Samson Young, "Machines for Making Nothing #1: Triumph of the Spectacle," 2011

“Writing off the Wall”

Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung,
MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young

Curated by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham
Organized by Kunsthalle Kowloon (S.E.C.P.)

Opening 26 May 2011, 14:00 – 20:00
Forum 29 May 2011, 10:45 – 16:00

In and around the Hong Kong Art Fair
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
North Wanchai, Hong Kong

Kunsthalle Kowloon is pleased to announce “Writing off the Wall,” an exhibition of recent art concerned with textual intervention to be staged during the period of the Hong Kong Art Fair in public and privates spaces throughout the neighborhood of North Wanchai. The project will open to the public on the afternoon of 26 May and will continue indefinitely until participating works are confiscated, stolen, or destroyed.

The last week of May has quickly become the marked period of the Hong Kong art world calendar: despite previous attempts at organizing a territory-wide art festival across different registers of spaces and galleries, it is ultimately ArtHK that has come to occupy the defining role in determining what the world thinks of cultural production in the city. With this in mind–and of course recognizing that anyone serious about maintaining a curatorial relationship to Hong Kong must do something in this key moment–we began to think of what our program might contribute to this synthetic and ephemeral week-long ecology of vision and pleasure. Seeking to produce the fact of intervention through the most minimal and non-hostile means possible, we consider the possibility of effecting an incident of media engineering that might be legible only within the discursive sphere. We hold no ill will against the commercial activities of the art fair but nonetheless believe that something should occur to insert or at least imply new meanings within this fast-codifying structure of exhibition and presentation. And so we come upon the notion of text: a flexible medium without any necessary presence prior to typography and not necessarily limited by the strictures of language, we are curious about the possibilities of this approach to intervention–a stealth proposition.

Considering the relatively unique audiences that appear during the period of the art fair, consisting not only of international visitors but also a certain category of Hong Kong residents who appear primarily at the fair, we began to examine the various publics and audiences that exist at different spaces and in different situations at various other times of the year. It appears that few in the Hong Kong art world are interested in questions of audience direction, as most purportedly community-based projects tend to define their programs by the coincidence of unconscionably bad art and hostility toward the contemporary art world. “Writing off the Wall” seeks to reconfigure the structural possibilities of relationships with our varied audiences by accounting for the violence of public positioning: rather than demarcating a particular space for the exhibition, artists have been invited to install their projects as they wish throughout the area of the art fair–indoors and out–in hopes that our highly specific public of fairgoers may stumble across or even be forcibly subjected to the work included. We attempts to produce a minor contradiction by making the exhibition as formally accessible as possible by placing much of it in public space, while on the other hand the content and conceptual import of the work may appear vague or absent for unsuspecting passersby not tuned to our chosen channels of communication (of which this mailing is one). The exhibition will be available–for a short time at least–but not obvious, a parody of the certain strand of community art that assumes it public to be “the street” writ large.

Confronting the mass of scholarship and critical reflection on the relationship between art and language produced particularly since the 1960s with the rise of conceptual art and its attraction to text, we find ourselves overwhelmed, enthused, and mildly disappointed in the lack of interest in the relationship between text as a medium that can only be instantiated with the assistance of some other material and language as a category simultaneously more encompassing but less relevant. This project seeks to again look closely at what materiality–and, of course, specific materials–have to do with art practice now, at a time and in a place where studio practice seems to be a sidelined genre in comparison with deterritorialized aspects of fabrication, participation, and intervention. Projects invited for inclusion in “Writing off the Wall” tend to deal with text as a tool, and language as a reservoir of potentiality sublimated by this more utilitarian device; material is typically a support, but also something that melds with and enters into a mutually dependent relationship with its textual superstructure.

We conceive of the exhibition as a platform for chain reactions that might themselves go on to catalyze new and interesting forms of visual or textual discourse. Rather than approaching a theme and commissioning or inviting projects related to our work, the curatorial process for this particular platform involved simply presenting the possibility of minimal intervention in the art fair environment, possibly using text, to a group of artists with demonstrated interests in such practices. Even this statement was written only after collecting proposals from these artists, making the project not so much a curator-driven exhibition as a piece of flexible material for the support of media-driven messages and sly hints at possibilities. “Writing off the Wall,” as a radically collaborative response to the filtered and economical mission of the art fair proper, exists during this time as a possibility of another way of looking. We hope our audiences will learn to read the terrain they tread as if it were a map, seeking out the moments of content within the broader form that we adapt to our own purposes. By making an entire neighborhood the space of an exhibition we seek to call attention to the role of the legend, the key to deciphering our graphic world, without which everything appears to be something.

Artists contributing projects to this textual platform, oriented around this document, include Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung, MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young; their work ranges from posters and namecards to monumental sculptural moments and electronic devices. A map will be made available of installed work at www.kunsthallekowloon.org and, in printed form, from the Hong Kong Gallery Guide booth art ArtHK.

In addition to these installations in the environs of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a selection of critics and curators have been invited to deliver a program of site-specific talks on notions of public, audience, and community in the art fair context. Updated details of this schedule will likewise be available at www.kunsthallekowloon.org.

Distributed forum, 29 May 2011 (Sunday)

10:45: John Batten (Critic and co-convenor, Central and Western District Concern Group), “After Sunday Yumcha: Thirty-three ‘must-knows’ about leisure, money, art, and space in Hong Kong” (Open space between Immigration and Revenue Towers, at Norman Ko sculpture)

14:30: Pauline J. Yao (Co-director, Osage Art and Ideas), “Audience and Client: Curating for the profit sector” (ArtHK, Osage Gallery Booth)

16:00: Jeff Leung (Project Manager, Hong Kong Arts Centre), “Art Out of the White Cube: Public art in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Arts Centre, lobby)

Nadim Abbas, "Cataract I," 2010

Nadim Abbas
Experimenta
LG/F., 89-95 Hollywood Rd., Central, Hong Kong
5 November – 11 December

Nadim Abbas, in his first complete solo exhibition, composes a scene that so resists interpretation that the viewer defaults into passive observation, submitting to a rather flaccid presentation of spectacle in the absence of a plausible guiding narrative. Several of the artist’s earlier projects fall into the category of conceptual assemblage, consisting of fragments of art historical imagery, design objects, and other components that collectively produce a surplus of information that ultimately numbs the viewer to the production of specific meaning, but here the problem is reversed: Abbas has fabricated an alternative to the white cube within the white cube, a blinding void of display space that displays nothing at all. Entering the environment through a glass door, hidden away from the neighboring gallery cluster in a rear alley, the audience is held at bay by a steel bar laid horizontally across the space. Directly ahead, a raised platform built over the floor is covered with white tiles, a shallow pool carved out of its center. Beyond this pool a freestanding vertical wall, also of white tile, faces the entryway; near the top, a shower fixture streams luminescent water into the reservoir below. On either side, hanging in parallel with this wall, translucent white shower curtains are illuminated from behind, masking also a large sound system playing a bass-heavy recording of a waterfall, enhancing and deepening the tinny sound of the shower installation. On the true wall to the left of the space, two sculptural hanging pieces mimic the rather slight aluminum window frames common to Hong Kong apartments, replacing their glass panes with the white tiles of the shower situation. The exhibition continues in a neighboring gallery with two similar window treatments in which kitschy backlit posters of waterfalls scroll from top to bottom to the accompaniment of another waterfall soundtrack.

Entitled Cataract, the project is ambitious and sensually domineering, commanding a certain depth and duration of attention rare to exhibitions so ambiguously imbricated within artistic motivations of the typical gallery space. The official narrative provided by the artist interprets the work as an experiment in optical effect that stages an attack on the crumbling edifice of purely retinal art, developing the concept of opacity (and, in particular, the moment at which transparent water becomes solid white at a certain speed) as a critique of the place of visual perception within cultures of contemporary art. Although the foundations of this idea are fundamentally literary, originating equally in psychoanalytical and phenomenological readings of textual modernism, the environment itself is profoundly antiseptic, allowing little of the raw sentiment required for such an interpretation; due to the barrelling sound and sight of the shower-as-waterfall, the viewer is instead required to submit, to remain external to and intensely critical of this vision from which she cannot pull away. There is a distinct refusal of immersion, of which the bar across the entrance is only the most literal manifestation. This entire architecture, warped as it is to create a singular physical effect and designed to provoke the cultural interpellation of sensory input, never progresses beyond the vacuum of concrete meaning it creates; references to decorative kitsch and actual window features are uniformly absorbed into the spectacle of the ceaseless flow of water from white to clear and back again. It would be simple, too, to approach anew Abbas’s prior production through the lens of this disastrously attractive monument to blankness: suddenly, his predilections for mirrors, frames, windows, and tanks all appear as tributary streams leading into this larger moment. Perhaps what the artist wishes to pursue is, after all, precisely this clarity of opacity, a defining situation in which to funnel the energies of artistic practice today–an environment that turns upon its audience by positioning the viewer as the only truly legible actor within the system at stake. Far from producing meaning via the mechanical architecture Abbas might have anticipated, the glaring white void swallows any possibility of interpretation, enacting the code of the inexplicable so fetishized in post-conceptual strategies.

