10 Chancery Lane Gallery invites you to join us for the opening of HKFOREWORD14, an end-of-summer exhibition showcasing recent works by seven young Hong Kong artists. This exhibition marks the third iteration of the HKFOREWORD series organized by 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, launched in 2012 with the aim to actively promote and strengthen relations between a new generation of contemporary Hong Kong artists and local art institutions.

Artists in the show are recent Bachelor and Master graduates from Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. We are excited to exhibit a selection of works from Ivan CHAN, Max CHAN, Rita LAM, Charlotte MAN, Shirley NG and Eric TSANG, Dino RIB.

CHAN Chi Hau (Ivan) (b. 1980, Hong Kong)
Ivan CHAN exists in a constant state of observation. A natural-born citizen of the concrete metropolis that is Hong Kong, his lived reality is one of perpetual city development. Construction sites and condominiums make promises of prosperity to the prudent property-buyer. Yet these futures hold as uncertain as the bamboo scaffolding on which they are built. With light contempt, CHAN hijacks the form of the architectural model to reveal both the futility and hopeful fiction of these imagined miniature constructions in his work Mirage (Unrelated to Eyesight).

Artist Statement
Architectural models are often used for the exhibition of new condominiums. However, a model cannot reveal the actual surrounding scenery to homebuyers. People cannot know what scenery will be seen from the windows of a high-rise condominium. Instead they are simply to imagine from its name. Certainly, names of the condominiums may give buyers a hint with some even fabled for their views. The truth is, these descriptions are overstated, or false. It is like describing a non-existent view to a person with visual impairment. Yet simultaneously, these conjured names and visions of fantastical scenery permit dreams of one’s own.

CHAN Wang Max (b. 1991, Hong Kong)
Two decades living in Hong Kong has opened Max CHAN to the visible spectrum of urban change in Hong Kong. He understands his city to be one of sensory exaggeration, supersaturated beyond point of natural experience. CHAN digitizes his very own hyper-reality in Equivocation, a two-part photography series. Shooting from an overpass bridge in Mong Kok, and the International Commerce Centre, the tallest building in Hong Kong, he photographs each figure and watercraft individually. Working through an intricate post-production process of collection and composition, he manipulates multiple raw images into a concise visual language of his own. There is no coincidence that to ‘equivocate’, is to use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth. Artist Statement

Collect the materials with photography. Analyze the systemization of randomness. Discuss the ambiguity in the city.

Rita LAM SHUK YI (b. 1977, Hong Kong)
Google is the ultimate search engine for so-called ‘spartan searching’, the term used to refer to quick, relevant results obtained from simple input expressions. The same cannot entirely be said for a member of its incorporate, Google Translate, a free, multilingual machine translation service. In her video installation Internal & External, Rita LAM uses this unreliable translation method to raise immediate questions about the present-day relationship between Hong Kong and China. In particular she recalls the proposed Moral and National Education Curriculum, which when announced was received with much public frustration and ire. Using Google services as her medium, LAM employs a neutral platform from which to externally voice a very personal, maternal concern.

Artist Statement
Performing art is not an invention. Editing is the new means of invention. I want to create public awareness over ideology and the internal consequences of the Moral and National Education Curriculum. Exploiting the capricious nature of Google Translate, I hope to highlight the raging miscommunication between nations. This is an external parody of a love affair.

MAN Wai Chi Charlotte (Hong Kong)
Charlotte MAN finds fascination in the fact that as humans, we spend at least one third of our life in bed. Experimenting with long-exposure photography, she takes a portable LED light panel and black curtain to friends’ houses and student hostels to shoot her current subject of choice: unmade beds. Playing with light and shadow, form and structure, the artist trials her hypothesis that the unmade bed offers an intimate imprint of the human landscape, reflecting personal habits and taste.

Artist Statement
The decision of capturing a scene by camera is based on conscious observation. I create images by expanding a single moment under long exposure in absolute darkness, to make the audience feel a sense of peace and calm. To follow the shadowy contours of an unmade bed that tells secrets of their own character. Lines shaped like landscapes.

NG Wing Yee (Shirley) (b. 1990, Hong Kong)
Eating Alone is a thematic departure from Shirley NG’s previous artworks in recent years that drew from her response to natural environments. The exhibiting work is founded on her innate curiosity surrounding the responsive nature of human behavior, specifically in reference to the unobtrusive act of dining solo. Recognizing that as a visually motivated life form our perception is heightened in response to the moving image that imitates real life, the artist uses video as the point of audience interaction. As an installation work, NG’s allows the audience to be a part of, or apart from, her artistic enquiry into the constructed limitations of our existence.

Artist Statement
This installation reflects my views and perception of lone diners as both participant and observer. I have created a typical Hong Kong snack shop, with a table against a partitioning wall. The seated audience faces two silent videos of lone diners eating, facing the same wall. Audience participation is ensured either by taking the seat between the separated ‘diners’, or through observing the happenings in the installation. The relationship between the visible perspective and invisible perception is discernable through the moving images and actual participation in the installation.

TSZ YEUNG TSANG (b. 1984, Hong Kong)
Eric TSZ, a photojournalist by day, toys with IKEA furniture in his photography-based installation work, Kamera. Working collaboratively with his father, a furniture-maker by profession, he repurposes materials of mass production to create a tripod of sorts, which is then used to capture blurred family portraits. The artist has personalized far more than Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture in his work. TSZ aesthetically personalizes his relationship with his father in the creative process, as they both come to terms with each other’s respective livelihoods.

Artist Statement
By coincidence, I built a camera with my father. We went treasure hunting in IKEA, collecting bits and pieces. Curiously, and in an unexpected way, it became a parent-child activity and together we went home to assemble a drawer that takes blurred photographs. Considering the idiom, like father, like son, inherited resemblance is retained, yet refused. I am finding, perhaps, the best family portraits are those where both familial likeness and relationship are obscured.

Dino RIB aka WONG Lok Hin (Eric) (b. 1984 Hong Kong)
THERE’S A TIME AND PLACE (FOR EVERYTHING) is a performance-based video work by Dino RIB. By means of visual immersion, RIB determines to engineer a spatially specific experience of time for his unassuming audience. The work is based on the observance that time appears to decelerate and lag if for example, you are talking to a person who speaks slowly. The artist devotes complete artistic attention to the kinesics of walking, the human movement he considers to be the most fundamental. Grounding his aesthetic decisions in conceptual rationale borrowed from Isaac Newton’s notion of absolute time and space, and Albert Einstein’s lionized theory of special relativity, his work may also be conceived as a parallel exercise in the creation and negation of virtual space and real space.

Artist Statement
Time, space and perception are three major themes philosophers are concerned. Newton suggested the existence of absolute space and time. For instance, absolute time could only be understood mathematical, and what we perceive as relative time is based on the measurement of objects in motion. Space and time are independent of any physical events, and therefore absolute. The occurrence of any physical phenomena is merely acting on the stage of absolute space and time. Einstein invented the concept of space-time, which suggested space and time to be relative, not absolute. Two spatially separated events occurring at the same time would appear to have happened at slightly different moments, depending on the observer’s ‘location’. From Newton to Einstein, it seems the truth of space and time is getting farther beyond the scope of our perception. In an aesthetic sense, this work is an attempt to measure the gap between the two.