In collaboration with agnès b.'s LIBRAIRIE GALERIE, Gallery EXIT is pleased to announce a place changes as we look, an art exhibition that features the work of emerging Hong Kong artists Silvia CHAN, Silas FONG, HO Sin Tung and Sarah LAI.
The city marks us. The city forms its marks upon us. We are marked by the city as we travel through it and have our being in it. We accumulate these marks, which overtime, form our identity and influence how we perceive and act. Thus, we write into the city as the city writes onto us. Nicolas Bouvier wrote in his travelogues L'Usage du monde, “one thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you.” The four artists were invited to show how the city of Hong Kong has influenced and marked their work. They journey through the city without a prefixed notion of what they are looking for and let the city and its changing rhythms form their understanding of what life and art is and could be, day by day.
HO Sin Tung’s ongoing project of research and meticulous map making draws upon the layer of historical, social and personal memory that a place is imbued with. She has made maps of various places in Hong Kong. In these maps, the names of new, old and obsolete streets and buildings are often intertwined to form a Kafka-esque puzzle.
Silvia CHAN and Sarah LAI's fondness in depicting the sea takes on multiple forms. In Vestiges, Chan collaborates with waves breaking ashore. She lays a roll of canvas along the beach, applies paint and gaze at the waves washing away the colors. Later in her studio, Chan spend weeks tracing these suggestive markings of frozen froth. Lai is fascinated by the myriad variations between the play of light and water. It can be an instantaneous burst of sunlight reflected on the tip of dripping tap or the moon dissolving its shape in a roadside puddle. The Sea (night series) evoke the mysterious sea at night, where time slows down towards eternity.
Silas FONG invests a lot of time in waiting. He chooses to film subjects who are in an involuntary state of suspense. They might be waiting for the train door to open, standing on an escalator, waiting for friends on a bench, lining up in a queue. Their facial and body expressions hints to a state of mind that is often dislocated. He questions how time passes in such moments and how it could be redeemed.
