Press Release
KWAN Sheung Chi + WONG Wai Yin
“But is it Art?”
“I know but I don’t know.”
18 October – 16 November 2013
Opening: Friday, 18 October, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery EXIT, 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen, Hong Kong
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 1100 – 1800
W ：Our exhibition is titled “But is it Art?” “I know but I don’t know.” , right?
K：Right.
W：What do you think of my proposed artworks so far?
K：There shouldn’t be any problems.
W：I especially like the mosaic work you suggested for me to make. How is your piece coming along?
K：No progress so far, I don’t know if there is any point to it. I wonder if I can draw out some core issues within art from my trail of thoughts rather than to casually conjure a concept.
W：To pour one’s thoughts out without reservation is already really powerful.
K：But ultimately, would it be better to have a completed work or to simply verbalize the concept? I don’t really know which of the two I should follow.
W：If you ask me about art, I can only say that it is a personal interest; can’t really help let alone give an opinion.
K：That is also an opinion and every opinion is subjective.
W：True. But I am often an indecisive person, my advices come with a lot of risk.
K：Ideas are unbounded. In that way, I feel that I should incorporate everything I hear and see into my artworks. For instance, in Pak Sheung Chuen’s latest work, he simply wrote down his thoughts without realizing them and I would like to retell them all, would that count as art?
W：No.
K：Would it not?
About the artists:
KWAN Sheung Chi and WONG Wai Yin regularly collaborate on their artistic projects, the first being EVERYTHING GOES WRONG FOR THE POOR COUPLE, a 34 hour-long performance over the course of 5 days at ART HK 2010; and had gone on to present TO DEFIND THE CORE VALUES IS THE CORE OF THE CORE VALUES, a performative and audience participatory project, in Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei organised by the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Many of Kwan’s work take the form of self-training without seemingly advancing. This on-going wrestle with the duality of success and failure, achievement and defeat, calculation and chance, underlies much of his recent practice and even his daily life. Through his work, we are invited to be witnesses of a life and to come up with exit strategies from our dualistic mind-set.
Wong Wai Yin’s practice is a persistent enquiry into what constitutes as art. Looking at the struggle between reality and imitation, her ambiguous pairings of everyday objects are appropriated as repositories of hidden, multi-layered meanings.
