Reviews & Articles

Captions: 1. The Second Part of Way I Returned Home. Acrylic on canvas board. 10 x 10.5 cm each. 2011. 2. Hi and Bye Mr. Hanoi. Acrylic on wood. 30.5 x 60 cm. 2011. 3. Kitasan. Acrylic on wood. 25.5 x 30 cm. 2011. 4. Nakai. Acrylic on wood. 18 x 60 cm. 2011. (原文以英文發表，評論《小光景: 黃倩怡首展》。) Summer is the time to see university fine arts graduation exhibitions and visit smaller galleries and venues promoting the work of younger artists. G16 is a modest gallery that regularly and without fanfare shows younger graduates and artists whose studios are located in the surrounding Fotan industrial area. Sindy Wong graduated from the nearby Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008 and ‘The Longest Ride’ is her first solo exhibition featuring finely executed acrylic paintings complemented with a specially composed musical backdrop by Japanese musician Hekiro Kusano, whose current band is Ozasiki. There is a quiet contemplative atmosphere in this exhibition despite the straight albeit elegant depiction of buildings, roads, railway carriages and electricity pylons. The solidity and physicality of the subjects, however, appears wafer-thin as the underlying tension in these landscapes is as if each were the scene of a crime awaiting forensic investigation or an event whose features are nostalgically kept timeless in a photograph album. The Second Part of the Way I Returned Home (see image) are a series of six small paintings on canvas board depicting glimpses of streetscapes and houses seen from a window in the Japanese city of Osaka. The parting of a curtain, the glimpse of an outside world, the distant but close view, the unseen viewer. Are we of the scene, participants in the same rooms, the same viewpoints? Or, just in a gallery? The painful, implied intimacy and drama that undoubtedly happened in these unseen rooms successfully stretches from the tight confines of each painting out into the gallery. Kusano’s music reinforces the wistfulness of youth and a sequencing of piano chords is counterpointed by the summer frenzy sampling of noisy cicadas, tropical rain, echoes in a stand of trees and birdcalls. The music builds to a denouement. The artist demurely explains that, “Sometimes you feel you are on the same track with certain people, whom you can wander with, even at a different pace.” However, “the greatest sadness is that these moments linger in their own beauty - while slowly, over time, become disconnected, dimmer and expiring.” The sad almost dismal finality of these words contrast against the actual artwork that unquestionably depict the strength of resolution, braveness after an emotional love affair has ended, and a shift to a more optimistic and stronger space. Wong joins a small group of Hong Kong artists, for example Elise Lai and Wong Kai Kin, whose work is strongly representational and delicately reveal their own lives through the depiction of interior and exterior landscapes. These strongly personal investigations sit amongst a maturing Hong Kong art scene that sees a range of art being exhibited in different media and approaches. Exhibition: The Longest ride: First Solo Exhibition of Sindy Wong Date: 23.7.2011 – 25.9.2011 Venue: G16, Unit 16, G/F, Block A, Wah Luen Industrial Centre, 15 Wong Chuk Yuen Road, Fo Tan, N.T. Website: http://www.facebook.com/GroundSixteen A version of this review was published in the South China Morning Post on 21 August 2011.