藝評

Above image:  Installation view of Sarah & Samuel exhibition – photo by May James for Zolima CityMag

(Daniel Ho's review of Sarah & Samuel, an exhibition at PHD Group in Hong Kong, originally published online by Zolima CityMag, 9 January 2025)

Review

Sarah & Samuel: A Contemporary Portrait of Intimacy

by Daniel Ho

A quiet voice calling out “Sarah…Sarah…Sarah….” A pulsating light in one light bulb seemingly magically generating motion in another light bulb. A car tyre suspended in mid-air, and a ways off, red tail lights spotlighting a familiar set of eyes, staring intently. On view in Sarah & Samuel, a touching new exhibition at PHD Group, is the delicate dance of influence between a couple. The exhibition touches gently on questions of presence and absence, and how contemporary artists might portray intimacy.

One half of the duo is the Hong Kong-born artist Sarah Lai, whose soft pastel paintings freeze moments from classic Hong Kong movies and advertisements. The other half is the American-born Samuel Swope, who since arriving in Hong Kong in 2006 has explored levitating objects and air in sculptural form, from drones, paper airplanes, to ceiling fans. While Lai’s paintings capture nostalgic yearning with fragments of collective memory, Swope sends objects to flight, grappling with air as a medium and aesthetic dimension as a new frontier in the history of sculpture. At first blush, it is hard to think of two artists working more differently. 

“ We thought we had very distinct practices,” says Swope. But then Willem Molesworth and Ysabelle Cheung, the gallerist couple who founded PHD, paid them a visit at their studio. “They could see connections. Because we’ve worked together in the studio for so long, we’ve forgotten how much influence we have on one another — where the influence is invisible or even opaque.”

Lai and Swope observed the understated ways in which their art verged, touched, and overlapped, and mulled over how the back-and-forth thrust and parry of conversations, comments, and critiques have over the years shaped the way they think about and make art. The history of the art space — formerly a private club perched on top of a Wan Chai skyscraper, now decorated in intimate-yet-raw exposed walls and floors — also provided inspiration.

Couples are, of course, one of the oldest stories around, and various exhibitions have explored themes from artists’ muses to under-recognised female artists, from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, just to name a pair of them. Other exhibitions survey a whole host of duos, seeking to unsettle the notion of solitary artistic genius by picking apart the influences artists have had on each other, like Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde at the Barbican in London (2018–2019) or The Couple Show at the Shanghai Gallery of Art (2011). Despite such ambitious curatorial bravura, the particular ripples individuals have on one another can sometimes risk being flattened under a generalising concept of “the couple” – or end up as grist for a cryptic parlour game of formal, art historical references. 

Artists have naturally also collaborated closely as couples. Christo and Jean-Claude had a life-long partnership with immense works wrapping major monuments, while the performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay famously broke up with a performative work, “The Lovers.” Starting from two ends of the Great Wall of China, they walked until they met up in the middle, at which point instead of marrying they ended their personal and artistic relationship. Closer to home, in Hong Kong, Kwan Sheung-chi and Wong Wai-yin tackled the mishaps that plague relationships in their series of videos “Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple” (2010), while Sara Wong and Leung Chi-wo together restaged anonymous historical figures with additional fictional anecdotes in their ongoing series Museum of the Lost (2013–ongoing).

In contrast, the exhibition Sarah & Samuel does not set out to deal with an overarching idea of “the couple” or fuss over biographical details, let alone traffic in over-sentimentality. Instead, their collaboration sensitively teases out the mutual reverberations in their works, in some cases adding new shades of meaning for previous works, and pushing new horizons in the new works. 

First, the older works. Choosing works that reveal points of convergence — and editing out other works — meant the artists in effect curated as a couple, going for works that entered in dialogue with each other. For instance, on the walls of the larger room are fragments of Lai’s scenographic installation, first shown at the 2021 Seoul Mediacity Biennale curated by Hong Kong–born Yung Ma. One painting, “Red Eyes” (2021), depicts Chow Yun-fat’s character in the 1986 Hong Kong film A Better Tomorrow. Frozen at an intense moment and framed around his eyes, the work confronts viewers with a sense of mystery and an intense male gaze. To the side is “Gang Killer” (2021), a painting of a gun concealed in a potted plant; in the film, Chow Yun-fat’s character hid an extra weapon inside a plant to save him from reloading. Next to the painting is a real potted plant, as though the artist were winking at viewers. Diagonally opposite Chow Yan-fat’s stare is “Tender Trap,” which Lai painted based on an old Penthouse magazine; the amber casing over the work both conceals and accentuates its erotic charge.

With her pastel, somewhat soft-focus paintings, Lai captures fleeting impressions — colours, textures or objects — from classic Hong Kong films and Japanese anime of the 1980s and 90s that had a place in her personal memory and in the collective consciousness of a generation. Whereas artists of the so-called Pictures generation, like Cindy Sherman or Sherrie Levine, level fairly overt critiques of stereotypes in image-making, and whereas Hong Kong artist Chow Chun-ai reproduces film footage with a satiric edge, Lai’s approach focuses on freezing frames or shots, slowing them down, and letting overlooked details gently emerge. Somewhat like Taiwan-based Hong Kong artist Lee Kit, who is known for his meditative installations, Lai’s indirection offers a respite to hectic rhythms in a hyper-capitalist city. The effect of her work however is focused on a past that feels just out of reach and yet somehow haunts the present, turning on presence and concealment.

