ArtAsiaPacific: A Lost City In The Spaces Between The Words Are Almost Infinite

Installation view of MAN MEI TO’s Crime Scene – Leg, 2020, black iron, oil pastel, and bee wax, dimensions variable, at “The Spaces Between the Words Are Almost Infinite,” Gallery Exit, Hong Kong, 2020.

One encountered a baffling sight upon entering Gallery Exit for the group show “The Spaces Between the Words Are Almost Infinite”: at the center of the first exhibition space was a sculpture of a dismembered, pale leg coming out of the floor. Man Mei To’s Crime Scene – Leg (2020) immediately changed the visitor’s perception of the space, imbuing the otherwise ordinary art gallery with a sense of eerie abnormality.

The leg is a reference to a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 thriller Frenzy, in which the body part appears at a market, causing a stir and transforming the area into a crime scene. This sudden transition from normality to chaos brought about by a single factor parallels the artist’s experience of social unrest in Hong Kong, where the government’s sudden announcement of a hugely controversial (now withdrawn) extradition bill in 2019 turned the city upside down, prompting an ongoing protest movement and a subsequent crackdown by authorities. Born out of this unstable context, “The Spaces Between the Words Are Almost Infinite” showcased new sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos by three emerging artists and friends, Man Mei To, Ivy Ma, and Ho Sin Tung, who all coincidentally turned to cinematic imagery to convey feelings of fear, loss, and uncertainty.

Pickpocket (2020), another dismembered-limb sculpture by Man, looks to Robert Bresson’s 1959 film of the same title—about a successful thief who is eventually caught—to explore the concept of dispossession. Pinned on an iron stand is a sculpture of conjoined arms; the fingers are pinched to mimic the gesture of stealing, while the hand on the other end discreetly holds an unidentifiable stolen object. The sculpture’s reference to stealing perhaps alludes to many Hong Kongers’ feelings of being robbed of their rights and freedoms following the rapid passing of laws curtailing public demonstrations and the expression of “dangerous” sentiments.

Hung on a wall across from the mysterious leg sculpture was Ivy Ma’s large-scale canvas New Women (2020), featuring a blown-up, black-and-white print of a woman’s face that has been cut into large rectangular pieces and glued back together in the center of the gessoed linen. Hazy to the point of unrecognizability, the ghostly portrait is a cropped shot of the prominent Chinese silent-film actress Ruan Lingyu (1910–1935) from New Women (1935), her penultimate film before she committed suicide. Although Ruan was a thriving film star in China, her complicated love life was intensely scrutinized by tabloid journalists. By blurring and fragmenting Ruan’s image, Ma sympathetically brings attention to the beautiful actress’s vulnerability and loss of identity.

IVY MA, New Women, 2020, printed image on rice paper, Japanese pure gold leaf, pencil, ink and gesso on linen, 194 × 153.5 cm.

Meanwhile, Ho Sin Tung experiments with the contrast of darkness and light in Full Dark, No Stars (2020), a projection composed of clips from an array of films. Lacking a narrative, the video includes mysterious shots of a car’s headlights flashing on a nighttime drive through empty roads, and of hands gripping a lighter as the character attempts to identify books in a dark library. A single green dot glows on a box TV on the floor (The Green Ray, 2015), while a tablet affixed to an adjacent wall displays a montage of multi-colored laser pointers flickering in the dark (Sleep Demon, 2020), possibly a nod to the use of these tools by Hong Kong protestors. Here, Ho relies on the metaphor of light as a source of hope, and gestures to a much-needed sense of unity in spite of widespread fear and uncertainty.

Gallery Exit’s show conveyed the collective unease of many regarding the city’s future, while pointing to the potential of art as a powerful form of expression.

Installation view of HO SIN TUNG’s (left) Sleep Demon, 2020, HD video with color: 12 min 29 sec; and (right) Full Dark, No Stars, 2020, HD video with color and sound: 49 min 26 sec, at “The Spaces Between the Words Are Almost Infinite,” Gallery Exit, Hong Kong, 2020.