Nadim Abbas, Rendering of "Cataract I," 2010

MAP Office, 'Lean Planning Thin Pattern'

This is an experiment in exhibition-making. It begins with the situation of cultural production and circulation throughout the Pearl River Delta, a conurbation that forms a cyclical distribution structure through which goods travel more freely than people. Encompassing a near continuous metropolis that stretches from Hong Kong and Shenzhen in the southeast through Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and ultimately Macau in the southwest, the region is marked by fascinating paths of growth (a form of just-in-time urbanism that Hou Hanru has called ‘post-planning’ and MAP Office has termed a ‘thin pattern’), unbelievable demographics (a population of some 120 million and an average age below 30 in certain cities), and an uncertain position in global exchange: although it was once known as the face of the Chinese economic miracle for its transition from farmland to manufacturing hub in the space of a decade, many factories have since decamped to interior regions with cheaper labor, and the Yangtze River Delta centered on Shanghai is increasingly usurping its role in finance and shipping. Nevertheless, contemporary Cantonese art has consistently been most interested in the possibilities for personal freedom and alternative visual production that emerge under the urban conditions made possible by these economic structures rather than manufacturing and trade per se, a fact evident in the growing list of alternative spaces and collective moments in the recent art history of Guangzhou and Shenzhen (and, as the territory becomes increasingly dominated by mainland Chinese cultural thinking, Hong Kong as well).

Installation view with work from Leung Chi Wo (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

The most interesting nexus within this system occurs at the point of friction between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a functionally-international border that operates as a point of exchange between China and non-China even as it regulates the definitions of these terms through a complex diagram of class, race, nationality, and power. Here, there is a privilege of passing that entails more than appearance: this is the right of passage, a rite in which many thousands indulge every day, but it is also a ritual of consolidation from which many millions are excluded on ambivalent terms. We find it productive to think of the border in this particular scenario as a mechanism, as something more than a gate that selectively allows visitors and other bodies in motion to pass from one side to the other; much more so, it also produces these very bodies and enacts a particular visual culture of passing. From the types of goods offered for sale at the entrances and exits to the border crossing to the luggage in which they are transported, from the types of clothing and hairstyles of those crossing to the uniforms and modes of transportation on either end, the figure of the border exists as a very special moment in the cultural imagination of south China, positioned somewhere between 1980s Hong Kong cinema, reform and opening, and grocery shopping.

Installation view with work from Hu Xiangqian (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

This exhibition emerges as an experiment in adopting this structure as a culture of display. The central strategy is simple: to produce a cultural space that might take on such a border-mechanism function. Within this strategy of course, is embedded a set of tactics contributing to a field we might classify as the curatorial; our tactics include balance, representation, space, sound, re-use, displacement, and so on. The exhibition takes place within the archetypal conceptual architectures of the border, installed first in a set of disused shipping containers placed between the harbor and the hulking post-industrial buildings of the New Territories, an effective cultural border zone between the urban cores of Hong Kong and Shenzhen. It is then to be installed again in an empty factory complex on the edges of Shenzhen, and the process of moving these containers from one pole to the other–including the legal and financial labor involved in pushing art-and-idea from one side of the border to the other–will become a central component of the exhibition project. These two forms of architectural space, linked in the middle by the container truck, constitute the central shipping apparatus of the Pearl River Delta, summarizing through the use and re-use of space a process of movement and production spanning half a century from the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial hub to its rebirth as an export control point for the factories of Shenzhen–and again into a third stage as the latter complexes began to go bankrupt or move further inland. This is a history of failures, and one ripe for incorporation into the artistic trajectory that we might call an ontology of cross-border living.

Installation view with work from Nadim Abbas and Leung Chi Wo (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

Conceptualized during the global financial crisis of 2008, when the number of empty factories and discarded containers in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively, had reached an all-time high, the project has, rather ironically, been forced to shift focus and downsize due to an increased demand for the tools of global export trade in 2010. The exhibition thus moves into yet further marginal spaces in its attempt to materialize both sides of this complex machinery, positioned in a former refugee camp (now golf course, naturally) in the middle of the eastern New Territories. Occupying five containers in a row of 10 on the edge of a storage yard–small by any standard–of several dozen, the site is dusty, windy, and cold. When evening sets in and the only light comes from the handful of barebulbs hung within the containers the effect becomes something along the lines of a night market, or, more appropriately for our purposes, a grey market. This is one of the major logics to inform our curatorial practice with regard to this exhibition: rather than working with artists to produce polished and resolved work that attempts to explore the border at a critical distance, we asked our collaborators to physically cross the border, often carrying materials, in order to complete their projects, essentially making for a grey market of ideas not quite ready for appearance at the real markets. It is also an instantiation of shanzhai culture, a phenomenon that has received much attention from the press in recent years. Stemming from the word for distributed domestic factory units that have emerged at various junctions of tension throughout early modern and recent Chinese history, this is a fascinating culture of reverse engineering, copying, reinvention, improvement, and innovation that has produced many of the partially non-functional technologies widely available in the regional electronics industries, the epicenter of which is located at Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen. The works described here are thus not-quite-ready, not-quite-unique, and not-quite-real; the same goes for the exhibition as a whole.

Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, 'Laoban Container Sounsystem,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of the artists)

The first container belongs to Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, inventors of the Laoban Soundsystem based in Beijing and Guangzhou, respectively, who have here produced the “Laoban Container Soundsystem” (2011). Fabricated under close observation at two factories outside Guangzhou, the work consists of a massive steel front plate cut and welded to custom dimensions in Huizhou and 40 speaker drivers made by hand to custom dimensions in Panyu. The steel plate is set flush several inches inside the mouth of the container and the speaker drivers are then wired into the empty holes left on its face, ultimately transforming the empty volume of the container into an infinite baffle prepared to take advantage of some 4000 watts of amplification. Hope and Phillips see their work as the tracing of a line between production and consumption, first taking advantage of the highly customized production situation in South China and then attempting to draw consumers–here, those moved by the sound produced by DJs at the helm of the system–into direct contact with the factories. The resulting piece fits in aesthetically with a peculiar erotics of the post-global manufacturing situation while on another level remaining a fantastically pragmatic piece of equipment for mobile event situations. Each and every element of the fabrication process becomes a telling signifier of this paradoxical situation: in this case the steel plate was made just millimeters too large, requiring the artists and curators to file, finagle, and otherwise negotiate the standardized geometry of ISO parts in order to complete the work. Interestingly, this error occurs as digital models–drawn on Hope’s computer according to the indicated ISO dimensions–clash with the reality of production when it at last becomes material with the collusion of steel and fire at the hands of underpaid technicians. Here, the engineering of sound can only be a political act: fabrication there, assembly here.

Leung Chi Wo, 'Fish Farm House,' 2006-2007, (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Hong Kong artist Warren Leung Chi Wo deals with this notion of the same object enacting different functions on opposite sides of the border in a less oblique way albeit with the distance of the documentarian, contributing the series of photographs entitled “Fish Farm Houses” (2006-2007). Executed in collaboration with anthropologist Sidney Cheung, these 60 images depict the transitional structures erected over the past half century in the northern New Territories in order to house owners and workers at aquaculture complexes; now that this industry is no longer economically viable, the buildings are used only as temporary resting places or housing for guest workers from the mainland. Often positioned in or adjacent to the closed border zone against the Shenzhen River, they are dwarfed by the rigidly designed skyscrapers and residential complexes built on the mainland side of the border. In this scenario the same architectural feature is able to reflect macroscopic shifts in economic flows, indicating the Hong Kong occupation of the fish farm territory during a period of economic and cultural growth in the city (namely, the 1960s and 1970s, when a mushrooming population of immigrants stressed the resources of the region) and then the later reoccupation by mainland immigrants themselves as the farms declined in productivity. Once known as fishing settlements, Hong Kong and Shenzhen alike are now far and way net importers of seafood; aside from demands of quantity, the waters here are now too polluted for a significant catch. In this exhibition these photographs are split into two groups: half of the images, those depicting interiors of the wood and metal structures, are placed inside the containers, presenting intimate views of kitchens, living rooms, and sleeping areas with their own liminal aesthetics of occasional habitation, while the other half, those depicting the structures from without, are instead printed as banners and hung over the entrances to the container volumes in an attempt to activate these standardized spatial units as objects. As the sun sets to the rear, the sky depicted in these external shots appears to change also from blue to grey.