Juxtaposed against this is Samuel Swope’s “Flying Wheel (Nervous Thrasher),” originally shown as part of a rather spectacular performance installation at Current Plans in Wong Chuk Hang. There, the wheel spun in motion, powered by drones, and whizzed around in flight. In an artistic sleight of hand, Swope had in fact fabricated a lightweight 3D-printed version of a tyre. Here, however, the work is suspended in mid-air while straps tethered to cinder blocks hinted at the history of sculpture — of sculpture pushing beyond the boundaries of the plinth — and in Swope’s case, to levitating objects in his practice of aerial art, of “flight and air as medium.”

Swope and Lai noticed how these sets of works in fact shared the sense of a pregnant pause before dramatic action. To that, they moreover added little touches. Instead of red spotlights on “Red Eyes,” for instance, Swope placed red tail lights from a car, powered by a car battery, turning the lighting into a sculptural object. The addition of his photograph of the performative installation “Floating Room” also reveals how Lai’s pastel sensibility affected his image-making.

Another pair of works sit at a corner bend of a back corridor in the space. “C-Luster” involves having “dandelion dust” — or the parachutes of dandelion minus the seeds — flittering and fluttering in a glass tube above a vortex of air generated by a fan at the bottom. Whimsically defying gravity, the work gives off a sense of the miraculous in the perpetual flight of the dust. Paired with that is Lai’s “Reef” (2008), a painting depicting a still image of the sea, shot through with reflections of glittering light. 

“After Samuel chose ‘C-Luster,’ I felt I should pick this work,” says Lai “It was just so clear in my mind.” The two both felt the two works somehow echoed, with the gyration of the dust against the painted sparkle of the sea.

Tying together the exhibition are new works where the duo collaborated in earnest for the first time. One such work, “Sarah,” involves a sound recording of Swope gently calling, “Sarah…Sarah…Sarah…” modulated in different tonal ranges. Placed in three spots, the sound ricochets throughout the space. Yet there is no reply.

“Sarah” (detail), 2025, by Samuel Swope and Sarah Lai – photo by May James for Zomila CityMag

The work turns on whether Lai is there or not, and indirectly refers to their own experiences. Though Lai and Swope met as art students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong 19 years ago, in 2006, the artist life of residencies and fellowships in various locales around the world together with Swope’s graduate studies in Chicago meant that the couple spent almost half the time in a long-distance relationship. 

“ No matter how far away he is, he always calls. He makes sure that he calls every day. Or, even if he doesn’t call there is maybe a message…but I don’t necessarily respond!” Lai laughs. 

The sense of absence in the recording is offset by Lai’s choice of physical “hosts” for the recordings, such as a talking bird ornament and a retro cassette tape player. At the entrance, in particular, is a vintage alarm clock of the red-headed basketball player from the popular Japanese comic and anime series Slam Dunk; in response to sensors triggered by the presence of visitors, the device emits Swope’s call of “Sarah.” For Lai, this clock has sentimental value, as she was fascinated by the series at the point in her childhood when she started dreaming about being an artist. The hairstyle as well as the headstrong yet passionate personality of the basketball character reminded her of Swope, too. Meanwhile, the cassette tape player harkens back to the days of the mixed tapes and the role they played in relationships, particularly long-term relationships. 

“Slam Dunk” (detail), 2025, by Samuel Swope and Sarah Lai – photo courtesy of PHD Group

Even if these betray traces of romantic gestures, Lai and Swope wanted to explore how the presence of someone becomes recorded mechanically. While Swope is recorded in sound in “Sarah,” in another touching work, “Her Breath,” Lai is recorded in the form of light. Two bulbs — one hanging from the ceiling and the other installed on a thin, curvy column — verge on touching. The higher one pulsates in light; watch carefully and one notices a gentle undulation. Inside the other, lower bulb is a vane, spinning to the rhythmic pulse of the light.

“Her Breath” by Sarah Lai and Samuel Swope, 2025 – photo by Felix SC Wong, courtesy of PHD Group

It turned out that Swope registered Lai’s breath by fitting her out with a medical device. After a long day of work, she sat down; in that relaxed state, she let in a flux of emotions. Surprisingly, the recording was done in one take, as her initial and final states formed a perfect loop. This breath is then converted into the rhythmic brightening and dimming of the light in the higher light bulb. In the other, lower bulb is low-pressure air, inside of which is a Crookes radiometer with four vanes. Due to the differential in pressure — the black sides of the vanes absorb light differently to the white sides — the vanes gently move. The rhythms here aren’t represented or distorted by algorithm; like how a photograph captures the likeness of people, the rhythmic patterns of Lai’s breath are directly converted into light, which then, almost like magic, generates the pulse of movement in the other light bulb. In a way, this could be considered a portrait of sorts, in conceptual and mechanical form.

“Her Breath” is a powerful work, working on different levels. Fundamental elements of the breath, light, and movement are threaded, bringing to mind connotations of the spirit, of intelligence and enlightenment, and being influenced (being “moved”) respectively. Presence is recorded and reproduced mechanically, with conceptual feathers tickling our contemporary sensibility. The two bulbs, too, might recall the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, with their minimalist strings of light evoking both affection and impermanence, as the bulbs dim and decay; here, what is highlighted are the invisible or intangible connections despite the distinct individualities of two solitudes on the other. 

These two new collaborative works truly round out the show: sound and light — impalpable and yet very real — signalling and registering the presence and absence of two individuals. With parts that almost touch, with elements that momentarily overlap, Sarah & Samuel delicately explores the subtle ripples of influences, in conceptual and technological ways, without soppy romance or heartbreak drama. It is, in effect, a contemporary portrait of intimacy.

Sarah & Samuel was exhibited at PHD Group in Hong Kong between 11 January 2025 to 8 March 2025