kong. The discussion revolves not only around the exhibition itself, but also the dynamics and how to work with curators.

Yim Sui Fong solo exhibition: A Room of Resistance

2019 28th Sept – 18th Oct
LO Gallery, JCCAC ; 11am-8pm

Siu Wai Hang

Few weeks ago I went to a gallery opening “Ritual of Synthesis” at Gallery Exit Hong Kong and one of the artists’ work brought attention to my eyes. Quoting from the original statement:

“Siu Wai Hang employs an analogue approach to photography and explores its materiality in his series. “Strokes of Light” focuses on light as a medium, which is fundamental to photography and essential for visual perception. SIU developed a series of prints using the leading end of photographic roll film that is exposed to light before being loaded into the camera. The array of colours captured is literally a transformation of intangible light into physical form. In “Faces of People”, SIU discovers photography in an alternative way with obsolete technology. By taking individual still images with a super 8 film camera, a device made for capturing moving images, he explores the nature of photography through the context of moving images.”

The work by “Faces of people” is intriguing, showing the never-ending faces of people whom are unidentifiable and that the loop of these people appearing on the movie screen mirrors the effort of HK citizens at the current Protest stage. It seems never-ending.

 

SIU also has other interesting work which he often explores the space between photography and moving images. His WMA award-winning series of InsidOutland is also intriguing. The work was made and photographed at the boarder where stowaways used to land from their great escape from China. The border symbolises identity, history, core values of Hong Kong. Without this border, Hong Kong doesn’t exist. His other work can be found here:

http://www.siuwaihang.net/pro.html