The following text, contributed by Robin Peckham, is associated with an upcoming exhibition at Blue Lotus Gallery.
Kitty Ko Sin Tung, a graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was born in 1987 and continues to live and work in Hong Kong. Though it visually belongs to the school of “nice painting” that dominates exhibitions of young artists in the region, Ko’s work moves beyond the fetish of painted handicraft and offers an interpretation on processes of assemblage, serving to diagram and reproduce the occasionally fantastic worlds to which it belongs. Working on the boundary between painting and illustration, Ko creates analytical images that digest and process the forms of this geography of objects, transferring the silhouetted contours and marks of painterly process visible in the external world onto ambivalent canvases of both description and production.
The exhibition centers on a group of three paintings entitled respectively “About Hair,” “About Bones,” and “About Teeth” (all 2009). The series as a whole examines how personal identity is constructed across an historical axis through the physical manipulation of the body, specifically by presenting in images simultaneously diagrammatic and painterly Ko’s own spinal alignment problems and contributing postures, a record of all of her hairstyles from the 1980s to the present, and an anatomical sketch of her teeth and the feats of dental engineering reflected therein. As a group, these colorful canvases enforce an idea of person and personality through only a sense of bodily evolution, transformed into a literary event.
More of Ko’s latest work is included in a further set of two groups of two paintings each that reflect the process of illustrative diagramming that marks so much of this body of work. Two such pieces, “Things in Order IV” and “Things in Order V” (both 2010), detail in text and line drawings the contents of shelves that belong to the artist. The former assigns numbers to some thirty books represented within the frame of the work solely as blank silhouettes, while the latter applies a similar process to around fifty shoes and shoeboxes. This empty cataloguing denies the importance of intellectual and emotional content, instead toying with notions of presence, ownership, and physical value. “Letters 1 to 9” and “Letters 1 to 10” (both 2010) function similarly, outlining from above two stacks of letters and other mail sitting on some surface not depicted here. As much as this is a record of actual things, it is also an empty demarcation of existence in and of itself.
An earlier group of works, initially exhibited as part of Ko’s graduation project, reflects her interest in categorization and labeling. These small canvases, again all executed in a neutral black and white, depict the barcodes, charts, product descriptions, and trademarks of a prosaic range of objects potentially purchased at a grocery store or clipped from a newspaper, but each component is repeated for multiple iterations over a close but not identical space, causing the images to appear blurred and often illegible. Playing with scale and the possibilities of vision, the legacy of this series remains evident in Ko’s later diagrams of objects, similarly transformed from physical entities into abstract representations.
A selection of Ko’s earliest work, though not included in this exhibition, demonstrates her foundation in a representational but overly geometric tradition of colorful, gentle, and slightly perverse paintings of the everyday. Fitting most squarely within the genre of “nice painting,” these images, including “See Me Eating” (2008), position the body as a disembodied figure within a space of uncannily abstracted furniture and other spatial containers, perhaps gesturing towards an aesthetics of diagrammatic observation divorced from the total artist and displaced towards a gendered assemblage of material components.