19 Sep - 11 Nov, 2017 | Group Show | Tale of the Wonderland, Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong

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Tale of the Wonderland
Featured artists: Amy Cheung, Isaac Chong Wai, Chow Chun Fai, South Ho Siu Nam, Sarah Lai, Lam Tung Pang, Leung Chi Wo, Pak Sheung Chuen
19 September – 11 November 2017
Opening Reception: 16 September 2017, Saturday, 4 – 6:30 pm Artists will be present. Performance by Isaac Chong Wai will take place at 4:30 - 5:00pm.
Venue: Blindspot Gallery (15/F, Po Chai Industrial Building, 28 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong) Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm (Sunday and Monday by appointment only);
closed on public holidays
Blindspot Gallery is delighted to present “Tale of the Wonderland”, a group exhibition that borrows Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the Victorian fantasy novel written by Lewis Carroll, as the framework to construct a collective narrative of the 20 years of post-colonial Hong Kong. Having bid adieu to the colonial era, she was thrown into the rabbit hole, and in 20 years she had to re-learn how to position herself in face of an uncertain future. Her beliefs about her identity and understanding of reality collapse in Wonderland, as she approaches such identity displacement in terms of a fairy tale.
The exhibition is divided into eight chapters, each abstracting elements from the storyline of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Each chapter is represented by the works of eight respective artists, who employ different methodologies and diverse mediums to interpret and realise the respective ideas. The eight chapters are “White Glove” (Sarah Lai), “The Rabbit Hole” (Lam Tung Pang), “Drink Me” (South Ho Siu Nam), “Who in the World am I” (Isaac Chong Wai), “Pool of Tears” (Leung Chi Wo), “Alice’s Adventures” (Amy Cheung), “White Rose Red” (Chow Chun Fai), and “Book – A Speechless Goodbye” (Pak Sheung Chuen).
The exhibition opens with Sarah Lai’s painting, titled White Glove, and a video work. With her signature low-contrast pale palette, Lai depicts a waving hand in a white glove. The gloved hand is devoid of warmth and ambiguous in intention: is the waving hand greeting, declining or bidding farewell? Through the symbolism of white glove, Lai reflects on the hypocritical nature of colonialism and the undecidability of politics. At the same time, Lai satirises Hong Konger’s idealised memory of the British rule during the colonial period.
Lam Tung Pang revisits a self-portrait, titled Folding (2017), created ten years ago whilst studying in the UK. The work resembles a folding screen, in which the artist upholds his empty palms, seemingly holding a cloud of air. Ten years later, Lam reinterprets this work by drilling holes on the wooden panels, visualising the unspeakable voids accumulated in a decade of emptiness. Another work of Lam’s is The Sinking World No.6 (2014), an elegant landscape on wooden panel in which weightless human figures fall without gravity.
South Ho Siu Nam’s installation titled drunken life dreaming death, which includes two kinds of beer brewed by the artist himself, a wooden table split and recombined, as well as dim illumination from hand-made lanterns. The work is a metaphor for people’s divergent memories of the past. Ho uses the bitter-sweet taste of beer as medium, creating a communal experience through the audience’s drinking, sharing, interacting, and participating. In addition, the artist has custom made a camera lens filter that contains liquid beer, transforming the tipsy state into a photographic eye to see the world.
Isaac Chong Wai painted the phrase “Is the World Your Friend?” on canvas as a response to a traumatising attack by a stranger on the street in a foreign country, which led him to contemplate one’s position in the society and in the world. Two other video works, Falling Exercise and Help! Help? Help, document the collective performances of falling and aiding. Through the cyclical processes of falling and standing up, and the reciprocal role of helping and being helped, Chong uses his performances to investigate the formation of individual and collective consciousness, as well as the consolidation of societal norms. Another featured work is an installation titled Hong Kong and Hong Kong, in which a recording plays
the gentle humming of the Chinese national anthem, while a Hong Kong SAR flag is “frozen” in a resin crystal.
