Visual Arts

‘Place, place in the sense of lieu, luogo, ort, mestopolojenie. The last Russian word also means situation, and this is worth remembering.

A place is more than an area. A place surround something. A place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action. A place is the opposite of empty space. A place is where an event has taken or is taking place.’

— A Shape of Pocket, John Berger

Taking Berger’s idea, we ask, what is being extended from this place? What does this place surround? As a continuity of the residency Inhabiting the Temporary Land in Eaton HK, Give Way to the Voices Afterward bring forth the group’s inquiry of the surrounding neighborhood.

Throughout the residency at Eaton HK, Lee Chi Leung, Lo Keng Chi, Cat Ha (Writer), Tsang Tsui Shan (Film Director), IV Chan (Mixed media artist) and Kou Chin Ngai (Interdisciplinary artist) relinquish our own practice and adopt each other’s ways of observation, ideation and creation, hence imagine ourselves as travelers exploring strange land with a foreign scope.

As newly arrived strangers we can only observe and assimilate the ongoing happenings here in passivity. Only through discovering the relational ties with places and objects can we identify the ‘situation’ we are drawn into and perceive our own ‘presence’.

In the exhibition Give Way to the Voices Afterwards, ‘object’ is the incognito protagonist emerging from the mundane everyday scenario, they speak loudly to reveal the alienated aspects of the surrounding neighborhood, to act as the mediator of the ‘situations’ we engaged in. The artworks form a network of object, each of them complements the others, opening up a space for continuation of the fragmentized narrative embedded.