de Sarthe is pleased to announce Shifting Landscapes, a presentation of artwork by the contemporary Hong Kong-based artist Andrew Luk (b.1988) and the Post-war master Chu Teh-Chun (1920-2014). The artworks were respectively intended for the Encounters sector and Galleries sector at the canceled Art Basel Hong Kong 2020. In Shifting Landscapes, these works are reconsidered within the gallery's own context during the Covid-19 crisis.
Redeveloped for the gallery space, Andrew Luk's large-scale installation Haunted, Salvaged is a giant suspended mobile with disfigured orb-like objects hanging from steel branches that stretch outwards above a sea of expanding spray foam. Constructed using layers of carved and corroded extruded polystyrene foam, the orbs are arranged to compose an artificial constellation of imagined psycho-geographic entropic accumulation. Underneath the swiveling orbs, cement totems rise from a an eight-by-five-meter bed of stainless steel mesh, each of which is interjected with copious amounts of exposed, cactus-like, tumorous blobs of dried spray foam. Closer inspection also reveals that many of the protrusions are built using concrete artifacts of recently antiquated devices, such as Walkmans and Gameboys––remnants of civilization embedded within a futuristic past-present wasteland.
In aggregate, the installation is a floating, fictitious representation of an urban landscape filled with anthropogenic contamination. The installation binds the natural and the man-made together, owing to the artist’s realization that not only is humanity a part of the natural world, the entities and forces of humanity are as well. For example, despite culture and technology being implements for contemplation and actualization, their organic development acts biologically with inherent needs. They exert effects as well as create byproducts. Contained in these entities is also the capacity for self-destruction, an inevitable stage in the cyclical progression of nature and evolution. As humans, we are both participants and subjects of this process.
On the other side of the gallery, Chu Teh-Chun’s broad expressive brush strokes elicit vast unexplored landscapes that are illustrated through a deeply rooted consideration of the traditions of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Nature unfurls within Chu Teh-Chun's canvases by distorting the viewer's expectation of horizon and perspective. His poetic expression of natural expanse uncovers realms of the abstract form and in doing so conjure an alternative interpretation of the medium and its capabilities. His artwork is immersed in the core of nature and landscape while remaining true to abstraction.
