HONG KONG.- Gallery EXIT announces a group exhibition featuring the work of three Hong Kong based artists, Mark CHUNG, Silas FONG and Nicole WONG. The exhibition opened on 29 July 2017 and remains on view through 19 August 2017.
Although each of them has their own unique voice, all the artists showcased in this exhibition hail from a new generation that has grown up during the multimedia era. The omnipresence of images, videos and other kinds of information, easily accessible through the internet, has shaped their interdisciplinary approach to art-making. All are comfortable working in different formats and are at home in a variety of mediums, including installation, video, photography and performance art.
The work of Mark CHUNG revolves around light and the passage of time. In "dontletthesunbreak.ooo", for instance, he makes use of publicly accessible webcams from different time zones to follow the sun on its apparent journey around the globe. At varying times depending on their location, these webcams show streaming images of the sun just as it is setting in the respective country. By linking video segments from different places together, CHUNG creates a sequence of images in which the sun never disappears below the horizon. This perpetual sunset challenges our conception of time: While the webcam footage is live and therefore represents a consistent reality, it nevertheless contradicts our own experience of time which is based on the daily cycle of morning, afternoon, evening and night.
Silas FONG is interested in our struggle to remain calm and focused in an urban environment flooded with information. He often explores this problem with the help of found objects drawn from the world of technology. The video "Focus Test", for example, consists of a series of tests charts for cameras. Their geometrical patterns, designed to determine the focussing ability of optical lenses, are equally challenging to the human eye. FONG's fascination with test patterns is also evident in "Nozzle Check/Head Alignment", a printout whose original purpose was to verify the proper function of a printer. Its fragile array of colour fields and lines is a constant reminder of how little it takes to become misadjusted, for both machines and humans.
Using mediums ranging from video to performance, Nicole WONG examines communication and the ways in which it can become disrupted. One of her works, "I will tell you in person", is inspired by an audio clip featuring the call of a now-extinct bird species. Transcribed into a musical score, the bird call will be performed on a violin during the exhibition opening. The reconstruction is doomed to remain incomplete, though: Before they went extinct, male and female birds of this species used to sing in duet - in the surviving audio clip, however, only a single bird can be heard. The unanswered call seems to foreshadow the disappearance of the entire species, and it is this sense of loss that gives Wong's work its power. In the artist's eyes, communication is a fragile thread. Once it is broken, the meaning it was meant to convey may be lost forever.
