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

One Day We’ll Understand – Sim Chi Yin