Hu Xiangqian, 'Flying Blue Flag,' 2005, (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Hu Xiangqian, too, plays with the ideas of settlement as a counterpoint to migration, here through a video recording a hypothetical intervention into Chinese local political machinery entitled “Flying Blue Flag” (2005). Democracy is actually alive and well (or at least surviving) at the lowest tiers of municipal government in rural China; in an attempt to define its possibilities through a humorous aesthetics of breakdown, the artist tried to run for village head in an election for which he was ineligible, making a mockery of the democratic process and using every tactics available in order to win votes: in the less egregious cases he plays on racial prejudice and shows small business owners ridiculous renderings of his plans to redevelop commercial zones, while at the other end of the spectrum he offers outright cash bribes. All of this is executed in a style clearly derived in large part from American political drama and Hong Kong triad films, complete with waving flags, victory signs, ill-fitting suits, awkward handshakes, and copious backslapping–reminiscent, perhaps, of the early days of government in Shenzhen. Taking place in the small town of Nanting outside of Guangzhou (where he was based until a recent move to Beijing), this dramatic video delivers an intriguing study in the flow of styles and ideas across borders: here it is largely this aesthetics of political process that commands attention, particularly in light of the fact that elected leadership in this part of the world is rarely ever less farcical than Hu Xiangqian makes it. It is a game of rhetoric, one filtered through the populist political imagery of Shenzhen that is itself a shadow of the Hong Kong legislative system. Installed here on an old security monitor and placed on a stool in the rear of a container otherwise occupied by the photography of Leung Chi Wo, we begin to approach an aesthetics of border crossing, albeit one defined by the passage of ideas at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

Li Jinghu, 'Untitled,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

The third container is given over to Li Jinghu, widely but perhaps apocryphally labelled the only contemporary artist in Dongguan–the Pearl River Delta factory town best known for producing plastic consumer products and building materials rather than electronics, a massive migrant population compared even to Shenzhen, a thriving sex culture, and a pseudo-syndicalist style of government by corporation. Given this background, Li Jinghu had originally wished to fill an entire container with water and salt to mimic synthetic human sweat, materializing labor in an ambiguous way that would leave its biopolitical products locked up and unavailable to the spectator. And while labor is always invisible, for this exhibition it also proved difficult to control: given a nonporous ground surface and a large number of electrical cables attached to a generator in the immediate vicinity, this proposal proved practically impossible. The artist later proposed an alternative version in which detergent fluid (coincidentally, the old-fashioned “Labor Band”) and water filled a barrel also housing an air compressor, thus filling the container with bubbles. Although it was never fully filled, this did prove to be an interesting approach to social sculpture, birthing bizarre pseudo-organic forms that grow, shrink, morph, and move, traveling around the space of the mouth of the container over the course of each day. Initially viewed through doors closed so as to leave only a thin sliver of space through which to peep, as these forms grow the doors can also be opened, allowing the soap structures to leak out the bottom of the doors and grow toward work in neighboring containers. I admire most in this work a fidelity to material despite the contextual failure of the original proposition: interested in the productive capacities of the region, Li Jinghu creates his work entirely out of the plastic and metal domestic objects and appliances so widely available–produced in Dongguan for consumption in Hong Kong and beyond.

Nadim Abbas, 'Cataract II,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Aside from further photographs from Leung Chi Wo, the fourth container is dominated by an installation produced by Nadim Abbas entitled “Cataract II” (2011). Although similar in concept to a recent solo exhibition in two crisp galleries in downtown Hong Kong, here the container setting brackets this work as if it were an altar of sorts: set several feet ahead of the innermost wall, a clean white wall appears as a freestanding monolith. At is center a pair of window frames of the flimsy aluminum style so common to Hong Kong apartments (intended to keep children in and thieves out) block a backlit photograph of Iguazu Falls, the South American tourist landmark infamous locally for its starring role in the 1997 Wong Kar-Wai film Happy Together. The falls, in that film a metonymical reference to the enthralling depths of a lover, are here further mechanically enhanced by a scrolling water pattern between photograph and light source, clumsily animating the water effect and gesturing toward the wall hangings and digital clocks also–surprise, surprise–produced in the Peal River Delta. Less interested in such politics of production, however, Abbas seeks a more universal grammar of psychoanalytical architectures of the self based on the experience of viewing; in this space, a loud amplifier sitting behind the window plays a waterfall recording that serves to further immerse the spectator within this image. Such immersion, however, can only come at a distance–the production values of the environment are low enough to force viewers into a vacillating relationship of absorption and boredom, drawing attention to the apparatus of the window frame and pushing into the background the literary or poetic references of the waterfall and water itself. Although it sits on a small peninsula just several dozen meters from Tolo Harbor, the immediate site of the containers is dusty and barren, leading the artist to insert this particularly restful moment into the harsh metal space of the exhibition galleries. This is a very conscious psychology of architecture, one that requires no context but interacts with site and place wherever it is located.

Huang He, 'Lilliput,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

Probably overlooked by many visitors, this container also contains the diminutive work of Guangzhou-based artist Huang He. Consisting of nothing but rock sugar and folded paper, this piece, entitled “Lilliput” (2011), is intended as an intervention into the fengshui and general spatial environment of the container setting. According to the standard ISO dimensions of the shipping container and the location and style of art works within it (paying particular attention to the aspect of water in Abbas’s work), the artist was able to diagram the proper actions to take without ever seeing the site or indeed ever entering Hong Kong. As a result, the photographs to the left of the space have a short line of rock sugar along their inner edge, while the white wall opposite the frontal opening of the container is preceded on its right side with another such line. Directly to the right as one enters the space there is a third line, here also including two sheets of standard computer paper folded tightly into square shapes, both of which are covered with a typed segment of text but only one of which reveals this writing on its exterior. The latter such text, authored by the artist’s sister Huang Shan, consists of a poem that touches upon the Shenzhen River, the idea of a homeland, regional accents, Hong Kong television, and consumer culture in these two Pearl River Delta cities. The other, three paragraphs of prose written by Huang He herself, approaches similar themes through a different tone, recounting anecdotes from a childhood spent on the banks of the Shenzhen River–all the while keeping in mind the fact that she was born in Guangzhou and counts as her ancestral home the town of Zhanjiang. We find here the derivation of the work title: Huang He’s mother, at least as recounted in this text, worked in “Lilliput,” or the land of the little people, a colloquial name given to the theme park Splendid China, which reproduces in miniature the great nationalist landmarks of Chinese history. As to whether these talismanic texts and pieces of sugar had their intended effect on the space, of this I cannot play the judge; nevertheless, it may be worth noting that this container was consistently warmer than any of the others.

Adrian Wong, 'Kucheza Na Sisi: Footketballe,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

The final container is occupied by Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong, who uses it for a performance engaging with the history of the site as a refugee camp during and after the war in Vietnam. Leading up to the exhibition opening, Wong hired two African immigrants seeking refugee status in Hong Kong and asked them to think of how they are stereotypically perceived within the racially rather monotonous society of Hong Kong; an acting coach then taught them how to act out these attributes in an exaggerated manner and assisted them in developing characters based on such a persona. Equipped with these new theatrical personalities, the actors then went on to invent a bizarre ball game inside the container involving a ball balanced between the eye and nose, brooms, heavy metal balls, chalk circles, and piles of dirt. As audience members arrived the men attempted to teach the rules of this game to their new students, all the while casting the questions of political identity, race, and belonging into high relief. Wong consistently employs this strategy of overacting as a tool in his performance-based work, and the results typically make for aspects of documentation that remain strong even after the factor of liveness disappears with the passing of time: in this case, a sound recording of raised voices, whistles, and balls clanking on steel walls, continues to animate the container space. As during the performance proper, this creates an atmosphere of participation that can only be described as forced or partially unpleasant, interpellating the viewer as a component of the work without ever asking for permission.

Installation view of exhibition site (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

This is the beauty of an exhibition in containers on a patch of dirt by the sea: it could be anywhere but, for the moment at least, it is here.

“The fire runs, and hollers on the blank page”
Liu Wai Tong, “Mysticism, a Song of Failure”

Telling stories with the body itself, narrative cannot avoid a trajectory from one door (material or imaginary) to another, walking or rushing between being and becoming, presence and absence. The window, which constitutes one of the primary moments of imagery in the visual language of Nadim Abbas, acts to interpret the door, demonstrating its dialectics of inside/outside without calling it into ontological existence. For Abbas, the window is sometimes a gasp voiced in the midst of a confrontation between mirror images and sometimes a fountain of voyeuristic bliss. One portion of the installation “I Would Prefer Not To” (2009) consists of a line of windows formed by dark glass mounted with window grates. In “Untitled” (2000), the viewer is seduced to look through a window into a boxlike white room without doors. “Perspective Studies” (2001) places wheelchairs, light, and windows in a set intended to test the viability of optical illusions, the black-and-white checkered floor twisted nauseatingly out of space.

This interest in windows also extends to the grates and frames so ubiquitous throughout the cityscapes of of Hong Kong and South China. “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again” (2007) represents yet another attempt to interact with the possibilities of the window, here in the form of a sound installation making explicit reference to Marcel Duchamp. The work develops strata of signification, juxtaposing a pornographic magazine clipping resembling Duchamp’s “Étant donnés,” window grates framing images of waterfalls, and a chair covered with cacti.

Liu Chuang, 'Split Landscape,' 2005

Within the household, the installation of window grates is typically intended to either prevent robbery or keep children from falling out–two different aims that are actually one: the prohibition of traversal (with respect to the window). Abbas further consolidates this interdiction by hanging his window frames on solid walls, a limit in contact with the rejection of continuity. Abbas is not, of course, the first person to transform observations of these grates into art. Mainland Chinese artist Liu Chuang’s “Split Landscape” (2005) marks a similar interrogation of the spatial functions of such extensions to the window, extracting the visual elements of a three-dimensional cage-like grate form once popular in Shenzhen and turning it into a stainless steel sculpture with a highly formalized and flattened visual presentation. This same object clearly serves different purposes in the practices of these two artists: Liu is concerned with researching a geometric aesthetic of the grate as an image by peeling it off from the functionality of the defensive structure, while Abbas displaces the windows in order to dissolve the dialectics of inside/outside through a discontinuity in visual perception raised by a physical aluminum veil. The window, here, is like a ship–Foucault’s heterotopia par excellence–a “placeless place … closed in on itself and at the same time … given over to the infinity of the sea.” It goes nowhere and everywhere.

