Kitty Ko Sin Tung, a graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was born in 1987 and continues to live and work in Hong Kong. Though it visually belongs to the school of “nice painting” that dominates exhibitions of young artists in the region, Ko’s work transcends the fetish of painted handicraft and offers an interpretation on processes of assemblage, serving to diagram and reproduce the occasionally fantastic worlds to which it belongs. Working on the boundary between painting and illustration, Ko creates analytical images that digest and process the forms of this geography of objects, transferring the silhouetted contours and marks of painterly process visible in the external world onto ambivalent canvases of both description and production.
This exhibition examines approximately three years of Ko’s practice, noting her strategies for confronting the inopportune. Contour is employed to delimit the space between the safe or known and the external, while the mark is used to denote not the excluded but rather the preferred instance. Entitled Repairing Space, this group of projects seeks to enumerate the ways in which the practice of art might improve social and individual life in general through the investment in the work of a symbolic or talismanic power. When the repair, categorization, labeling, and reproduction of objects within the work causes these paintings and drawings to achieve the status of living objects in their own right, they enter an economy not just of signs but of speaking icons that encourage and reinforce.
In more detail:
The exhibition centers on a group of three paintings entitled respectively “About Hair,” “About Bones,” and “About Teeth” (all 2009). The series as a whole examines how personal identity is constructed across an historical axis through the physical manipulation of the body, specifically by presenting in images simultaneously diagrammatic and painterly Ko’s own spinal alignment problems and contributing postures, a record of all of her hairstyles from the 1980s to the present, and an anatomical sketch of her teeth and the feats of dental engineering reflected therein. As a group, these colorful canvases enforce an idea of person and personality through only a sense of bodily evolution, transformed into a literary event.
(On diagonal wall, 3450 mm)
More of Ko’s latest work is included in a further set of two groups of two paintings each that reflect the process of illustrative diagramming that marks so much of this body of work. Two such pieces, “Things in Order IV” and “Things in Order V” (both 2010), detail in text and line drawings the contents of shelves that belong to the artist. The former assigns numbers to some thirty books represented within the frame of the work solely as blank silhouettes, while the latter applies a similar process to around fifty shoes and shoeboxes. This empty cataloguing denies the importance of intellectual and emotional content, instead toying with notions of presence, ownership, and physical value. “Letters 1 to 9” and “Letters 1 to 10” (both 2010) function similarly, outlining from above two stacks of letters and other mail sitting on some surface not depicted here. As much as this is a record of actual things, it is also an empty demarcation of existence in and of itself.
(On wall across from office, 4470 mm)
An earlier group of works entitled “I Read (if you can’t see)” (2009), initially exhibited as part of Ko’s graduation projects, reflects her interest in categorization and labeling. These small canvases, again all executed in a neutral black and white, depict the barcodes, charts, product descriptions, and trademarks of a prosaic range of objects potentially purchased at a grocery store or clipped from a newspaper, but each component is repeated for multiple iterations over a close but not identical space, causing the images to appear blurred and often illegible. Playing with scale and the possibilities of vision, the legacy of this series remains evident in Ko’s later diagrams of objects, similarly transformed from physical entities into abstract representations.
(On wall under loft, 5428 mm)
In another series entitled “What’s Your Position?” (2009), a group of paintings present themselves as maps of public affect. The largest canvas depicts two contrasting floor plans of typical apartments; another includes sketches of the three jurisdictions of taxi cabs in Hong Kong; the third reproduces logos of major bus and other mass transport companies. Viewers are asked to apply round red stickers to their usual “positions” within this matrix, defining identity through the choices and postures they adopt in everyday life. Subverting the typical use of such red dots to denote commercial activity in an art fair setting, Ko constructs relationships between visitors and between multiple painted images, embedding all of this exchange not in the space of interpersonal relations but rather in the body of the work itself. A project entitled “Six Pieces of Blue Carbon Paper” (2008) divests itself of such public interaction but continues to repeat the forms of pre-existing images. On each of six canvases, blue carbon paper has been used to repeat a specific shape, creating repetitive patterns of labels abstracted from function.
(On office walls, 2946 and 2863 mm)
The exhibition also includes a new series that functions almost therapeutically, attempting to displace the fear of the everyday through organization, categorization, and labeling. Adopting the allegory of “repair,” a prosaic notion by which one might work through the disorder, failure, and despair of the networks of things, this large-scale project appears far messier than Ko’s other work, taking the form of a window under repair.
(On main wall, 6521 mm)
