Arrow Factory is pleased to announce a new installation by Hong Kong artist Lee Kit. Taking the form of an imagined music shop from the 1980s, “It’s Not An Easy Thing” is both an elegiac tribute to a specific moment in time and an aggregation of the artist’s invented memories, tangential associations and bittersweet emotions. Foregoing his usual practice of painting, Lee has chosen instead to sparingly combine assorted daily objects, furniture and music into a common scene reminiscent of another era and another state of mind that oscillates between anticipation and loss, hopefulness and mournful regret. The setting appears typically mundane but the timing and atmosphere it intends to evoke—a mixture of apprehension and excitement upon the eve of a music album release circa 1989—is deeply charged.
“It’s Not An Easy Thing” is inspired by sentiments surrounding the artist’s first visit to Beijing during the dead of winter. The journey triggered in Lee an array of associations and conflicting emotions; fears about experiencing the acute cold translated into trepidations about entering the political space of mainland China and being confronted with unresolved feelings about the past. Lee’s internal agitations—which tend naturally towards the melancholic—compounded by his peripheral position as an outsider from Hong Kong, have yielded a cryptic memorial with fictional and illogical origins. Integral to the atmosphere is the looping soundtrack by Cai Qin, a Taiwanese pop singer active during the 1980s whose saccharine lyrics and romantic melodies flow in and around the installation adding another layer of nostalgia. Borrowing a lyric from Cai’s hit songJust Like Your Tenderness for its title, “It’s Not An Easy Thing” epitomizes Lee’s ongoing effort to reconcile the fragile workings of his inner self with the outward discomforts and injustices he faces in everyday reality.
About the Artist
Lee Kit (b. 1978, Hong Kong) received both his BA and MA in Fine Art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He normally works in painting, drawing, video, and installation, often concerning himself with the sphere of the everyday. He has held solo shows at the Western Front in Vancouver (2011) and Para/Site Hong Kong (2007) and and has participated in various international group shows and biennials, including this year’s Generational (2012), organized by the New Museum in New York.
