藝評

(A review of the group exhibition ‘Fragments of Curiosities’; a version of this article was originally published in the South China Morning Post, 21 October 2024)

（這是一篇有關群展《碎片拾憶》的藝評，原文刊登於2024年10月21日南華早報。）

Above image:

Review

‘Fragments of Curiosities’

by John Batten

Curator Helena Halim sets the stage for this exhibition about memory by prompting the seven participating artists with a recollection. While working-at-home during the COVID-19 outbreak she thought about her childhood seashell collection that had hung in a bag in her bedroom. They were left behind when her family moved away from Hong Kong, but “these physical mementos left an indelible impression in me, as the shells had come to symbolise my childhood growing up here.”

Asked for a similar response to objects, the artists have admirably matched Halim’s curatorial concept. There is no random artwork in this show; objects and artwork relate precisely to a range of personal or culturally collective memories. In a varied display at HART Haus’ open-plan exhibition space, the audience literally needs to get on hands and knees, and carefully watch and listen to videos and sound recordings to appreciate the explored ideas.

Explaining further, Halim says that ‘Fragments of Curiosities’ investigates “how objects are vessels for our memories”, and that objects - often mundane – can also elicit “wonder” or curiosity “…provoking us to unearth new insights about ourselves and our surroundings….”

The association of an object with a memory is a well-covered enquiry, especially of interest to the pioneers of psychology during the 20th century. Also, the artistic depiction of objects as an intentional metaphor or symbol is seen in all cultures. Memory as an exhibition theme is too wide-ranging or common, but memories are fragmentary, governed by time and circumstances: this exhibition covers memories that are variously traumatic, sentimental, imagined, personal and collective.

Daniel Stempfer’s home and studio is in Tai Kok Tsui, near Mong Kok. The area has seen great change over the last seventy years; originally an island, then hugging the waterfront after reclamation, now far from the sea and transformed by high-rise redevelopment. Stempfer mirrors the district’s landscape in his sculpture using found acrylic sheets, adding red neon and a concrete base. Collected seed-pods of the ‘Flame of the Forest’ tree, a colonial import from Africa, and dried pom-pom grass are inserted atop the sculpture. The result is an oddly appropriate amalgam of nature and the recycled, held together by red neon: a new urban landscape.

A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella is an absorbing two-channel video by Sharon Lee, who is currently living in New York. This new work intelligently tracks a memory of visits to the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens shared by many older Hong Kongers. On one channel a camera zooms in and out examining an old postcard of the gardens where people group around its fountain, relaxed and happy. On the other channel, text is addressed to a young “Canton Girl” - as she is referred to – seen in side-profile from an old photograph. The text weaves, recalling incidents and intimate personal recollections, strongly resembling the mind’s quick jumping between memories drawn from a lifetime.  

Sharon Lee, A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella, 2-channel video, 2024, still. (photo: John Batten) 

Natasza Minasiewicz has collected abandoned materials and domestic parts from the street. Her installation, Foraged, resembles an office waiting-room or formal lounge, but everything is off-key. Hanging above a low-table and a lamp assemblage is an elevated view of Lamma Island scratched into found stainless-steel cupboard doors to become a silvered ‘painting.’ A chrome round-back Chinese chair with added spherical balls along the arm-rest makes sitting uncomfortable, but looks good. The abandoned past of all these objects now becomes their reimagined future.

      Natasza Minasiewicz, Foraged, 2024, installation view. (photo: John Batten)

Artists S. Yi Yao Chao + Koel Chu’s joint installation, Nondormant Dreaming, is a resting spot with a tatami-style mat on which the audience can listen to a recording of people talking about their dreams. Also, nonchalantly lying nearby, is a book with its pages fully redacted by Chu using ‘white-out’ and masking-tape. The book’s reworked text and added writing now tells the trauma of the bullying she experienced in her previous workplace, an established Hong Kong arts organisation. What appears as an innocuous book, builds a revelatory narrative about – initially – self-doubt working for a bully of a boss, to confidant self-vindication after leaving.

S. Yi Yao Chao + Koel Chu’s joint installation, Nondormant Dreaming, 2024, installation view  (photo: John Batten)

Koel Chu's altered book (detail) in S. Yi Yao Chao + Koel Chu’s joint installation, Nondormant Dreaming, 2024. (photo: John Batten)

S. Yi Yao Chao's embroidery (detail) in S. Yi Yao Chao + Koel Chu’s joint installation, Nondormant Dreaming, 2024. (photo: John Batten)

Evocative and equally intimate, S. Yi Yao Chao uses photographs, ceramics, embroidery and sewn assemblage to remember their grandmother. A Macau-resident, grandmother is seen in a display of her old passports and Hong Kong entry permits. And, like a “dangling watermelon vine,” Chao has sewn a hanging installation of thread and buttons from grandma’s sewing kit. An imaginary patio is recalled with the artist shaping a piece of unfired clay that, kept wet, encourages vegetation to grow, but “just humid enough for moss but not dreams to spread.” Finally, a ceramic headrest on the tatami mat invites visitors to give their own memories a place to rest.

Cobie Fung, Nothing Less, smartphones & other devices, video & still images, installation view, 2024. (photo: John Batten)

Cobie Fung’s Nothing Less is a floor installation of smartphones displaying grainy videos and photographs extracted from memory cards found on devices from Sham Shui Po junk dealers. Such scenes as a child playing in the waves at a beach is universal; it could be ourselves as young, recalling a similar childhood. Peering into these devices is like researching a folder of visual evidence, but it is also voyeuristic: we are looking at memories not willingly or knowingly shared. Like most historic evidence!

Louisze Chan Pui Sze, Landscape, 4K, Realistic, installation (detail), 2023-2024  (photo: John Batten)

However, Louisze Chan’s elaborate two-part installation, Landscape, 4K, Realistic, questions similar photographic proof. Chan uses AI to make composite photographs of people and families posing in front of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. These are shown as photographs or made as a magnetic souvenir and placed on a tourist postcard display stand. We can also listen to a video of people talking about Hong Kong. But, it is all fabricated, described by the exhibition curator as a “mockumentary.” A beautifully drawn wall map of Hong Kong’s coastline in 1888 with added historic postcards creates an aura of authenticity. Or does it?

‘Fragments of Curiosities’

HART Haus

3/F, Cheung Hing Industrial Building, 12P Smithfield, Kennedy Town, Hong Kong

29 September 2024 – 2 November 2024