2022

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Sansiao Gallery is delighted to present “2022”, a group exhibition that brings together new works by Hong Kong artists Muses Sze Mei Ting, King Lau, Iris Tsang, Stephanie Sin and Fung Chim in response to “2022”. When we started planning the exhibition in 2020, the topic “2022” was ambiguous to the artists. As vague and uncertain as it might be, it offers artists limitless space to imagine what it can relate to.

What does 2022 mean to you? The process of exhibition planning reminds us of how we try to forecast or imagine an unknown future. This vision represents an attainable hope, assuming it is a hope of a better future. The five artists, working with different mediums, responded to the topic “2022” as varied as their distinctive artistic practices.

Muses Sze Mei Ting perceived 2022 as a set of numbers. In the digital space, digits are the building blocks of dots; dots can form lines and lines can define geometric surfaces. On the contrary, flowers are organic forms so Muses tries to convert them into geometric shapes using ceramics. The transformation is not intended as an artificial replication, but a simplified way to reinterpret the story of the flowers from Hong Kong. Alluding to the concept of “heterotopia”, the flowers have reborn into another form of existence through the transformation.

Influenced and inspired by Japanese Ukiyo-e art, King Lau’s painting style focuses on lines with a strong calligraphic sense, as well as sharp colour contrasts. He aspires to depict the daily life subjects he encounters by using the traditional art form. King Lau interprets 20 as the past and 22 being the future. He believes it is a revelation, an opportunity to research and understand the distance between the past and future through his works.

Embroidery is Iris Tsang’s preferred artistic expression. She has visited different countries to learn sewing, weaving, and other various traditional techniques to form her unique language. To her, 2022 conveys an uncertainty about the future, be it a year or 10 years from now. She wants to express the ambiguity by sewing, capturing plants that are already extinct or about to become extinct. Her work references the Garden of Eden and Indian palace garden design concepts, which originally echo their vision of paradise.

Stephanie Sin likes to reconstruct images found on the Internet with the daily scenery encountered in real life. She merges the two on canvas, using vivid colours to imply the exaggeration on the internet and the confusion in the real world. She believes that the 2 in 2022 represent opposition – the opposition between reality and the virtual world, or the different stories trusted by different minds. Everybody strives to find the acceptable truth, but at the same time is frustrated by the instability and helplessness of the state of the world today.

Passionate in depicting the repetition and variation of things with a realistic style, Fung Chim often paints plant leaves and brick walls with meticulous oil painting techniques. He carefully manages the composition on the canvas, creating a strong contrast between the organic forms of plants and the cold brick walls. When Fung Chim was searching for possible issues related to 2022, global nuclear disarmament often came up in search results. If nuclear waste represents death, then plants are the most important symbol of life, as they are capable of germinating and surviving in any environment.

The year 2022 appears to the curator Chun Poon as a mid-term exam for all people who contribute to the development of Hong Kong, accessing how far we have come and how much further we can go until the final exam in 2047. Planned in 2020, the exhibition was meant to be released in early 2021, but the uncontrollable force of nature drove us to the year 2022. Whether the unknown tomorrow is changeable or fated, it may all hinge on a single thought in a single moment.