Karin Weber Gallery “A Hong Kong Everyday”

Hong Kong, July 8 – August 20, 2016

A small exhibition by the youngest generation of Hong Kong artists: artist collective Brainrental 大腦出租, Elvis Yip Kin Bon 葉建邦 and Joyce Lung Yuet Ching 龍悅程. As the title suggests, the inspirations reflected in the show came from the small things in the artist’s life: Small to medium size paper sculptures of Brainrental, executed in a three-dimensional comics style from white cardboard and black lines; Lung’s detergent bottle sculptures from porcelain (life-size) and a porcelain model of a subdivided flat (scaled); Yip’s geometrical reconfigurations of horse-racing betting tickets and an abstracted axonometric rendering of a leaking pool using masking tapes.

On top of the everyday inspirations, the common denominator of the works has been modest scale and modest materials. All of this a bit resembled a senior generation of Hong Kong artists as they have been assembled e.g. at Painting On and On 5: Taciturn. What set them apart and what made the youth of the artists on display apparent was the over-mimetic nature of the works, caught in the trap of trying to represent too literarily what they thought they saw or experienced. The porcelain detergent bottles covered with text like “Eat more choy” and “Did you brush your teeth” pointed towards the hard time of a late teenager nostalgically longing back for his lost youth. The miniature paper models combining an iPhone with a typical Hong Kong architectural element resembled a paper model building exercise of an afternoon art school class. Only Yip’s two-dimensional works diverged a bit, especially the work making use of the horse-betting form. Even the use of masking tape in the leaking pool image still hinted at an adolescent’s love for colorful stationery.

Yip’s works gave a hint at a possible direction he may be taking as a more mature artist. Brainrental’s work was giving out more ambiguous signals, hovering between youth culture, comics and street art and an architectural research of urban environment. Lung’s work expressed in full the trauma of becoming an adult, and it was hard to guess her future direction. Is she going to expand on the theme of an abstract intimate domesticity following in the steps of Au Hoi Lam and Lee Kit? Or will the socially critical element take over, as her investigation of subdivided flats (represented by the porcelain model) suggested, leading towards a relational approach?

Doing a quick googling, the feelings induced by the artworks corresponded quite well with the artist’s background: Yip having a few years of experience in the art scene, slowly finding his own artistic language. Brainrental likewise, but with an independent design agency-like framing. And Lung as the youngest, recent graduate. There has been a potentiality in each of the works, and only the future will tell which path the artists will end up taking.