New/Alternative Art Space

Captions:

1. Elmgreen & Dragset, Hong Kong Diaries, performance installation, 2015.

2. Magdalen Wong, Sunrise, Sunset, mixed media installation, 2015.

3. Moyra Davies, Subway Writers, 25 C-type prints, postage, tape, ink, 2011.

4. Cevdet Erek, SSS, Shore Scene Soundtrack (Theme and Variations for Carpet), installation view, 2008.

5. Cevdet Erek, SSS, Shore Scene Soundtrack (Theme and Variations for Carpet), instruction manual, opened pages showing hand movements for replicating the sound of sea waves.

All photographs: John Batten



(原文以英文發表，評論Spring工作室的「日夜雙生」展。)

Spring Workshop is an arts space anomaly in Hong Kong. It is entirely self-funded and has a strict lifetime of five years, after which it will close. Now, at the mid-point of its life, Spring has just appointed Hong Kong and Amsterdam-based Christina Li to further develop programme and curatorial ideas.

Time itself is under the spotlight in Li’s thoughtful Days push off into nights exhibition of nine artists tackling the “stillness” of time and the slow diurnal duration of life. Appropriately, a performance developed by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset, held at daily set times during the exhibition, shows four young male teenagers sitting at desks in a secluded room writing a diary in longhand. It is almost an antediluvian activity, and the performance is marked by life itself: fruitful action, routine, boredom, thought, fidgetiness, and finally the relief of escape from imposition.

Magdalen Wong’s Sunrise, Sunset is a successfully simple depiction of day’s start and end. Metres of rolls of gold tape are adhered above a window. The rolls slowly unravel downwards, some unrolling slower than others; catching the hesitancy of last light, and the inevitability of day’s brief end repeating again.

Likewise, the sea’s waves and their constant hum are recalled in Cevdet Erek’s instruction booklet SSS, Shore Scene Soundtrack. Erek’s manual teaches how to replicate the sounds of the sea by using different hand movements placed across a piece of carpet.

Life’s simple activities invariably fill our time. Moyra Davey’s set of 25 photographs capture commuters writing on New York’s subway trains. These writers, balancing books and papers, are caught in thought, or possibly inwardly frantic trying to quickly jot an idea or to meet a deadline. The resulting photographs are folded into envelopes and mailed to friends around the world reinforcing the transportability and physicality of time over distance.

Olga Chernysheva’s Screens of five filmed sequences in Russia are beautifully leisured “portraits” of life: oblivious to the artist’s camera, a man exercises alone; villagers casually chat together while eating snacks. These videos linger over the mundane, life without drama, outside any spotlight or fame: how most people spend their time.

''Days push into nights'', installation view at Spring Workshop (partial view only), 2015.


Exhibition:
''Days push off into nights'' @ Spring Workshop 

A version of this review was published in the South China Morning Post, 16 March 2015.