Leung Chi Wo’s Untitled Waterscape series captured the variably colourful surfaces of the Victoria harbour in different seasons and times of the day, recording the temporal and mnemonic impressions unperceivable by the naked eye. Leung’s other work, Before Sunrise, is a set of 6 photographs that documents the artist’s response to Yoko Ono’s performance Morning Peace. Set to the accompaniment of Im Abendrot (At Sunset), one of the Four Last Songs Richard Strauss wrote before his death, the artist and attending audience witnessed together the twilight of sunrise.
Amy Cheung’s work documents a performance she enacted, titled 72 Hours, lasting the duration of three days starting on 30 June 2017, the day before the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, until 2 July 2017, the day after. During the performance, the artist blindfolded herself and relied on the physical guidance of a different participant each hour to walk, trace and verbalise his or her respective narratives about self and society in the past 20 years, weaving individual stories together into a collective memory.
Chow Chun Fai will install an artwork consisting of 2046 flags, as a metaphor for the discolouration and distortion in the authoritarian rule of the Red Queen. Also featured are signature paintings of Chow’s that take their subject matters from local Hong Kong news reports, depicting scenes of iconic moments and speeches made by the various Chief Executives in the past 20 years, along with insightful subtitles.
Pak Sheung Chuen’s work Adult Library Series: LXB originates from the Library Series during Pak’s residency in New York in 2008. The artist sees the listing of the year of birth and year of death of an author in the library system as a metaphorical memorial to an author. Pak’s work thus acts as a commemorative gesture to a recently deceased writer, while reflecting on the definition of “banned books”, as well as the porously indefinable and permeable border between Hong Kong and China.
The eight featured artists began their conceptual creation at the intersection between realism and fantasy, reflecting on the coexisting dialectics of self and collective, power and freedom, reality and fiction, and past and future.
Interviews with artists are welcome and can be arranged.
About Blindpsot Gallery
For enquiries and media interviews, please contact Ms. Lesley Kwok at 2517 6238 or by email info@blindspotgallery.com
