Six Beginnings

EVENT DESCRIPTION

HART is delighted to present “Six Beginnings”, the last group showcase in 2022 featuring works by six artists born in 1990s to 2000s, including new HART social studio artists Eunice Lai, Liao Jiaming, and fresh graduates of BA programme – HART Award recipients Natalie Chu Lok Ting, duo Tracy Cheng & Shera Cho, and Wong Kwok Ming from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. The selection of works presents a showcase of multi-disciplinary approaches and in-situ installations, within HART Haus’ arthouse environment to incubate Hong Kong-based artists, and cultivate sustainable creativities, exchanges, and experimentations.

Two new artists-in-residence will showcase works in response to their original purpose of joining HART Haus and the development of their latest artistic practices. Eunice Lai instils her training as a Designer and persistence as a comic artist to become a zine-maker since her exchange in Italy. Comics and zines reflect Lai’s storytelling through a series of frames and her ongoing collection of subtitles, in creating possibilities to build the artist’s imagined utopia. Lai turns towards an exploration of comic art to a canvas surface, driving her deeper search into the portrayed situations as a still moment. Liao Jiaming’s The Intouchable (2021) is an artist-built, site-specific sculpture made of selfie sticks and images of hand gestures collected by the artist from dating apps. Liao twists the sticks into an organic framework that seemingly to be a hybrid, connected network, yet it visually forms a field of isolations.

With the pandemic restrictions in the past few years posing more challenges for BA programme students to attend studio classes, part of them diverted their practices to digital. Art graduate-duo Tracy Cheng and Shera Cho’s B¡n \o-o/ c|e (2022) is a two-channel video installation, designed with an interactive element leading the viewers into their imagined future world. Using digital collages of street posters, news, advertisements, photographs, and animations capturing the influx of new trends and news in the recent years. The artists composed the background music with video games and their humorous singing, implying a first-person perspective to look into our contemporary world. Wong Kwok Ming’s Karma (2022) is a set of a comic book and animation. His practice explores the imagination of nature and the relation with human beings and it brings thoughts to the audience with a sense of humour through the storytelling in digital formats such as illustration, comics, animation and graphic design. In contrast, works by Natalie Chu Lok Ting encompass traditional Chinese ink painting, ink rubbing, and sculpture resulting from her research in Chinese poems, humanistic history, commemorations, and monumental idealism. Chu’s recent work Unceasing Night (2022) is a 10-page concertina ink painting with artist’s handmade seals, in reference to a Chinese poem Jian Jia cited from Shi Jing (the Book of Songs). The continuous pages initiate the viewers to read with a cinematic experience, to witness a trace of time and a sense of loss from the changing condition of the common reed as seen in the work.

The Opening Reception will be accompanied by performance programme “The Uncanny HAUS”, presenting three individual performances by HART artists Natasha Cheung and Liao Jiaming, with US and Hong Kong-based artist Anlan Huang. The performances share a similar vein using heterogeneous mediums of performance in conjunction with lens-based media to explore the theory of Uncanny Valley, a model published in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist researching on objects that imperfectly resemble human likeness provoke a sense of unease or uncanniness to the viewer. Through digital and physical augmentation, AI distortion, and humorous personification, the artists invite the audience to consider how our identities are constructed through history, culture and technologies.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Tracy CHENG (b.2000, Hong Kong)
Shera CHO (b.2000, Hong Kong)
Natalie CHU Lok Ting (b.1999, Hong Kong)
Eunice LAI (b.1993, Hong Kong)
LIAO Jiaming (b.1992, Guangdong)
WONG Kwok Ming (b.1999, Hong Kong)