Hanart TZ Gallery is pleased to announce Chow Chun Fai’s new solo exhibition I Have Nothing To Say.

Say ‘I have nothing to say’, it’s for one of three reasons: either because of my intense frustration with the way things are, or because I have to use metaphors or fables to stand in for the things I’m unable to talk about directly, or because I find that it’s only by taking a more distant, oblique approach that I can accurately portray the things I see happening in front of me.

This exhibition can be divided into three sections:

The first is comprised of images I have captured from my mobile phone of postings from electronic media/ social platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and WeChat. Some of these postings are from actual newspaper articles or other media reports, others are clearly political propaganda: but what they all have in common is that they are either deceptive information or outright lies, of the kind we encounter on a daily basis. From the huge amount of data I collected, I have made a selection of 49 of these capture images and turned them into drawings on paper.

The second section can be described as a new installment of my ‘film paintings’ series. This time, however, I selected specific scenes and dialogue from films such as Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly, which are full of ambiguity and leave the audience constantly guessing what the real truth of the situation is. Each of these scenarios has a kind of symbolic significance related to our current socio-political situation—and once again, the main theme is about lies and deception.

For the third section of the exhibition, I have created a performative mixed-media work using appropriated images of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. In these images, which North Korea has broadcast to the world, Kim is shown surrounded by his devoted followers, many of whom reach out towards their idol with passionate, energetic gestures and with their faces contorted with emotion and even streaming with tears. To me these propagandistic images of Kim have the constructed pathos of Renaissance-period religious paintings, and it is this quality that I want to capture in this work.

Chow Chun Fai