Plunging My Hand Into the Lake of Billowing Trees

Part of the fascination with venturing into the unknown lies in the confusion experienced in unchartered territories combined with excessive satisfaction when clarity emerges. Such is the experience when viewing the work of young artists as they dive off the first waterfalls of their artistic practice. Drawing together four young talents of Hong Kong’s art scene, Gallery Exit’s exhibition, “Plunging My Hand Into the Lake of Billowing Trees,” brought a fresh display featuring the creations of Carla Chan, Un Cheng, Jeremy Fung and Gavin Yip, all of whom are products of Hong Kong’s art schools.

Chan’s minimalist aesthetic explores the ambiguity of nature and a malleable approach to material and digital mediums. The exhibition features four of her “Clouded White (The Horizon)” series from 2017, consisting of black carbon powder scattered upon white paper that appear to depict abstracted mountaneous landscapes. Although containing a conspicuous resemblance in both theme and aesthetics to Chinese shan shui (literally, “mountain” and “water”) paintings, the pieces are composed with a modernized bent, carrying clear influence of digital aesthetics. In the series, the pigmentation of carbon powder creates a fragmented surface that possess a pixilated affection. This aspect of her practice is brought further to the fore in her video piece, Unseen Land (2015), a seven-minute-long, single-channel work depicting mysterious landscapes shrouded in clouds. Viewing Chan’s creations together, we can see a disintegration of the aesthetic distinctions between the two mediums; Chan presents a vision of the continued tranformational capacities of natural material and stochastic computational algorithms in tandem—creating a state of flux between material and digital methods.

In a very different vein, Yip’s work also scrutinizes concepts of unconventional abstration and perception. For the past year, Yip has been painting small-scale figurative paintings of a hand and pot plants in staged compositions. The works are intended as an exploration of how unconscious hand gestures and the contours of leaves function as a proto-language. The use of these two motifs as the vehicle for this metaphysical investigation is interesting as both have a remarkably similar structural composition with intricate translation systems for disseminating information to the rest of the organism. Despite this, the execution of the works, particuarly the restrictiveness of the space and the somewhat crude figuration of the compostions, hinders the communication of these systems’ expansivness and intangible nature that Yip wishes to probe.

Taking strong inspiration from the consititution of Hong Kong itself, Cheng, who lives and works within the city’s last remaining shipyard, utilizes imagery of the urban city as a basis to delve into contemporary life. In the pieces within “Plunging My Hand,” there were images of ladders, ships, ports and roads, often depicted in an entangled manner with no clear start and end points. The consequent works depict an unstable balance between order and disorder, arrivals and departures, that is reflective of both the urban landscape and human psychology.

Contrary to Cheng, Fung’s intense “Flow” (2017) oil paintings attempt to create an enviroment emancipated from the external stimulus of the city, and instead establish isolation from all conditions exterior to the painting. The works are vigorously immersive with sweeping color fields, as well as varying textures and paintwork application. However, the pictorial frame is fragmented to a degree that the plane begins to become figuratively suggestive, fracturing the sense of solitude and seclusion. Given the artist’s ontological leanings, Fung’s works were hampered by their presentation alongside others in the exhibition. On top of that, their compositions lack the potency to extert the artist’s intent in a confident manner.

Each artist featured in “Plunging My Hand” is under the age of 30, so the show was a true dive into the embryonic practice of its contributors. Although the strengths of their work vary, each conveys a strong grasp of aesthetics, artistic context and thematic manipulation that bodes well for their future development and the continued growth of Hong Kong’s art scene.

“Plunging My Hand Into the Lake of Billowing Trees” is on view at Gallery Exit, Hong Kong, until September 23, 2017.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.