Nadim Abbas, 'I Would Prefer Not To,' 2009

Besides the window, the figure of the Rorschach test image makes a significant appearance in Nadim Abbas’ working practice. The window grate patterns from “I Would Prefer Not To” actually correspond to ten strictly symmetrical inkblots from the Rorschach tables, while “Untitled (14-03)” (2010) consists of a set of drawings mingling the outlines of such inkblots with the floor plans of thee apartments in Hong Kong in which there has been recorded an instance of either homicide or suicide occurring on 14 March over the course of the past 15 years. This project creates an imaginary non-space defined only by absence. Less obviously, “Ornament and Crime” (2008) involves an installation constructed out of white pipes through which observers roll ceramic fengshui balls that ultimately smash against the floor. The symmetrical design of the pipes here certainly resonates with the Rorschach test images, if remotely. Abbas makes reference to clinical psychology again in “I Would Prefer Not To,” another component of which is a specimen box containing manga action figures intended to correspond with the disorders listed in the MCMI-III (Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III). Diverging from the hyped version of psychoanalysis adopted as cultural theory in the art world, Abbas is more concerned with psychopathology. The body, which Schilling calls an “unfinished biological and social project,” is manipulated and fragmented by the clinical gaze, while psychology expands and limits the possible dimensions of the subject through language. Here, art cuts into the human body without the presence of the latter.

Nadim Abbas’s latest project, “Cataract” (2010), continues this distinct obsession with windows and grates in two distinct spaces on a small street in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong. In one, two light-boxes show (subtly) moving images of waterfalls, while the other contains an installation with all the qualities of the theatrical set: glossy white bathroom tiles cover a low platform and a square indentation in its center, creeping all the way up a vertical wall punctuated by a protruding shower head from which water pours down ceaselessly into a recycling drain. The shower system, constantly running within this environment, makes reference to a certain filmic anxiety, mirroring the imagery of the waterfall in a different register. At the same time, the soundtracks of a roaring waterfall is juxtaposed against the crisp, white structure, colluding with the monumentality of the shower stand to endorse the cycling of water in a ritual sense. On an adjacent wall are hung two metal frames that cage white square tiles, their gleam muffled under the reflective surface that stands in for that of the glass panes. A metal bar in a matte silver tint extending between the bathroom set and the audience constructs a peculiar sense of viewing distance with its fleshy, disconsolate curve. The sound of the waterfall spirals through the space, trembling beyond it along lines of metaphor. Through the tonal undulation of the audio track one may even be able to visualize the bubbles and foam that, infuriated by the force of gravity against mass of water, burst in reasonless bliss, visualizing the transient glint of light on each bubble that recalls the eyes of aquatic animals.

Still from Wong Kar Wai, 'Happy Together'

The continuous artificial waterfalls may resemble the cylindrical lamp depicting the Iguazu Falls that features prominently in the Wong Kar-wai film Happy Together, or perhaps the digital fengshui calenders mass-produced in mainland China, typically consisting of a large light box occupied by a lush landscape or other Buddhist imagery on one side and a digital clock on the other. It would be overly hasty, however, to cloak this work in the narrative fabric of social criticism related to the extremes of Fordist modes of production or clichéd cinematic reference. The piece may instead shed some light on the politics of artistic production: the monochrome installation not only demonstrates a minimalist aesthetics revealing a process of abstraction, but also reminds the viewer of the white cube space–often considered the most convenient, if not ideal, space for the exhibition of art for its supposed neutrality and lack of presupposition. Nevertheless, this white cube space never embraces the actual work of art with open arms and a neutral context. The white cube arises historically with modernism, as argued by Brian O’ Doherty, who writes: “The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space.” This spatial ideology is heavy-handed, putting its own image before the art work. The bathroom mise-en-scène of “Cataract” may function as an attempt to deal with the gallery as an object rather than an empty structure waiting to be filled with events and other objects that take up portions of the space like actors moving around props on a stage, or even, for that matter, the laughing philosopher’s notion of the atom moving around the void. “Cataract,” on the other hand, interprets space as an object by changing this space into a place through the psychological mapping of daily experience (in this case, the act of showering). We have many curators and artists who treat space as an object: the exhibition Voids: A Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou makes for a strong example. Described as an “exhibition of nothing,” the display consisted of nine empty rooms created by artists from Yves Klein to Maria Eichhorn and Art and Language. Instead of pondering the ontological fable of verticality and horizontality in the spatial perception of art, “Cataract” investigates the possibilities of the cubic space as an object with precise dimensions that function as the limitations and fringes of semiotic implosion.

The title of the project relates to the imagery of the waterfall with a pun, a linguistic forking path. Semiotically and physically, as translucent water is beat into a milky color by virtue of its own velocity, the project speaks in opacity. Opacity, from the window grates that cut short the fabricated continuity of an imagined landscape to pieces of dark glass, deformed floor plans, and inkblot images, far from acting to block vision, can actually open up space for new interpretations of the phenomenology of space. This space, however, is never as simple as a large void or volume to be filled with whatever might appear. Opacity in some ways wipes out the visual markers of certain objects while producing new schematics of signification and metaphors, but, on the other hand, it also provides for the viewer what Zizek calls a “universalized process of recognition,” quite similar, in fact, to the function of the Rorschach test. For Abbas, the production of the space of possible symbolic engineering is a fire that simultaneously burns down and illuminates its object; the singularity of space is always followed by a vanishing, remaining in an unavoidable moment of becoming or morphing into a new and ephemeral likeness. Opacity, sometimes, is a void choked by symbols and language.

Nadim Abbas, 'Untitled (Trinity Buoy Wharf),' 2001

Upon closer examination, the void is ubiquitous in Abbas’ work. Some of these voids are physical , as with the white tubes through which ceramic spheres slide to their self-destructive fates in “Ornament and Crime” or the empty cage of “The Fasting Artist.” Others are basically abstract, or otherwise diverge from the classical Western concept, as with the linear grates that teeter on the edge of metaphor in “I Would Prefer Not To,” creating a dimensional contrast between inside and out; or the mirror reflection of “False Mirror Tests;” or elsewhere, in the dysfunctional shower scene in which the physical bar and mental distance between audience and work prove that no transgression is possible (for it is not discernible in the work).

These manifestations of the void are linked with other elements of the artist’s work. Taking “I Would Prefer Not To” as an example, Abbas adopts explicit cultural references, including the genealogies of different Japanese manga heroes and the psychological paradigms of the MCMI-III. Such discursive systems are sutured together to form a net of connotations, as with the abstract insect-like Rorschach images paired with Hong Kong floor plans. The intangible void, including the heterotopia formed amongst the mirrors reflecting different aspects of his Duchampian peep-show, retains an impossible distance in order to protect a certain utopian narrative; this wall of imagination then creates an illusion of completeness that allows the imagery of the spotlight to emerge, inviting the void to glide across the discursive plane formed by these various paradigms as a trace of the inability to be subordinated to any other system of signification. The void becomes a surface across which additive or reductive traces roll in the form of allegory, metaphor, and random mental association. As a permanent transition between presence and absence in “I Would Prefer Not To,” it etches an extra semiotic layer into the scales of the MCMI-III. But this trace never wants to remain static, instead inherently dynamic and always resulting in a crack–something totally out of the hands of the artist and his practice–when exposed to the interpretations of the viewer. These cracks may interrupt traces just as, in the words of Tim Ingold, “a path of travel may be interrupted by a precipitous gorge in an otherwise level plateau.” This dynamic sense of mutation in and around the void actually creates and erases the traces of the discourses from which the artist borrows and reshapes; the void can not be reduced for any teleological ends, leaving us only to gaze upon its emptiness until we are passively blinded by the “beams of darkness,” to borrow the language of Agamben, that define the presence of the work.

Yves Klein, 'The specialization of sensibility in the raw material state into stabilized pictorial sensibility,' 1958

For Nadim Abbas, contrary to the Orientalist and anti-visual functions to which Yves Klein motivated this key figure of the void, the generic notion of emptiness calls for the void as a specific poetic machine to latch onto existing semiotic systems: opacity becomes adornment, a wildly blank fire of dazzling folds.

It has become a truism: Chinese art is big not only in terms of physical scale, but also in the impressions it imparts to the observer. Chinese art, and not just that of the big, red, and shiny variety, tends toward the shocking and the monolithic, qualities established through a sense of illusion that accompanies the often extraordinary production values of fabrication and large-scale craft. Hong Kong art, on the other hand, is small—or so the story goes. Hong Kong critics write that local artists work on a small scale because of their environments: studios and galleries alike are diminutive, so the production of art is spatially constricted. Artists, on the other hand, prefer to believe that their work remains small because of a certain strategy of discursive resistance: having been left out of the mainland contemporary art boom, they now intentionally work in a rhetorical style that desists from the grandiose claims of the public sculpture fabricated in massive workshops just across the border to the north.

Both of these apparently logical statements, of course, contain only half-truths at best. Space itself rarely plays such a defining role in the production of culture; space, after all, is not place, which alludes more properly to the accumulated matrices of social interaction that populate the alternately physical and virtual worlds of spatial constitution. Although contemporary art in Hong Kong and mainland China would seem to have arrived at their current states relatively independently and through different routes, the shared history of development actually extends further back than advocates of colonial cosmopolitanism might care to admit. A porous border, at least for the intellectuals who found themselves so often labeled refugees over the course of the twentieth century, has assured that forms and ideas of modern culture have always found a way to keep the staggered trajectories of Chinese art more or less even across the region. Why, then, such a gulf when it comes to the contemporary? A comparative close reading of certain historical functions of studio practice will reveal that size and scale are not nearly the overdetermined properties of social space they may seem to be, and that notions of place and cultural placement play a much more significant role in the production of space in art.

