Minsheng Art Museum will be hosting Hong Kong artist LEE Kit’s solo exhibition “Every Breath You Take”, which will be his first institutional solo exhibition in mainland China. Works in this show include latest series of cardboard paintings and readymade objects, photographs, a pseudo-karaoke installation and a new installation "Every Breath You Take". LEE Kit, Born in 1978 in Hong Kong, lives and works in Hong Kong and Taipei. He has in recent years presented a wide range of works that aim to intertwine the boundaries between art and daily life, focusing on daily objects and ordinary practices. His works include fabrics painted and used as bedsheets or tableclothes, installations that enclose paintings and ready-made objects, and performative works that address seemingly ordinary daily rituals, such as repeatedly scratching the surface of a table, or drinking a cup of coffee.
The works will be presented in two exhibition halls and one multi-function room in the museum this time. Several series of cardboard paintings with readymade objects such as "Clairol" and "Just Like" will be shown in the two exhibition halls. The artist painted on the cardboard with acrylic or emulsion paint then he applied the inkjet to gain the product logos and disposed it in different way such as put some tapes or make some scratch marks and imperfections. In one of the corners in the exhibition hall, he set a relatively independent space isolated by the temporary exhibition wall, attempting to create some sort of state of mind.
For this new work "Every Breath You Take", a few notes by LEE Kit:
‘Alright. There was a time, you kept thinking about something for a long time. Then you made up your mind. You were about to say ‘Ok.’ But at that moment, everything had become silent, including yourself and everything around you. And then you said, Ok.’’
‘Since then, sometimes you can’t hear any sound. The only thing you are sure and clear is that you are breathing. You are breathing slowly.’
‘One day, you really felt that you want to show your gratitude, or on the contrary, to blame on somebody, or something. But you didn’t.’
The multimedia hall located on the 2rd floor of the museum will be transformed into a karaoke room with a worn sofa and 20 television sets, each one playing a short silent looping video of some common objects such as a tin of Nivea cream, a tube of Vaseline. Lyrics, the name of those objects, are added in the manner of karaoke videos.
Recently, LEE Kit has been selected to represent Hong Kong at the 2013 Venice Biennale by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the M+ museum. He was also included in many international exhibitions such as the 2012 New Museum Triennial "The Ungovernables" (New Museum, New York 2012) and the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Art Foundation and Royal Academy of Art since he started to create hand-painted cloths in 2001.
