SPIME: 10 Suns

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Off the Record Gallery is pleased to present ’10 Suns’, SPIME’s first Hong Kong solo show featuring 10 new works. Integrating digital tools with traditional approaches, SPIME’s paintings explore themes of nature, gender, and contemporary psyche as reflected in humanity’s relationship with the environment.

SPIME responds with 10 new paintings to the Western Han Dynasty’s Chinese Myth of Yi, and more specifically to the tales of Yi shooting down nine of ten female suns. Before turning to the reach of SPIME’s interpretation of that part of the narrative, it should be noted that she has divided the exhibition into two parts. One part focuses on the power of the suns within the plot. While another offers meditations on the questions that the exhibition raises.

Omitting the conventional protagonist, the archer — Yi, SPIME responds to the ancient mythology through the personification of the 10 female suns. She explores an alternative ending to the story. The works featured in this show ground themselves on such balance, invisibility, and heroines. Drawing upon both eastern and western philosophies, SPIME adds weight to and highlights the heroic bodies that embody these feminine deities.

One can find in the mythology beyond Yi the matrix of the paintings from ‘10 Suns.’ The works are nonetheless not mere visual representations confined to the original tale. SPIME weaves together webs of meaning across time. She intertwines the female identity with Ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as references from different techniques and processes.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

To delve into the fantastical world of Spime, born in 1992 in Montreal, Canada, and raised in Hong Kong, means to encounter an ever evolving family of figures. These figures are bold, narrative, and strange, illuminated by glowing colors that display a childlike appearance of glorified innocence and serene scenes of everyday escape. She is interested in exploring what it means to be in multiple cultures at once, the ways our identities are shaped and molded by multiplicity, consumed and fantasized, and how this reveals our inner psyche’s desires and anxieties. Each work begins with her main characters Bam and Boo, often accompanied by their companions like Banana. Together they create a world that hasn’t been documented, a world that is symbolic to our growing multifaceted identities. She has previously showcased her work in London, New York, Montreal, Toronto, and more recently Seoul and Hong Kong.