Wu Hung has advanced a rather singular conception of monumentality that will be useful here. Having developed an art historical methodology for his classic account of the public and historic functions of art and artifact in ancient Chinese society, Wu later applied this same strategy to his exegesis of the planning of Tian’anmen Square, and it is this possibility of an art history of architecture, or an architectural reading of art history, that I am interested in here. The defining properties of monumentality in the classical scholarship, he relates, are almost self-evidently defined through empirical reference to the category of the monument: it is permanent, durable, hard, solemn, and still. We might add to this list that the classical monument bears an implication of the public and defines its own space in a sculptural sense despite its original integration with the architectural grid (indeed, it is this latter property that allows for the collapse of the sculpture-architecture category that proves so productive for Wu Hung in his analysis of contemporary planning). For Wu Hung, however, this set of attributes is competent only insofar as it refers to the intentional monument erected such that it might reflect the properties of monumentality. His work, however, is much more interested in the notion of unintentional monumentality, which occurs when an object—any object, it would seem—acquires the ability to memorialize or commemorate the past, and, most importantly, to bring structure to history. This definition, which I prefer to call weak monumentality in light of the fact that it subsumes a much more general set of objects bordering on the universal, almost unintentionally assigns to the project of Chinese art, from the classical to the contemporary, a project of remembering. Regardless of the historical validity of this application, it does indeed open a new set of readings for Chinese art that we, as external observers, might call monumental on the basis of size, form, location, context, and referent alone.

The best example here in terms of a brutally explicit relationship to the monument may be the installation “Uprooted Obelisk” (2008) presented by Liu Wei at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on the occasion of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, and consists of a stone obelisk some eight meters tall seemingly balanced with its tip to the ground and suspended from the ceiling. As with the work of the classical monument, which almost always eschews subtlety in favour of accessibility, there are few questions left unanswered here. This is a monument, inverted. Though the conceptual act of approaching the monumental form in such a way within a work of art is highly symbolic, it also appears simplistic and petulant in many ways, depending on visual shock and perhaps a touch of fear (it was eventually exhibited laid out horizontally along the floor out of safety concerns) in order to produce a reaction ideally consisting first of awe that only later shifts to reflection. Armed with the deliberately emboldened definition of monumentality, however, we are invited to inquire into the relationship of this architectural feature to history: which history is memorialized here, and how is this history structured? The first half of this query opens up space for imagination simply because no information is offered. Liu Wei refers, in his own statement about the work, to the origins of the obelisk in ancient Egyptian aesthetics, willfully oblivious to the play of power enacted through the public sites in which such structures stand across the world. The artist thus creates an imagined and engineered history, however ambiguous, that hovers just beyond the available space of the work proper. This gestures toward how history is structured through the act of exhibition—it is quite literally inverted, narrated, and made virtual—but also at how the work seems to be produced precisely in order to provide a scale and a monumental form for a history that would not otherwise exist. The same relationship is evident, though slightly less explicit, in the artist’s “Energy Block” (2008), a room-sized installation of machinery, buttons, lights, and sounds intended to synthesize the anxious sensations of a vaguely menacing piece of anonymous if misunderstood technology.

Something similar happens in the work of Xu Zhen, whose inosaurs” (2007) appears particularly monumental in this context. This installation, positioned outside the exhibition galleries of Long March Space during the exhibition NONO, consists of two glass tanks several meters tall, each filled with one half of a bisected brontosaurus fabricated out of resin and preserved in a liquid like formaldehyde (it was intended to be placed in the gallery, but was ultimately outwitted by its own aspirations to size and glory). The allusion to history here is two-fold: superficially, the reference is to a history even further removed, or, more properly, a prehistory, but the work is conceptually directed at a much more recent historical narrative in the form of the auction-topping taxidermy tank works of Damien Hirst. As art market satire, however, this installation is stunningly hollow and even sterile; here, the joke is on the repetition of form itself. Xu Zhen appears to accentuate and ultimately laugh along with certain tendencies in contemporary Chinese art to exaggerate the most glaringly vacuous aspects of global culture: the big is made bigger, the absurd even more preposterous. The scale is certainly monumental, but its reorganization of history in this work is incidental, serving primarily to position itself within the recent developments of pseudo-conceptual contemporary art. In his project “88418-1.16″ (2005), Xu Zhen again fabricates an imagined history via the form of the monument. Through video, photography, and the installation of an artificial mountain top within a refrigerated glass vitrine, the artist constructs a narrative in which he ascends Mt. Everest and cuts off the top peak at a height roughly equivalent to his own. Historical truth is again doubled here, as the story itself offers a conceptual gesture of the subversion of the relationship between man and nature (not to mention the ambitions of the Chinese cultural elite), but, in another way, the obvious fallaciousness of the story also shifts its focus to the storytelling itself. As such, history is produced through the form of the monument—the piece of mountain that functions as a commemoration of the act of attaining it—as much as it is organized by it, and monumentality is allowed to fill in the gaps of history by virtue of the shock of scale.

The third archetypal approach to the ordering and fabrication of history in mainland Chinese installation art is found in the work of Zheng Guogu. Whereas both Liu Wei and Xu Zhen employ the literal strategies of monumentality in the form of public architecture and museum-style preservation, respectively, Zheng Guogu adopts a more oblique approach to the naturalization of history, though he too does touch upon the forms and fetishes of natural history. In “Hundred-Year-Old Tree Blooms Again” (2008) and several related installations, the artist uproots and transplants an age-old (and possibly legally protected) hardwood tree, shipping it by road across the country and replanting it in a new environment where its odds of survival are relatively slim—perhaps even worse than those of the upstart art district that surrounds it. Through a process of negotiation, purchasing, delivery, and publicity, the artist turns the tree into a spectacle of its own existence, suggesting, due not only to its age and stature but also to his own work, that this living organism is a monument in its own right. He goes a step further in sculptures produced collaboratively with the Yangjiang Group like “Waterfall” (2003) or Garden of Pine Also Fierce Than Tiger II [sic] (2010), pouring liquid wax over smaller trees and other objects in order to capture their likenesses and make eternal the momentary positions of such living things. Resembling Xu Zhen’s process of embalming in some ways, this conceptual technique insists that there is something worthwhile, something long-lasting in the visual appearances of these objects, much like the tree that gains currency as contemporary art only when Zheng Guogu metaphorically packages it and releases it into the world. That is to say, monumentality is not here a goal or even an intention so much as it is a constellation of techniques by which the artist achieves legitimacy for his own practice, allowing installations constructed at scale to demand a certain historical precedent that becomes the aesthetic value of the work far more than its visual appearance.

In the face of work like Liu Wei’s “Uprooted Obelisk,” the critical viewer might be tempted to write off such allusions to monumental forms as manifestations of the harmless ludic desire for humorous satire that marks contemporary art. I would venture, however, that these artists are quite serious when they demand that their works fabricate alternative histories—that this is more facetious than it is playful. Size and scale are almost always intended as mockeries of their own pitfalls, but this strategy rarely succeeds in desisting from its own seductions. No one, it should be said, actually believes that Xu Zhen’s “Dinosaurs” is a humble attempt to point out the absurdity of increasingly larger and ever more expensive pieces of art because it is itself an absurdly large and expensive installation. What makes this fact painfully clear is the extraordinarily high production value of such work, and it is production value that makes the pseudo-historical narratives offered by the monumentality of contemporary art believable or at least viable under the erasure of the exhibition. That is to say, illusion is itself a constituent component of the production process, which has recently come to depend on flawless sites of fabrication and manufacturing in the upper reaches of global contemporary art from Jeff Koons to Zhang Huan. Within contemporary culture, art no longer plays the role of the amateur gadfly, gesturing toward larger phenomena, but rather has come to imitate such phenomena with amazing fidelity. And even as practice expands from the studio into the factory (or, often, the fabrication studio), studio spaces grow to include storage for objects fabricated, work space for assistant labourers, and so on. It is not so much that Chinese art is big because its studios and urban spaces are relatively large, but rather that such spaces of production adjust their own scale to contain the bloated discourse of contemporary Chinese art. The reasons for its affair with size are too complicated to discuss here, but I suspect that the foremost factors are an impatient desire to be noticed globally and a genuine interest in entering into dialogue with the scale of China, particularly as a global factory.

We should look again, then, at the notions of scale and space in Hong Kong art. It would be easy to point to factors exactly opposite to those affecting Chinese art discussed above, claiming that underground culture seeks to avoid attention (an obvious falsehood) and that, with its manufacturing industries relocated to the mainland, there is no inherent interest in examining the issues of production and circulation. But absence does not constitute a reason for disinterest any more than the traditional complaints hold: that space in Hong Kong is too expensive, leading to relatively small studios, galleries, trucks, and elevators. The latter is true, of course, but large-scale fabrication may be even cheaper and easier in Hong Kong than in Beijing. With a high concentration of skilled factories and workshops, many owned by local businessmen and management chains, located within several hours by container truck, it would actually be exceedingly simple for local artists to manipulate and take advantage of these systems of production. There is a reason that artists, working in formerly industrial spaces on the outskirts of the city, instead turn towards craft and work at the scale of the human hand, and I suspect this reason relates more or less to the rejection of the trading lifestyle of commercial Hong Kong business in the Pearl River Delta. That is to say, the ideology of art in Hong Kong insists on its difference from secular life, retaining an almost premodern attachment to the aura of studio practice long abandoned in the post-globalization ideologies prevalent on the mainland and elsewhere—a phenomenon of difference that owes more to the recent social history of the development of Hong Kong industry in the mainland and the ensuing political battles with the central government than to any imagined divergence in art historical trajectories. In many ways, studio practice in Hong Kong entails the creation of a single private space of the purely personal, a space for expression rather than for conceptual engineering, in response to crowded residential conditions and an ever diminishing quantity and quality of per capita public space. Although there is a nascent movement towards both community art, which here typically emphasizes the involvement of non-art participants with art world activities not necessarily taking the form of art practice, and street art, which inserts works of art edging closer to popular culture in public spaces, this movement remains far and away secondary in significance to the private culture of the studio.

