Pearl Lam Galleries presents a group exhibition of mostly historical artworks by: Ho Siu-Kee; Ellen Pau; Sara Wong; and Vincent Yu. The exhibition title Déjà Disparu takes reference from Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, a seminal book on Hong Kong’s cultural politics of the 1990’s written by the renowned cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas. Curated by David Chan, the exhibition investigates our numbness towards the rapid physical changes of our urban space, and explores our collective consciousness of locality and time.
Déjà Disparu is defined by Abbas as: “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been. It is as if the speed of a current event is producing a radical desynchronization: the generation of more and more images to the point of saturation going together with a general regression of viewing, an inability to read what is given to view, the state of reverse hallucination.”
Déjà Disparu focuses on selected artists who emerged from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The exhibition simulates this overloaded experience through different media of photography, sculpture, and video installation. These artworks express collectively an in between state of imagination and regression that is metaphorical of a desire to escape versus being contained and where objects become flattened and dematerialized.
Subverting the narrative structure of film, Ellen Pau’s Recycling Cinema (1999) is a single channel video installation that signifies our compliance with a master temporality central to urban development. Pau tracks the moving vehicle on the busy Island Eastern Corridor highway with a panning video camera. The moment the panning speed of the video camera matches with the one of a moving car, the vehicle is held captive for a brief moment only to accelerate out of sight during the next instant. The artist then targets another vehicle on the opposite lane, only to have forgotten what she saw seconds ago. The act of viewing is a monotonous exercise of blind fate, our reading of the city is merely a series of flattened images that can never be held captive for our closer scrutiny and the set narrative must move forward.
First shown at Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong in 1998, Local Orientation (1998) by Sara Wong questions the elusive representation of maps and our inability to navigate through a permanent urban terrain. Drawing straight lines along the four cardinal directions on a bird’s eye map of Hong Kong from a determined centre, Wong proceeded to walk along the set trajectories on actual location in order to register the daily lives on a neighborhood. Whenever she is met with a building or an obstacle along the set journey, Wong would then proceed to the nearest open space to continue with the set path. For this exhibition, Wong will project one of her walking tours from 1998 onto the ceiling of the gallery to disorient the directional bearing of the gallery. Furthermore, Wong will make a new version of Local Orientation (2013) by walking along the same western path as in 1998 in order to differentiate the actual physical changes within the city.
Well versed in Greek mythology and in French phenomenology, Ho Siu-Kee considers the body as a mere tool for our perception. It is through the body’s timely engagement with different man-made structures that reveals our relationships with the world and its many hidden potentials. In Gravity Hoop (1996), the artist suspends himself upside down inside a circular steel apparatus and asks us to ponder on gravity as a fundamental physical condition that has limited the appearance of our reality. Such a defiant act celebrates stillness and the longing for a personal space for introspection.
Vincent Yu has worked as a photojournalist for Associated Press since 1989. His participation in this exhibition provides objective glimpses of living in Hong Kong with a series of documentary photographs. Two series of photographs will be shown. HKG is a series of photographs he took from the 1980s to 1990’s that records the physical changes of the city and the events leading up to the pre and post handover periods. In addition, another series of frontal portraitures of the long time inhabitants of the now demolished Shek Kip Mei Estate- the oldest public housing estate built by the former colonial government in 1953. Yu records meticulously many elderly people living and their belongings inside a cramped living quarter. Yu’s matter of fact photographs acknowledge the historicity of a dwelling, his visual diaries provide an abbreviated chronology that binds the ephemeral artworks by other artists in this exhibition in a provocative manner.
Image: © Ho Siu Kee, Pearl Lam Galleries
