exhibition review
Invisible islands
MAP Office
2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architecture Hong Kong
December 20, 2013 – February 28, 2014
Kwun Tong Ferry Pier, Kowloon
http://www.uabb.hk/
Tucked away in a back corner of Kwun Tong’s North Point Ferry pier as part of the 2013-2014 HK architecture biannale, is a collection of plants, physical artifacts and photographic and filmic evidence which assemble a portrait of an often overlooked part of Hong Kong – the 260 outlying islands which were leased to the British in 1898, and are now part of the HKSAR. Map Office’s Laurent and Valerie have visited 33 of these islands, discovering a diverse range of environmental conditions, transient populations, eroding programs and forgotten histories; past, present and future.
Their installation recalls the practice of the kunstkammer, the Victorian cabinet of curiosities. Constructed to display treasured evidence of lands far away, they contain meticulously assembled, labelled and displayed artifacts, the first findings of uncharted territories. Yet to be categorized, the artifacts seemingly random adjacencies create zones of intensity, each item a treasure, with its mystery still somewhat intact, but gesturing towards the possibility of revealing ontological and epistemological secrets when laid out in combination with the others.
With the ambiance of a natural history museum in a small coastal town, waist high glass topped tables exhibit found objects, seashells and other errata, identified by hand printed labels with their name and site of discovery. This intimate, deceptively amateur tactic is complemented by the not quite lush representational context of potted palms and other tropical plants, wall hung photographs, looping video and windows painted to obscure views of the city, directing ones gaze down to the churning Victoria Harbour. The room is topped by a neon sign, reading, in cursive, “island is land”. Effected to transport the viewer to the room’s tropical doppelgänger, this recreation of moments of discovery acts as a representation or more accurately, a re-presentation of the experience itself, in all of its happenstance multiplicity of strange juxtapositions and unexpected constructions. Just as a shell or a fishing buoy can stand in for the activities involved in their creation and function, the installation as a whole acts simultaneously as a piecemeal simulacrum and as transformative device, with curatorial adjacencies hinting at the embedded potential richness of this expansive, seemingly isolated and ignored archipelago.
exhibition review
State of Mind
Monica Tai
October 8-13, 2014
Visual Arts Centre, 7A Kennedy Road, Central.
Monica Tai’s second solo exhibition in Hong Kong, State of Mind, is an exploration of the relation between the individual and the collective in both their communicative practices and the gestures that enable that communication. Not simply meant to evoke passive emotional responses, the work exposes the tension between an absent object and a focused subject as a way to activate an awareness of the present, often unacknowledged conditioning that modern technology and regulation has had on our lives. This conditioning is both a cause and desired effect of a modern, middle to upper class lifestyle, where hard work is (sometimes) rewarded with an ability to accumulate, often at the expense of the environment and our personal freedom. The negative effects of accumulation on our thinking may not surface or seem to matter at a personal level, but in sum, the state of mind with which we all approach our daily lives, and the practices and gestures that result from it, has had a massive effect upon the planet itself.
This cumulative effect has been significant enough to require the naming of a new geological era, the anthropocene, to register the overwhelming impact of human activities on the climate and on planet Earth. But it is not just Earth that is affected, it is the very grounds of our relation to the earth, and to each other. In a recent essay by Bruno Latour, “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene”, the anthropocene is understood as a planetary inability to distinguish an environment separate from ourselves: we have lost the object, or perhaps more accurately, the subject and the object have collapsed into one another. “…the Earth is no longer “objective”; it cannot be put at a distance and emptied of all Its humans. Human action is visible everywhere— in the construction of knowledge as well as in the production of the phenomena those sciences are called to register”. [1]
This construction of knowledge which is simultaneously a measure our own actions, is evident in Tai’s work, particularly through the activation of varying degrees of subjective intensity – the oscillation between isolation through passive consumption, and collaboration through focus on a specific goal, complicates the relation between the subject of the piece and the object itself that we are viewing. In Tai’s pieces, one or the other is missing, or are collapsed together, “objectivity” no longer possible. How can we work collaboratively while retaining our own identities? How do we expose and respond to our reflexive reactions to the increasingly regulated and isolating urban environment?
This conflation of subject/object is apparent in several sets of thought provoking sculptural installations which are showcased as groups in different areas of the gallery. As an example, four slightly smaller than life figures are conjoined with everyday road signs and traffic control devices, merging graceful dance positions with urban objects. Entitled ‘compliant beings’, the works question our knee-jerk responses to our environment and tendency to follow the rules and asks how we can overcome our indoctrination through actions such as reflection and balance. In a set of life-size wooden hands, a cacophony of hand gestures are represented, questioning which is the speaker and which is the response – in fact is it a conversation at all or rather is meaning just lost in translation? It is through this exploration of body language and other notational strategies that Tai playfully and provocatively captures the in between states of mind which inhabit our thoughts, and reflexively determine our environment.
[1] Bruno Latour (2014), “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene”, New Literary History, Vol. 45, 6.