Lee Kit is probably the clearest representative of this trend, turning his entire practice into an event showcasing the alternative lifestyles of the artist and using exhibitions as a platform to proselytize or at least demonstrate the seductions of studio practice. He is a consummate painter outside painting, with no interest whatsoever in the historical explorations of painting as a medium of image and process, but he does mark his hours by painting layer upon layer of lines and stripes on thin pieces of cloth draped over a table in the middle of his studio. In his most recent series, “Stories” (2010), Lee Kit downloads photographs involving cloth found through targeted keyword searches on the Internet, studying the resulting images of families picnicking or of linen tablecloths over dining tables in order to synthesize a narrative for each of the figures pictured and its background environment. He then reproduces the patterns of these textile objects, often pictured crumpled or folded, on a flat piece of blank cloth, typically painting patterns of stripes, plaids, and solids before hanging the piece, as if it were a canvas, on the exhibition wall. Projects like this one would appear to be fundamentally anti-monumental, not in the satirical mode of the mainland artists discussed above but in actual form; there is very little space for anything less substantial than pure sincerity in such work. Similarly, although this work does construct narratives for the figures it touches upon, it does not have anything to say on an historical level, or, more appropriately, it does not make any claim to history. Monumental form is unnecessary here, not because its presence would be impossible but because the actions of artistic practice function on a different register. For Lee Kit, stories exist on a human scale. His earlier work brings this mode of production into the public sphere, as with “A perfect ending for a perfect day” (2008–09), in which he built a bed for himself on the floor of the gallery space out of mattresses, sheets, and pillows on which he had painted phrases like “Pour yourself a hot bath, pour yourself a drink.” The artist then proceeded to live in this environment for the duration of the exhibition, attempting to demonstrate the possibility of a private, personal space even in public through the work of his own body.

One can note in the work of Nadim Abbas a similar relationship to scale, albeit one that functions beyond the space of personal lifestyle. If Lee Kit’s nest-like environment, developed in “A perfect ending …” and elsewhere, is concerned with the generation of a social place for interaction and comparative aesthetics, Abbas is more interested in the essential properties of space as a dimension in which such events unfold. “Perspective Study” (2001), for example, consists of a wheelchair parked on a black-and-white checkered floor within a semi-cylindrical warped mirror, resulting in a range of diverse visual effects of perspective from different viewing positions inside the assemblage. Other installations of that period turn marks of degradation on old photographs into actual interventions in real space and replace mirrors with glass in order to test the ability of the eye to distinguish here from there, while more recent projects like “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again (Given: 1. Pornography 2. Electricity 3. Water)” (2007) tend toward less formal questions of assemblage. This latter work consists of a framed page from a pornographic magazine, two steel window frames enclosing a photograph of a waterfall, an accompanying soundtrack of falling water, and a wooden chair with its seat replaced by a tray of living cacti. As with the best of any contemporary art form, Abbas makes reference to a world beyond the immediate space of the exhibition experience—here, the reference is primarily of an art historical nature—but, without the techniques of either monumentality or documentary, it is difficult to actually construct a history, false or genuine. The artist is here more fundamentally interested in how history functions within space, creating a situation and then drawing in a broader set of aesthetic elements intended to manipulate the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer. Nevertheless, Abbas continues to work at the scale of personal space, even if he does revel in games of perception and participation. Studio practice functions as an activity of scholarly craft, and issues of production—physical or historical—never come into play.

Somewhat uniquely among Hong Kong artists, Adrian Wong does step beyond the confines of the studio and into the territory of fabrication and production; fittingly enough, his work also deals with historical subject matter in a way that the work of Lee Kit and Nadim Abbas do not. Projects like “From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society” (2009), for example, begin from a kernel of history: in this particular case, Wong attempts to reconstruct one of the first films ever shot in Hong Kong through anecdotal notes from those involved in its production or reception. The installation takes the form of two animatronic ducks engaged in a humorous conversation atop modernist Formica pedestals encasing restaurant plateware, a tableau that comes close to suggesting monumentality by virtue of its plinth-like treatment of historical figures and vitrine preparation of artifacts of the past. Here, however, the aspect of performance keeps the assembly as a whole active in a way that precludes it from offering a distinct organization of history; without the intention of permanence, sculpture is unable to make a serious claim for the shaping of the past. Wu Hung might disagree here, citing the capacity of even ancient parchment to function as monument, but I would argue that, in that particular case, it is the mode of preservation of the object that allows it the properties of the monumental, not any intrinsic quality. In addition, Adrian Wong injects a measure of humour into his work that serves to redouble the vitality of performance, seemingly admitting that he has no designs over the rewriting of history (and functioning to subvert a quality of production values to rival the massive installations of the mainland). Instead, it is the reanimation of history that is expanded into spatial practice such that the artist implicates a readymade historical place (or referent of place) within the architectural scene he constructs in the exhibition space. Wong has applied this strategy in other cases as well, as with pieces like “Sang Yat Fai Lok” (2008), in which the artist reenacts children’s television shows from the 1960s and 1970s, the original versions of which were hosted by a distant relative, and creates an appropriate theatrical set. In this case and elsewhere, however, Wong records and exhibits the project primarily through video (although the monitor is typically installed within a portion of its set), abstracting the performance and inserting another layer of the object or artifact within what might otherwise appear as a dangerously historicizing interpretive display.

In this body of work, Adrian Wong opens up for the viewer several possibilities of visual culture for Hong Kong. The artist mines the source material of historical and street culture in order to construct a relationship between the spaces created in his work and the actual social places of the site, but these new spaces of installation in turn transform the general cultural identity of Hong Kong, exploding it outward into a hybrid of globalized visual production. The general visual culture of Hong Kong is determinedly insular, naturally adopting elements of both Western design and Chinese tradition but adapting them into something new entirely. Now that this language of street culture has been codified through decades of film, fashion, theatre, comics, architectural preservation, and other facets of mass media, nostalgic cultural producers are loathe to allow its delicate balance to be disrupted by external factors (most typically in the form of immigration, investment, and intervention from the mainland). Hong Kong culture, this logic holds, is fundamentally Chinese but resides in an already internationalized form that must not be infiltrated by either base Chinese culture or purely global culture; unfortunately, this is a stagnant logic that bars cultural innovation from within as stringently as it blocks new influences from the outside. Of the many possible routes out of this situation, that which has so far proved most productive is the fabrication of spaces of potential and virtuality (that is to say, spaces that create potential for an altered actual environment through the virtual). Installations by the artists discussed here represent such a possibility: conceptual interventions in real space offer visions of an alternative present that stands within the range of reason, ready to be realized if the artist can collapse the marked space of artistic discourse. While Liu Wei and Xu Zhen accomplish this collapse, or, more properly, its reverse, through high production values that create the illusion of semblance, Lee Kit does so by inserting himself into his work and by bringing his finished work back into his studio practice. In one infamous project, Adrian Wong invited Daoist priests to exorcise his studio to similar effect, drawing the actual space of the exhibition into the imagined places of superstition so as to deny any originary difference between the two—between contemporary art and belief. Nadim Abbas, in his latest work, “Cataract” (2010), turned a small gallery space into a shower, creating a scene of indefinite suspense that quoted horror films even as it gestured toward the artist’s own work with the psychoanalytical language of water. Importantly, no major renovation work was necessary to do so—production value was moderate, the illusion was marginal, and the potential place offered through the space of the work remained within the work rather than in the audience perception of the installation.

Whether or not they are related to actual structures or buildings, these are fundamentally projects of architecture, and the design of such spaces of potential emerges particularly clearly in the work of architects influenced by the Hong Kong regime of urbanism. MAP Office, a conceptually oriented studio known for its explorations of the “lean planning” of the Pearl River Delta and the corridor-based component flows of the Hong Kong pedestrian environment, has created such a space in its latest video project, Runscape (2010). Accompanied by the solemn voice of a narrator holding forth on the theoretical implications of the imagery, the video follows young men running through public areas of the city: across pedestrian bridges and rooftops, up outdoor stairs, and down streets, attracting attention not for the novel nature of their antics (this is definitively not parcour) but rather for their sheer speed, for their willingness to activate the horizontal flows of the street without regard to its typical pace. The body is a “bullet that needs no gun,” creating within the urban environment new spaces of action characterized by the body as place.

