“First Smash” is a non-profit art project launched by Art Experience Gallery. The project aims at sponsoring exhibition space for emerging artists in Hong Kong to stage their talent and skills. Hong Kong is a small crowded city where extensive space for displaying arts is rare, and so are the organizations willing to provide exhibition venues and opportunities for local emerging artists on a non-profit and unrestricted basis. The debut of “First Smash”, held in 2013, has received wide praise and recognition from the public, and has successfully gained attention for the young artists participated. This year, Art Experience Foundation and Art Experience Gallery join hands to present “First Smash 2”, a platform to discover talented local artists and to provide whom with exposure and connection to the community.
The themes explored by this year’s participants diverged. Some of the works are inspired by the inquiry into “self” or the emotions among people. For instance, inspired by the solitude during the journey in Europe, Ng Sum Chi created the enormous painting“Endless Isolation”; Man Mei To chooses daily objects such as student desk, chair and water to quest for the idea of “organic body”, “self” as well as the emotional relationship between individuals; while in “Mirror”, 3D projection technology is used to allow viewers to see their moving images repeated on screen, which resembles the self-identification process in the “mirror stage” proposed by Lacan[1]. The other works are inspired by certain social phenomena, such as Cheuk Sze Wing employs a variety of electronic devices to demonstrate the abstract concept of “natural” and “artificial” temperature changes, an expression of the dilemma that human is struggling between the natural and the man-made environments. Further, in “Sometimes when we touch…”, Wong Suk Yin makes a mimicry of the smart phone addiction of urban dwellers, whose perception of reality has been distorted and who have forgotten the real world is the physical world in which they live.; and Yiu Kwan Ho’s work “The Tourist Gaze” examines the relationship among consumers, symbols, space, images and consumerism through painting and smart phone application.
“First Smash 2” Art Project group show will be held from 19 Jul to 30 August 2014. For enquiries, please call 2110 9928 or email toinfo@artexperiencefoundation.org.
[1] Jacques Lacan: French psychoanalyst who proposes the “mirror stage”. The theory, states that the awareness of “self” of human infants is established by distinguishing between “I” and “other” through the external image from the mirror.