Image Captions: Pak Sheung Chuen, LXB-573.07-7263-ZGDDZZYZGZSFZ-42-A1A10, 2017, Archival inkjet print, 57 x 102.5 cm, Edition of 7 + 3AP Isaac Chong Wai, Help! Help? Help, 2016, Video, 1’53”, Edition of 5 Amy Cheung, 72 Hours, 2017, Dual-channel video, Edition of 5 (Image courtesy of artists and Blindspot Gallery)

仙境奇遇” 展出藝術家:張韻雯、莊偉、周俊輝、何兆南、黎卓華、林東鵬、梁志和、白雙全 二零一七年九月十九日至十一月十一日
開幕酒會: 二零一七年九月十六日,星期六下午 4 時 至 6 時 30 分 藝術家將出席開幕酒會。莊偉的行為表演將於下午 4 時 30 分至 5 時進行。
地點:刺點畫廊(香港黃竹坑道 28 號保濟工業大廈 15 樓)開放時間:星期二至星期六,上午 10 時至下午 6 時(星期日及星期一只供預約);公眾假期休息
展覽“仙境奇遇”以出版於 1865 年維多利亞時期的奇幻文學小說《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》作骨幹,建構出一個有關香 港脫離殖民時期二十年的集體故事。這二十年來,她被掉進兔子洞,對前途不明感到困惑並需學習重新自我定 位。對自己的身份和周遭的現實的認知崩解後,她藉著仙境裡的童話故事重新理解自身的處境 。
展覽抽取了《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》故事中的不同元素或情 節,分為八個章節,由八位香港藝術家以不同媒介和手 法的創作演繹各章節的涵意 。展覽的八個章節包括“白 手套”(黎卓華)、“兔子洞”(林東鵬)、“醉生夢死” (何兆南)、“我在世上是誰”(莊偉)、“淚水之塘” (梁志和)、“愛麗斯的旅程”(張韻雯)、“紅玫瑰白玫 瑰”(周俊輝)和“圖書 – 無言的告別”(白雙全)。
展覽以黎卓華的繪畫及録像作開首。黎氏以一貫淡色
調、低反差的繪畫風格,繪畫了一隻穿載著白手套、在 揮動的手。被白手套遮敞的手變成了一隻沒有温度的手,手的動作意向不明 – 揮手、拒絕還是道別?通過白手 套的意涵,黎氏反思殖民主義的虛偽本質,及政治的不確定性。同時,暗地裡揶揄港人對英殖時期、經美化的
回憶。
林東鵬重新演譯 10 年前留學英國期間創作的自畫像《Folding》。作品看似一幅能摺叠的屏封,自畫像雙手懸 空,看似抱著一團空氣,裹藏在打開了的屏封當中。在 10 年後林氏重新演繹此作品的版本中,自畫像上卻鑽 了一個個的洞,10 年前無以名狀的空虛感演化成無底的空洞。而另一件創作於 2014 年名為《沉世繪()》 的作品,在優美的山水境致中,人們失重地墮落四方。
何兆南的裝置作品《醉生與夢死》是由藝術家親手釀製的啤酒、一張分裂後再重合的木枱,加上燈光效果組 成。何氏釀製的酒有甘、苦兩種味道,隱喻人對過去與回憶持有的不同態度。何氏以啤酒作媒介,通過喝酒、 分享、互動,介入觀眾的參與,從而營造群組的氣氛與經驗。除此之外,藝術家更特製了一個盛載啤酒的相機 鏡頭過濾鏡,透過攝影捕捉“酒後”的風景。
莊偉參展的繪畫《Is The World Your Friend?》的靈感源自他一次在外地 被街上的陌生人無故襲擊的經歷,此事件令他反思自身在社會和世界 的定位。他的兩組録像作品《Falling Exercise》及《Help! Help? Help》 紀錄了跌倒及援助的集體演出。透過跌倒及站起的過程、拯救與被救 的對立角色扮演,莊氏通過兩組集體行為,以探討自我/集體意識的 構成,及社會標準的釐定 。而最新的裝置作品《香港‧香港》(Hong Kong and Hong Kong),在中國國歌的哼唱聲中,香港區旗被摺叠上並 「冰封」在水晶體裡。
梁志和的攝影系列《Untitled Waterscape》通過攝影記錄了維多利亞港在不 同季節、不同時段變幻無常的色彩,保存了肉眼看不見卻飽含在水中、有 關時間和記憶的印證。另一參展作品《拂曉》(Before Sunrise)是一組共 6 張的照片,記録了一次回應藝術家小野洋子作品《Morning Peace》的即場 表演,伴隨即場演奏的音樂是 Richard Strauss 在預視自己生命終結前一年 填寫的歌曲 Im Abendrot (At Sunset),藝術家與在場觀眾共同見證了日出的 晨曦。
張韻雯的參展作品《72 小時》記錄了她從 2017.6.30 至 2017.7.2,即香港回 歸二十週年的前一天至後一天,三天內共 72 小時,蒙著雙眼,每小時跟隨 著一個參與者,到不同地點追溯參與者關於社會或自身的回憶。作品通過 不同個體的回憶拼湊出集體回憶的大畫面。
周俊輝的最新裝置作品由 2046 支旗幟組成,經手工處理後的旗幟比喻在紅心皇后的統治下,事物的變色和失 真。另外,周氏一系列取材於本地新聞的畫作,描繪出過去 20 年來歷屆香港特首在不同場合發表演說時具時 代標誌性的畫面,及發人深思的語句。
白雙全的參展作品《成人圖書館系列:LXB》延續白氏於 2008 年在美國紐約作駐留時所創作的圖書館系列。藝 術家以圖書館把作者的出生及死亡年份在搜索系統中列出,比喻為一種對作者的追念。白氏以此作品追念剛去 世的作者,同時反思「禁書」的界定,及中港兩地的無形邊界。
8 位參展藝術家通過概念化的創作從奇幻與寫實交錯的建構出發,反思自身與集體、權力與自由、真實與虛 構、過去與未來的共存而對立的關係。
歡迎媒體預約採訪。
關於刺點畫廊
如有任何查詢,請致電 25176238 或電郵至 info@blindspotgallery.com 與郭麗兒小姐聯絡
圖片說明:
白雙全,《LXB-573.07-7263-ZGDDZZYZGZSFZ-42-A1A10》,2017,收藏級噴墨打印,57 x 102.5 厘米,版本:7 + 3AP 莊偉,《Help! Help? Help》,2016,錄像,1’53”,版本:5 張韻雯,《72 小時》,2017,錄像
(圖片由藝術家及刺點畫廊提供。)