Art Experience Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition, “hidden Track”, curated by Samantha Wong, of four emerging Hong Kong and Taiwan artists, Vivian Poon, Alice Lau, Hui Kim Ho and Shih Yung-chun and their latest series of paintings.
Artists are always sensitive to the particularity of the daily routine, their attempt to search for the hidden events - sometimes banality in others' perspective - is to regard all the tiny tracks and to transform them through their way of interpretation. By colors, by texture, or by form, in each moment of creation, their way of existence is reflected by their sincerity toward the canvas also as much as the religious repetition that would bond the artists and audiences together through the hidden beauty of the daily life. The four artists with various backgrounds here will share their "usefulness" but extremely peaceful and reflexive thoughts in this exhibition.
By building temporary relationships with things that are mingling in the reality, Vivian Poon unfolds the hidden scents surrounding her. She is intended to create an atmosphere that reminiscent the memory of her personal life and also the memory of the hidden moment. In her Snow series for instance, she depicts the kapok tree in her childhood memory and the juxtaposition of the white polka dot pattern and curtain-liked paint altogether makes its reference to her favorite quotation in Chinese literature - Xie Huilian's Rhapsody on Snow, “Such is its appearance: Scattering and spreading, mingling and merging”.
Shih Yong-chun presents the reality in his subjective imagination mainly by deconstructing and then carefully resembling the factual elements of the daily act including reading, eating, studying and being with pets etc. onto the canvases. His works are often appearing absurd in a way that the tiny details are being amplified and rearranged like “Soup Opera”, no matter in his Demonstration Life series or the latest Daily Life System series. Through the handful and mature painting techniques, an intriguing and evocative dimension that is close to the language of film has present and it interrogates the audience to re-examine the trivial details of the existence of human being in the modern city life.
Living in a confined city, Philip Hui Kim Ho re-articulates the meaning of “nature” and “artificial” by his theatrical representation of such. He criticizes the disappearance of the animal instinct by the repression imposed by the modernization and capitalism, and therefore he plays with the dislocation of the relationship of human beings and nature, and city environments in his series of work. Albeit the paintings sound familiar to those “traditional” art lovers due to its classical posed figure and framing of the background that the artist adapted from masters like Giacometti and Euan Uglow, however the blurred eyes surely are in its modern representation of 21st century, which are hopeless and are lost in their faith with the metaphor of atheism.
The kind of hopelessness also inevitably reflected in the paintings of Alice Lau, she quietly observe the failure of the reality spaces – a place which no longer signifies the communication for her existence but only endless solitude. In her paintings, a sense of the “placeless place” could be found, she hides and she is “hidden” in the heterogeneous space that she created for her own, or maybe also to the audiences that connected with her explosive rooftop, disposed playground and abandon bridge.
The hidden track in an album usually comes after the long silence of the last song, it requires extra attention otherwise it might have been missed; it is so condensed that the audience would probably associate it with the “extra” of the everyday life. The entity of life parallels an album with a bonus hidden tracks, in which we sometimes miss out things that worth a glimpse. With their works exhibit, the four artists reveal the linkage between the reality, the silence, and the “extra” imaginary realm.