A jar of water from the seas of Hong Kong rests quietly in a white drawer. On-lookers are bemused for a moment because of the tranquillity it bestows upon the frenzy of our age, nothing short of a stagnation of time. Time is an important element in this art-piece, it acts as an adhesive, and much change is fixed upon the nodal point of time.

This is Wu Yuren’s installation piece, for the upcoming exhibition in Tang Contemporary Hong Kong, like his other art-pieces, it is placed in a grid of time, different nodal points are placed in this time grid, they are all meaningful to the artist in some way. Video art-piece “The Ocean” exhibits the limitless and intricate changes on the boarder of sea and heaven, dusk and night, “El Nino” is a printer mounted on a wall, blank sheets of blue paper constantly streaming out—they are an unleashing of the artist Wu Yuren, as well as his experiment to transcend into the social context and meanings generated through art as a device of criticism and intervention.

The concept behind “Cant Hold Back!” comes from his involvement and organization of the artists’ rights protection movement that took place in Beijing not long ago, expressing the multi-layered thoughts of the artist through the continuous ring-tones of text-messaging of his phone. The rapid ringing is more like an alarm, when distracted by the ringing, it reminds the audience to explore the social phenomenon and the current affairs that lie behind it.

“Not A Day Spent in Waste” is a story about ever-increasing and ever-disappearing, this increase and disappearing is more like a record of the artist’s life-prints, it, with another sculpture-piece, “Those Past Years” are a stagnation of time. An elegant residential house of the south stems from a thick tree trunk, we can see its tiles and other details. They are encircled in the growth rings of the trunk, ringing back memories amid the ripples of time, expressing a poetic beauty. 

Curator:
Wei Xing