Gallery EXIT presents Screensaver - Luke Ching's first solo exhibition with the gallery, also the artist's solo exhibition in Hong Kong since the past seven years.

Broadly acknowledged as one of Hong Kong's most active conceptual artists, Luke Ching Chin Wai interchanges 'twixt the roles of an artist and observer within and beyond the city. Ching creates artworks that transcend conventional forms, restriction and control. He breeds a discursive system of his own that, with a good mix of humor, responds and interrogates the cultural and political collisions occurred in our city.

Ching's solo exhibition has two titles: Screensaver in English and (The Truman Show) in Chinese, featuring a linear series of thought-provoking video installations, sculptures and photographs all anchored to the notion of 'repetition' - the fundamental and perpetual pattern of screensaver. Screensaver, under Ching's artistic articulation, is translated into a societal device imbedded deep beneath our contemporary life. By repeating certain images on the surface, screensaver protects the sleek illusion hovering astride reality and prevents the veneer from collapsing. Ching's work Screensaver, sharing the selfsame exhibition title, displays single commercial logo on the screen of seven closed-circuit televisions for a period of over 5 months (3600 hours). Such blank operation eventually imprints respective after-images on the TV screens that linger over like screensavers.

In a metaphorical sense, the "screensaver" enveloping our reality can exist in its own right - if without an observer. It can only be discovered by piercing through from within with the wake of man's awareness. The Chinese title is taken from the film The Truman Show (1998), wherein Truman Burban watches the repetitive activities occurring in his neighbourhood before realising the virtual world where he is thrown within. Thus, acute observation is the second nature surging across Ching's exhibition which emerges in works such as Screensaver - Sunsets in our country - a video work which the artist recorded six flag-lowering ceremonies held in varied venues across Hong Kong on the same day.

Born in 1972 in Hong Kong, Luke Ching earned his MA in Fine Arts in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Over the past two decades, the artist has participated exhibitions and residencies abroad including P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center (New York), Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery (United Kingdom) and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Residence Program (Japan).

-Gallery Exit

Image: © Luke Ching
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Exit