Osage Gallery is presents Chen Sai Hua Kuan’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Entitled Space Drawing, the exhibition will feature the video work, Space Drawing 07.

Space Drawing 07 was filmed in an abandoned warehouse in the city centre of Limerick, Ireland in 2010 and follows the trajectory of a taut rope as it is released and ricochets across the dusty floors, through the rusty rollers of a conveyor belt, and in and out of the warehouse. The rope simultaneously delineates, sculpts and deconstructs the sites that it moves through. The work thus reinterprets the function of a line, extending the traditional two‐dimensional practice of drawing into a three‐dimensional spatial intervention that works across the borders between installation, drawing, performance, film and sculpture.

Chen Sai Hua Kuan chose the abandoned warehouse as the site for the video after thorough contemplation. Like many other forsaken urban spaces in the city, this is a place where emptiness and decay are slowly taking place within a manufactured and civilized urban landscape. The site had an elusive openness that held both the remnants and potentials of time, which the artist activated, reinterpreting the inherent movements of the time and space through the precise choreography of the rope.

Such gestures are evident of the artist’s sensitivity to the characters of everyday objects, as well as the witty, mischievous and explorative qualities inherent in the artist’s practice. The simultaneous playfulness and precision, tightness and looseness to Chen Sai Hua Kuan’s approach is perhaps what creates a tension in the movement of the work itself.

The artist states, ”My work is an intuitive reflection of specific space and time through playfully deconstructing the identity boundaries of everyday objects, found materials, or situations, such as a damaged signboard or a half‐eaten broccoli. Through the movements of construction/deconstruction and position/deposition, I am interested in looking at different ways of reading evolving from the simple, quotidian means.“

Space Drawing 07 is a part of a larger series, entitled Space Drawing, that the artist has been creating and filming in locations such as London and Bracknell (UK), Moscow and Kaliningrad (Russia), Singapore, Chengdu (China) and Frankfurt (Germany) since 2007. The series has been widely shown in international film festivals, such as the Busan International Short Film Festival, 2010 and the International Festival for Arts and Media Yokohama, 2009 and now Space Drawing 07 will be shown at Osage Hong Kong.

-Osage Gallery

Image: © Chen Sai Hua Kuan
Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery