DOUBTFUL MEMORY
11TH JUNE - 1ST JULY 2021 In 2019 my proposal successfully got the funding from Art Development Council in Hong Kong to do a solo exhibition in Anita-Chan Lai Ling gallery with the theme about memory of Hong Kong. Doubtful Memory to me is the suspicious feeling of seeing something familiar in the street whereas I am not certain if I had genuinely seen those before. After all the protests against the government happened in 2014 and severely descending to a devastating confrontation in 2019, I thought many people in Hong Kong have the same feeling of the essence of this city is disappearing. And thus I worked on such theme which is literally desperate and the legacy of the artworks I have done in Berlin few years ago. From this point, the nature of Hong Kong, the absolutely high humidity which I thought is perfectly matched to the viscosity of paint. This time instead of canvas I directly applied the objects I found as the surface for painting. And the boundary of painting subsequently became a focus of mine and I took parts of the artworks outdoor to shot video of them in an attempt to frame the paintings into video including the slight movement and sound. At the same time the question about necessity of gallery and art space raised in my mind. In this exhibition, I portrayed the textures, the mundane objects or remembrance, and the infamous humidity of Hong Kong which have influences on how he applies the paint. In order to create the appropriate textures and viscosity of paint he mixes various kinds of paints with different materials. The paint surfaces, fluidity or viscosity of paint and the objects were therefore the most important parts in the painting-object confiiguration and the question of what is the boundary of painting is subsequently aroused, which hopefully can lead to an argument of how to push the boundary of painting. |
Two months before the exhibition I brought parts of the artworks to different places in where I thought they could completely immersed with their own qualities. And then I took videos of them in order to complete the painting within the video frame that including sound, and slight movement of the objects I put there by the breeze.
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