Known for making in situ paintings for different situations, either for picnics and social gatherings, public interventions, or at a prison visit, Hong Kong artist Lee Kit claims “painting is the means to convey the faint consciousness resulted from our emotion.”

Lee’s interest is to redefine how we identify with the everyday by staging communal activities with his artworks and to seek an uncanny interpretation of an object. The artist washes, folds, irons, consumes and even lives with the fabrics to search for the very meaning of his “painting”. His more recent artworks involve painting on cardboard using brand names drawn from his childhood memory that are steeped with pop sensibilities. One may situate what Lee calls his artwork “more than object”, that is, in between theatricality and presentness to upstage a total self absorption while anticipating a subliminal state in a casual manner.

For this exhibition, Lee will exhibit a series of artworks that allude to multiple stories inside a single space. An ad hoc cinema will also be set up in another gallery to polarize the tension between our static and theatrical associations of the objects on view. The unfolding of contradictory narratives transforms the exhibition site into a temporary film set, upstaging a tension between what is real and artificial, still and theatrical. What is left is an emotionally charged state, open for the audience’s improvisation and imagination, and which requires the attention of a careful gaze.

Private Viewing and Reception: 21 Jan 2011 (Friday), 6.00pm