We spend just above 30% of our lives in bed. Our global average lifespans are 67.2 years, meaning we spend about 20.16 years in our beds. If NYC is the city that never sleeps, than HK is the city that never rests... I moved to HK from Seoul, Korea just under a year ago and it has been a shock to my internal metabolism. Here in the twisting canyons of steel and glass and the relentless din of its congested Market alleys, I have drawn my inspiration and at times perspiration for my recent exhibition at Galerie Perrotin HK.

I should tell you that I was born in Incheon city Korea, raised in Minnesota USA, spent over 12 years of my life in NYC and 4 years in Paris. So as a result, I travel a lot. Unlike my transition From NYC to Paris which seemed a de-aceleration, my recent move had the absolutely opposite effect. Here everyone is busy all the time, perhaps it is the famous Chinese work ethic, or the fact that Hong Kong is the only truly global cosmopolitan city in asia. Clearly it re-defines the term “hustle and bustle” for the 21st century. Upon moving here I found that a couple things happened to me and most importantly my work.

The first is I started looking at and taking my own pictures, I have always used a cultural perspective of being a kind of accidental tourist when it comes to making art. My subject matter has purposely and definitively never been about me. Maybe my early adoption to america, where I was swallowed up by middle american culture as a 4 year old and was always an outsider inside of something that was truly foreign to me, has never really let go. I just know I have always been more fascinated with the outside world and the swirling maelstrom of culture than my own private and simple internal conversations. However, as I started making the show last year in my usual way things slowly began to change...

My daily routine has always been pretty much the same, get up, get ready for the day with coffee and breakfast and then head to the studio. I have always been a bit of an insomniac, sometimes it’s jet lag, sometimes extremely vivid dreams, a lot of times I just can’t shut off my headful of thoughts the night before. As I mentioned before I had recently moved from Seoul, which is a great city to paint in. It is quite special in that it is a large city but is still relatively calm, it has big american-style streets and every building seems to have its own space. In terms of the scale of its urban planning Hong Kong is infinitely more dense, with impossibly small sidewalks and far more European in layout. Coming from Seoul my immediate reaction was one of excitement and awe.

Admittedly my initial reaction to try and do as much as I could may have led to one too many nights on Lan Kwai Fong and to one too many stumbling mornings trying to navigate my way to the studio amidst all the media, and relentless visual and auditory cacophony that is HK, but before I knew it I really started needing my own private space even and especially on the canvases.

So to go back to the beginning, I travel a lot. One of the inevitable things about traveling is I stay in a lot of hotels. At first this really made me uncomfortable, it never is my own bed, and sleep always seems to come really hard to me. ( I have a friend who explains this phenomena thru the lack of familiarity and intimacy with a foreign pillow, as a result she travels with her own.) I am not sure this would solve my personal predicament, and sometime back I started enjoying my overnight affairs with strange new beds and rooms. Eventually I even started making a sort of photo journal of all the beds I was staying in.

One in particular kept coming back to me. It was of a bed at the four seasons here in HK. Maybe it was the right time of the morning or the local quality of light, regardless it started manifesting itself in my mind over and over again and eventually found its way onto a small canvas. (I have a small confession to make when I am unable to sleep I generally resort to one of two options the first is to get up and work or I call up a friend and go out, both eventually lead to exhaustion and the safe sanctuary of my bed)

I believe that young artists should try everything and anything, maximise before finding and working our way into the fundamentals. As a result I have always attained to impossibly ambitious large scale paintings with little or no breathing room to visually rest. I have never made shows in a thematic way, I much prefer to make shows like good albums, with one or two clear initial ideas and then the pieces kind of follow and in a way make themselves. Honestly I never like to go into anything with a lot of pre-planning. It cuts away from my feeling of getting to true discovery.

I had initially thought I would call my show “endless sleep” after the famous Hank Williams song, but as one of my dealer’s pointed out, a show based on a song about suicide would not be the most palatable title. More importantly, as I thought about it, that name just did not do justice to what I really was thinking about and feeling. I have always had an insecurity about making art that is overly simple in the same way that I have always been reluctant to make things directly about my personal experiences. I have just never thought these things were that important or interesting. So what changed? The transition, the move to HK, the desire for something different? Most of all what I really needed was to create some calm, a bit of sanctuary in a city full of noise. A personal space, of beds and moments of rest. But as we all know no silence is absolute, and there really is No Rest for the Wicked...

-Jin Meyerson, Hong Kong, January 23, 2013

Image: © Jin Meyerson, Courtesy of Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong & Paris