The designs of Gary Chang, known for his renovation of a reconfigurable apartment that squeezes several dozen possible room configurations into a space of some 300 square feet, accomplish a similar feat. Such an approach to urban density quite literally compresses physical space into a set of layered virtual striations, assuring that the place of the home retains the capacity to expand outward into new territories at any given moment. For his participation in the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, Chang engineers a structure of cage houses (stacked metal cages rented by impoverished single senior citizens) and fluorescent lights (used to indicate the locations of prostitutes), using the intangible materials of light and context to build a mental architecture of the underground that comes to stand in place of the physical structure of the unit. In both cases design is a living entity that is constantly transforming, never allowed the opportunity of monumentality. Intriguingly, it is Douglas Young, a designer and the founder of lifestyle brand Goods of Desire, who applies this strategy most directly to the visual culture of Hong Kong discussed above. Young designed for the global coffee chain Starbucks a restaurant interior that mimics the canonical styles of the local cha chaan teng, a sort of diner characterized by very specific menu styles, flooring, booths, and other architectural features, embedding this new interior environment within a typical Starbucks branch. This explicit commodification of Hong Kong visual identity as novelty implies the packaging and virtualization of its archetypal architectural space, preparing this specific visual style for a global journey through the very products produced by Young’s own design firm (and, of course, film, fashion, and so on). Whatever our qualms, we cannot deny that the creation of a virtual space with the characteristics of actual Hong Kong—and within real Hong Kong—suggests its potential realization elsewhere.

Such modes of production, of course, are far from unique to Hong Kong. The core figures of the short-lived Shenzhen art scene at the turn of the millennium engaged equally with such games of space, working in a mode with even lower production values. This makes sense: Shenzhen popular culture, too, was once strongly influenced by that of Hong Kong, and its forms of urbanization once resembled an understanding of international street life based on the visible features of Hong Kong film and television. Chu Yun’s “Constellation” (2006) has been previously interpreted from this formal angle: the indicator lights of various electric appliances, running silently in a dark room, appear like so many multi-colored stars until the lights turn on and the viewer sees the composition of the scene. Here it is imagination rather than history that fills the void of virtual space created through the formal arrangement of the work, but the effect is similar. In “Unspeakable Happiness 2″ (2003), again, the artist strung the multicolored flags typically used to announce a sale at a mall or car dealership over the space of an exhibition opening, both physically adding new elements to the space (and creating a new space with the triangular geometry of the pyramid) and drawing in new meaning to the event at hand. Key here is the fact that the intervention on the part of the artist was absolutely minimal, operating on the economy of the gesture rather than that of the illusion. Liu Chuang, another core artist of that Shenzhen circle, explored the systemic consequences of such virtual spaces in his installation “Untitled (History of Sweat)” (2007), by which an air conditioner installed in the exhibition gallery drew out and collected the sweat of the audience in a pool on the floor. Viewers were here made aware not necessarily of another space but rather of an alternative dimension—something more corporeal than visual that might still best be described as the virtual. This minimal gesture on the part of the artist, manifested in the reversal of an air conditioner, called in to being an entirely new register of spatial perception suddenly no longer dependent on place, creating not an imagined or fabricated history but rather a new possibility of becoming for the present.

It is tempting to find, in this striking confluence of work from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a quality of blandness perhaps native to the culture of South China, a distinctly Cantonese property that somehow infects its art; it was, after all, the misty landscapes of the south and their distance from political power that inspired the most minimal painting and poetry in past eras. In the scenario of the contemporary, however, distinctions of regional culture are no longer able to exert such universal influence. Zheng Guogu, still based in his hometown of Yangjiang, just west of the Pearl River Delta, remains within the sphere of cultural influence of Hong Kong but displays none of the gestural subtlety found in Shenzhen. More strikingly, the artists of Guangzhou who once set the agenda for artistic practice oriented around the urbanism of the region work almost entirely in rather different modes—though this transition typically occurs after they have left the regional art circles and begun to exhibit nationally and internationally. Cao Fei, for example, has moved from scrappy videos researching the quasi-global youth culture that first infected Guangzhou via Hong Kong and theatrical stagings like “PRD Anti-Heroes” (2005), which resembles the dramatic adaptations pioneered in Hong Kong by Adrian Wong, to the polish and finish of “RMB City” (2009–11), a massively expensive engineered virtual platform for explorations of fictive Chinese urbanism. Lin Yilin, who came to global attention with the performance “Safely Crossing Linhe Road” (1995), in which he moved a brick wall from one side of a road to the other piece by piece, has most recently been crafting larger-than-life sculptures of Mao Zedong wielding an AK-47. Clearly, the spirit of intervention that characterized the bland economy of virtual spaces has given way to a need to finish, a desire for a very certain sort of illusion able to completely hoodwink the spectator into undying trust in a fictional history. Such monumental installation is a totalitarian art in many ways, refusing visual ambiguity even as it embraces the notion of unyielding belief in the invisible promise. This is a transformation of rhetoric, though one that clearly requires something more than geography and space for its completion.

This essay offers no answers to this question; I seek only to trouble the notion that scale is a secondary factor in the production of contemporary art that depends entirely on environmental variables. Despite all this, Hong Kong art is small, and Chinese art is big. That we feel the need to differentiate between these two modes of production, separated by far more than a border and a language gap, speaks volumes about the ongoing changes in the relationships of greater contemporary Chinese art. It is my hope that, understanding the problem of scale as it functions variously in space and place, the production of spaces of potential, a routine reflected in the practices of leading artists in Hong Kong but also in the work of several internationally minded and rarely bombastic mainland artists, might become something of a shared vocabulary able to explode the highly limited visual cultural identity of Hong Kong—and any other similarly situated environment. The notion of a potential monument is almost preposterous. While the artists discussed here have demonstrated the capacity of the monument to create a fabricated ideological and historical background, this equation does not flow in the opposite direction; spaces of potential do not produce monuments. If contemporary art can put aside the art historical pretensions of the avant-garde, engaging instead with the present moment in the constructed cultural environment that surrounds it, a form of potential space—a space that is not yet real and thus is neither virtual nor actual—can emerge in even the smallest studios, and in even the miniature galleries of downtown Hong Kong. This is meant as an infectious proposition, one poised to intervene in the currently overdetermined relationship of space to output. Potential awaits.

Nadim Abbas, Matt Hope + Jon Phillips, Hu Xiangqian,
Huang He, Jin Jiangbo, Leung Chi Wo, Li Jinghu, Adrian Wong

Curated by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham
Organized by the Society for Experimental Cultural Production

Opening 8 January 2011, 17:00 – 21:00
And running through 28 January 2011
Open weekends 12:00 – 18:00
Otherwise by appointment

At the cargo container storage bay
Located adjacent to the Whitehead Club
In Whitehead, Ma On Shan, New Territories, H.K.

The Society for Experimental Cultural Production is pleased to announce The Border Show (边展), a site-specific exhibition of recent art concerned with the border mechanisms of the Pearl River Delta to be staged during the period of Fotanian, Hong Kong’s annual open studio event, from 8 to 28 January 2011.

Taking place inside a set of shipping containers placed amid the hulking post-industrial buildings of the New Territories halfway between the urban cores of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, this exhibition proposes a new relationship between these two cities and the wider region by approaching the ontology of the border crossing. Rather than allowing the various art communities of the area to misapprehend highly localized situations of cultural production as representative of the Delta as a whole, radically open work can instead build connections between audiences by advancing new possibilities for art in cross-border living.

This exhibition exists both within and literally as the marginal spaces between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, interrogating the operation of the manufacturing-shipment complex of the Pearl River Delta region. Participating projects will be first installed in the disused containers of the New Territories in January 2011; at a later date in the spring, the work and its containers will be removed to a disused industrial area of Shenzhen. The status of the border crossing is thus materialized by the presence of the exhibition itself in these two archetypal spaces of production and trade.

Participating artists for the first portion of the exhibition in Hong Kong include Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Laoban Soundsystem (Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, Beijing), Hu Xiangqian (Guangzhou), Huang He (Guangzhou), Jin Jiangbo (Shanghai), Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong), Li Jinghu (Dongguan), and Adrian Wong (Hong Kong). Collectively, their work examines the psychology of architecture, the engineering of sound, interventions in local politics, fengshui and space, the economy in regional urbanism, migration and settlement, the visibility of labor, gray markets, shanzhai culture, and the biopolitics of identity.

The opening reception will include a sunset barbecue on the harborside with live music provided by a variant of the Laoban Soundsystem engineered by participating artists Matt Hope and Jon Phillips. All are welcome into the evening. Additional events will be organized on 15 and 22 January, and a pamphlet on the exhibition will be produced for the closing reception.

To reach the exhibition site, take the MTR to Wu Kai Sha Station and follow the signs to the Whitehead Club Driving Range (白石俱乐部), approximately 10-15 minutes by foot. Alternatively, shuttle bus service is available directly to the Whitehead Club from Shatin Town Hall every hour on the half hour until 20:30, or from Sunshine City every half hour until 22:45. The Club is widely recognized by cab and other drivers. From the entrance to the Whitehead Club, follow the parking lot driveway between the golf driving range and the barbecue restaurants to arrive at the container lot. For questions, you may reach us at 5181-5156 (English) or 5181-2762 (Cantonese), or at the email addresses listed on the contact page.

