Text by Robin Peckham
Exhibition runs through 29 November 2009
Osage Gallery (5/F Kian Dai Building, 73-75 Hung To Rd., Kwun Tong, Hong Kong)
Osage Gallery claims an interesting set of ties to the largely industrial neighborhood of Kwun Tong, where it maintains its flagship space and the offices of its parent company, a garment manufacturer. The area currently faces an uncertain future as industrial buildings are repurposed, the old harborfront is redeveloped with luxury housing, and public housing estates become rife with social issues. Coinciding with “Now or Never,” the latest iteration of annual contemporary art festival October Contemporary, Osage has invited two local emerging artists to engage in a hypothetical “(Last) Intervention” in the unique street culture of the environment surrounding the gallery.
Both Kingsley Ng and Samson Young keep their interventions both politically benign and aesthetically subtle, a far cry from most of the overbearing political art that emerges from Hong Kong. The concept of intervention is interpreted here as an activity that need not actively effect change; instead, the work in this exhibition positions itself somewhere between the archival and the memorial, bearing witness to the parallel processes of disappearance and remembering.
Samson Young, a classically-trained composer equally at home in sound and new media art practice, has positioned his important work “RPG Triptych” (2009) in the first room of the gallery. The project consists of three expertly scored projections tied to the discourse of art gaming: one is a looping video that recalls the affect and aesthetic of third and fourth generation game consoles, while the remaining two are short, playable games complete with controllers and sofas. Although all three capitalize on a certain nostalgic response that accompanies elements appropriated from the top-down role playing games popularized by Nintendo and Sega, the intricately designed games are actually much richer than the experience that typically accompanies art games.
The artist has clearly learned much from the legacy of serious games, a theoretical trajectory that encompasses formalized definitions of gaming as an activity in which subjects attempt to reach objectives within a particular limited context. This genre includes a range of projects ranging from educational to military simulation, but “RPG Triptych” is clearly an art game. It moves beyond the boundaries of serious gaming proper, celebrating the styles and behavioral logics popularized by Japanese role playing games while simultaneously bringing in two additional elements: the arbitrary and the abstract. Choice and control are replaced by the uncertainty of symbolic logic and suggestion.
In the next room sits Kingsley Ng’s installation “Distilling Kwun Tong” (2009). Primarily a sound artist with a penchant for the tactile, he here offers an installation that outdoes the majority of his past work. Capitalizing on Kwun Tong’s long history as an imperial salt field, the artist arranges a number of black columns of varying height in a loose circle. Each column is capped with a lighted glass box filled with an inverted pyramid and liquid, and each box is connected to that on the neighboring column by a set of wires and tubing. Standing in the center, the viewer is subject to an unnameable field of recorded and live sound.
Both works are impressively conceived and moving. Although their relationship to the politics of a changing Kwun Tong may be subtle to the point of intangibility, it is precisely this property of legible multiplicity that allows for such a unique possibility of immersion. The shared environment developed by both artists is habitable but disquieting, creating slow trajectories through time that can be experienced or observed but never appropriated for use beyond the space of the gallery. This is art in its most prosaic form–games and sounds–that can only be experienced as art.