With keen perceptions of all things delicate, attuned to the realm of the miniscule and sensitive to the emotional shifts brought about by slight changes in one’s environment, the three female artists, Choi Yan Chi, Ivy Ma and Wai Kit Lam, presented in this exhibition, In Details, use their work to “pin” and carefully display – like a butterfly collector – small but significant details from their lives’ experience.
Details here refers to those particular moments that typically pass unnoticed in the course of one’s daily life; those moments in-between other moments which are easily forgotten or ignored: a fragment of a pop song heard in passing, the color of a shard of broken glass, a tiny bird hidden in the tangle of a bush, the breeze stirring the pages of a book, the sheen of water on just-washed tiles.  All of these tiny “events” lie hidden in plain sight, surrounding us and playing upon us just beyond the realm of consciousness.  Nevertheless they are always somehow “sensed” and when they do capture our attention they provoke moments of child-like wonder or Surrealist marvel.

In Details speaks of another way of addressing the world, reconsiders the notion of time, and challenges us with off-kilter perspectives.  Here the nature of things seen takes on an alien atmosphere- sometimes dreamy, occasionally horrific. More than simply transforming such minor epiphanies into representational ‘art objects’, these artists’ practices engage in a pure pursuit of knowledge, making discoveries which are rooted in a phenomenological, sensual realm.

The artists’ emphasis on details does not consist in the too-easy (and god-like) gesture of enlarging the small but rather consists in physically getting closer to the seemingly insignificant.  It’s a gesture of supplication, a humble bending and stooping that literally brings one in closer contact with the world.
Thus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous statement “God is in Detail,” is reversed in the hands of Choi, Lam and Ma, who search not for perfection but find, in imperfection, a real beauty and a poignant echo of our very human relationship to the world.  Starting from an empty place and refusing pre-conceived ideas, their work is neither “conceptual” nor “political” (though it is, in fact, both) but rather an “embodiment” or “incarnation.”  Refusing to make statements (which are always, at heart, justifications), their work aspires to a condition of facticity or state of being that is, quite simply, undeniable.