Nadim Abbas
Experimenta
LG/F., 89-95 Hollywood Rd., Central, Hong Kong
5 November – 11 December

For his first major solo exhibition, Nadim Abbas has chosen to transform a small, hidden exhibition space into a singular environment of optical effect based on the collapsed figure of the shower-as-waterfall. Prevented from moving closer by a horizontal steel bar, the viewer sees a freestanding wall of white tile on which a shower fixture constantly drains into a pool on the floor below. To either side of the wall white shower curtains dull the glare of spotlights illuminating the environment from the rear, while a hidden speaker system blares the lower registers of a waterfall recording. On one wall a pair of flimsy aluminum window frames (a common decorative element in Hong Kong residential structures that has appeared in several of Abbas’s projects over the past several years) has had its glass panes replaced with a set of white tiles. The window situation is repeated again in an adjacent gallery space, this time framing kitschy scrolling animations of a waterfall.

As in his previous work with mirrors and windows, this project, Cataract (2010) emerges from a fascination with the technologies of perception. Constructing a careful but never immersive environment, Abbas is interested in the failures of purely retinal art. All three components of the installation pass through the territory of opacity, and a particular excitement is reserved for the moment at which water, transparent until a certain speed of impact, becomes solid white; the artist seeks the psychological effects of such phenomenological symbols, looking for the point at which the architecture of sensation determines cultural meaning.

During a recent debate over sound art that seemed to grip several quarters of the Hong Kong art world for the better part of the summer of 2010, one of the recurring topics of discussion was the relationship between art and music. Dominated by figures emerging from the contemporary classical and experimental spheres, however, this has been a distinctly theoretical conversation, revolving around the parallel but temporally offset historical development paths taken by the contexts of music—in and beyond the concert hall—and art—in and beyond the white cube of the gallery. Setting aside, for a moment, the many sensitive and intelligent artists working with sound as material, medium, and genre, of which there are many in China–from Yan Jun in Beijing to Yao Dajuin in Taipei and Cedric Maridet in Hong Kong–one particularly overlooked territory may yet contribute something additional to the field: that of independent popular music.

This is a fraught topic, one that often devolves all too quickly into hype for “genre-spanning hipsters” and other distasteful members of the fray labeled “creative China.” On the other hand, this was also, until recently, a marker of some cultural resentment, especially as the period that saw musicians like Zuoxiao Zuzhou sharing live-work space in the East Village with artists like Ai Weiwei gave way to the auction bubble for Chinese contemporary art and international obscurity for domestic music. For the historical background to this transition, see the important scholarly work on politics, identities, and relationships within and between these two communities carried out by critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya. The topic of this column, however unfortunately, is both less expansive and more prosaic, attempting to examine several of the more recent instances of exchange between contemporary art and independent pop music in an effort to determine what further dialogue might be able to accomplish, and what alterations to this process may be necessary.

In Hong Kong, at least two of the leading artists working locally also lead independent bands. Nadim Abbas, who has lent keyboard and vocals to the disco punk and modulated noise quarter A Roller Control since 2008, is recognized primarily for his visual work, as with the project installed in the Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition The Hong Kong Seven that compared the varying shapes of window barriers to Rorschach blots and assigned a new superhero identity for each. Having completed advanced formal studies in literary theory and being widely read in critical modalities, Abbas represents a more intellectual pole of the Southern Chinese art scene. With A Roller Control, on the other hand, he fabricates walls of noise uniquely suited to art contexts—which is appropriate, given that the best live music venues in the city more or less recreate the rote/cookie-cutter post-industrial shells from which gallery spaces are created. This is a new incarnation for the group—which previously emphasized more danceable styles—but this seems likely to stick given the increasing preponderance of large-scale cultural festivals, exhibitions, and other events, even as longstanding performance venues like the Fringe Club fade into the background of the local scene.

Also in Hong Kong is the part-time resident, Adrian Wong, who teaches for a portion of the year at the University of California in Los Angeles. He has just recently taken the helm of an energetic group that has seen a quick succession of names, and is at the moment working under the label Fantastic, I Love You. Born and educated in the United States, Wong brings the tactics of rigorous archival and scientific research coupled with a crude sense of humor to the Chinese art world, thus rarely fitting in amongst the more subdued artists emerging from the official Hong Kong art education system. His latest project may be the consummate demonstration of this approach, investigating sobriety as a parameter of expressive performance and offering an unbridled space of energy to a quiet scene.

Artists moonlighting as musicians (or musicians making art, or dilettantes trying out a bit of everything) are nothing new, of course; this is a long-standing tradition in many parts of the world, and the nexus of independent music and experimental art has played an integral role in the historical development of scenes from Los Angeles of the 1960s to the Lower East Side of the 1980s. In Hong Kong, however, this offers new possibilities for less systematic, more purely affective or sensory approaches to the creation of cultural objects, creating a plane of exchange removed from the straitjacketed processes of traditionally insular studio practice that is derived from an odd imagination of scholarly painting implicit to the post-colonial ideologies of education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from which (until recently) the majority of practicing local artists graduated. We are also beginning to note similar trends in mainland China, though the quality of musical practice in that situation is highly variable.

The most interesting example at the moment may be the relationship between N12, a group of painters who studied together at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that once included now well-known figures like Qiu Xiaofei and Wang Guangle, and Shanshui, a record label operated by Sun Dawei that represents 8-bit and intelligent dance music artists like Sulumi (a stage moniker for Sun himself), Liman, Dead J, and B6. Recognizing that commercial success had bolstered visual art long before music, a nebulous organization known as the N12 Foundation has offered funding for publicity and compilation publications for the label, while Shanshui events have also seen participation from a crowd of like-minded painters and other artists. This cooperative relationship is no doubt spurred on by the relationship between Cao Yang, the lead singer of the respected electronic rock band Exit A, and N12, though it should be said that there is also a certain overlap in terms of aesthetic sensibility, as with A Roller Control and Fantastic, I Love You in Hong Kong.

Other attempts at cross-genre synergy, as with those by the Modern Media music critic, Jian Cui, the second-rate punk musician, Wang (Gia) Yue, of Hang on the Box, and others to present themselves as artists, often under the aegis of exhibitions and markets known as “Mary Inn” and organized by You Yang, have fallen remarkably flat, offering stunningly naive interpretations of the discourses of contemporary art. Falling into this latter category, too, would be the “graphic art” with which many self-consciously hip foreign observers and young Chinese are enamored, works that offer nothing whatsoever for intelligent viewers and do little to enhance the music, design, and apparel with which it is associated. Much of this activity is carried out in hopes of building wider markets for this material, an explicitly statistics-oriented commercial aim for which serious artists and musicians have little patience.

These highly visible missteps notwithstanding, the transferral of artistic energies into music (and, more occasionally, of musical energies into art, though this asymmetry derives more from the primary position of independent music in the popular consciousness rather than the elitism of high culture) can be extraordinarily productive in venting some of the pretensions attendant to the professional practice of art in a society largely ignorant of and removed from international cultural histories. This can occur through the changing relationships between subject and audience, a distinction that has attracted so much commentary in the literature that it requires no further theoretical articulation here. In the art exhibition, which is typically open to the public but limited to geographically marginal sites, entities that range from environments to objects and images rarely ever offer personal presence, no matter how impressive they may appear. In this model, such phenomena are intended for review by a large audience but, ultimately, for consumption by only a minority. In the musical performance, live human bodies present a rehearsed but transient experience funded jointly by all viewers. These two divergent models indeed can lend theoretical support for experiments in configuration within both distinct discourses; the key to success lies primarily within focus on the assemblage of the scene, as outlined here, and aesthetic coherence or at least stylistic consistency. This is where so many musicians-cum-artists fail: a lack of respect for disciplinary histories and boundaries allows for an undiscerning desire for linkage and connection between scenes and individuals, thereby bringing in cultural products with no meaningful relationship to the work at hand. Fortunately, the art scenes of Hong Kong and mainland China alike find in the karaoke lounge a litmus test pertaining to the viability of this crossover, a filter that discriminates between the endlessly devolving and overlapping categories of artist, musician, consumer, and pretender.

Cantopop may have been revolutionary back in the days of Sam Hui, the godfather of the Hong Kong sound, but today a younger generation of new irascibles is looking to make a change in the musical landscape of the island metropolis. A Roller Control, which counts among its members DJ and label boss Alok Leung as well as leading local contemporary artist Nadim Abbas, is well-poised to make it happen. With a sound somewhere between disco punk, modulated noise, and knob-fiddling sound art, ARC–as they are known in the hipster colloquialism–has been taking a certain segment of Hong Kong’s population by storm, opening for acts like Peaches and headlining after parties for major events like the Hong Kong art fair and the benefit for local arts magazine C for Culture.

Although A Roller Control has yet to release a proper album, you’re likely to hear them at any given major gig in Hong Kong. And while we’re waiting for the group to hit the studio and give us something solid to hold on to, we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy their solo contributions. Alok Leung has recently been concentrating on a series of sound art performances, including a high profile piece that explored connections between music and architecture, while Nadim Abbas has been showing visual art related to psychogeography and scale around town. Then there is Steve Hui, the man behind the moniker Nerve, whose new media art and music pieces are also widely exhibited around China. Throw in Sebastian Seidel and it’s clear that this group is brainier than most pretenders at the pop throne–ARC is going places.

On stage the quartet line up like so many technicians, each one absorbed in the boxes and machines arrayed in front of them. After long blasts of bass and instrumentation, lead culture vulture heartthrob Nadim is prone to augment the bobbing heads with a lithe intonation of what we’re certain must be a literary reference of some sort; then the fun begins.

Catch them next at the Venetian in Macau on 31 July.