Hong Kong, September 29 – October 9, 2016, http://www.100ftpark.hk/
100ft. Park is a miniature art space located on the second floor of an old 6 floor walk-up building, right above the extreme noise and light assault of the electric appliance and lighting market in Sham Shui Po’s Ap Liu Street.
Both Ko (高倩彤) and Sin (冼朗兒) are painters, but the exhibition was as much about the space that surrounded it as it was about the artworks on display: An exercise in “relational” painting. Sin showed more traditional canvases, one set of smaller ones depicting emergency switches and one set of larger ones depicting air conditioning units. Both of these elements are ubiquitous on the exterior of the building in which the gallery is located. Through her paintings, Sin moved them inside of the space, including the weird colorful lighting resulting from the combination of neon lights, some from shops selling light fixtures and some (pink) from shops selling customized “massage services”. Ko’s work took the form of two gentle interventions. One barely noticeable was the covering of the gallery floor with a white protective plastic sheet usually used during construction to protect the floor material. Another one consisted of three approximately 60 cm tall stacks of paper, each stack consisting of multiple copies of one offset printed photograph of the surrounding building’s exterior showing a bare wall of a building and a metal scaffolding supporting it – the situation that happens when one house is torn down and the exposed walls of adjacent houses are propped up in this way. Ko’s painterly intervention consisted of removing the metal scaffolding from one photograph on the top of the stack by painting over it with oil paint. Only if a visitor grabbed the photograph he realized the structure of the oil paint on it and noticed the difference between the top sheet and the stack below it.
Both Ko and Sin’s work have been taking something from the outside to the inside of the gallery space. Both were expressing their experience with the urban space surrounding the gallery. There was a sense of gentleness and care in both works that was in contrast with the noisy crudeness of the objects and environments depicted. This created feeling of balance and complementarity between the outside and the inside, as well as between Ko and Sin’s works. Sin’s paintings provided an intellectual entry point, and Ko’s work provided a backdrop, which slowly moved into the foreground as the time of the gallery visit passed by.
