(·s»D½Z)
Instant gratification takes too long!
Hong Kong, a city suffused with visual stimulations, is an ideal setting for an exhibition called DESIRE, especially in this time of seasonal indulgence. With a skyline of skyscrapers flashing all year round like Christmas lights, property advertisements displaying buildings vying to be more sexy than the promotional models, and shop windows stuffed full of aspirational luxury goods, Hong Kong's surface is a cornucopia filled with material temptations. Its underground has plenty to offer for whatever tickles your fancy; from music, bars and dance parties, to sex and illegal drugs, there is something for every appetite and taste. The city is full of promises, big, small, and some perhaps empty. Yet all these implied gratifications lure you for instant satisfaction, even though these invitations may take too long to fulfill and be over sooner than expected - promises with the possibility to please or disappointment.
Noritoshi Hirakawa, one of the participating artists comments, ¡§Sexuality is also an illusion, creating the conditions of desire, which may not be connected with the ¡¥reality' of the sexual act.¡¨
Art makes us conscious of the in-betweens to various states of aggregation, and DESIRE reveals the oscillations between fantasies and realities. The artists featured tease and play with our expectations, their artworks examine and deconstruct our relationship and feelings about desire.
Even though the artists in this exhibition appear to be engaging the audience primarily on a sexual level, on closer inspection they share other significant issues with the theme, such as representation, gender and consumerism.
The artists in this exhibition present intimate and individual examples of desire in their works. Emmanuelle Antille and Noritoshi Hirakawa's respective videos and slides are short curious vignettes about sex and human relations. These relations may seem loaded with desire but they appear simultaneously superficial and yet intensely constructed. Emmanuelle Antille explores the possibility of direct experience, the possibility to feel ¡§so strongly that one trembles all over¡¨. Both artists have very distinct and unique ways of altering story and structure that makes their message even more decisive. By withholding as much as revealing, the artworks attract by making cuts to the narrative, which are to be filled by the audience, like a novel completed with pictures from the imagination.
The women in Yvonne Todd's photography share the same aura of mystique but with a hint of sadness lurking beneath. There is something uneasy and wrong about these portraits, but it is not explicitly articulated. The two portraits seem to frame emotionally charged women captured in images of uncanny reality, suggesting a hybrid of suburban photo studio, wax-museum and ideologist churches. As viewers, we seem to become anthropologists and voyeurs in her tableau, creating thwarted narratives about characters and strange lives distilled from a gothic reality.
Camilla Holmgren's nude self-portraits delve into the fantasized interplay and tension between the viewer and the viewed. The viewer is allowed to see the artist nude in an intimate private apartment setting but by exposing only part of her body and her face in the dark, she creates a feeling of apprehension and disquiet. The effect is ambiguous, sensual or disappointing depending on the perception of the individual.
Exploring desire on another plane, Hiram To shifts the focus and approaches the subject in relation to appearance and concealment .
The drums on the elaborate red drum-set, located in the middle of the gallery, are covered with colorful close-ups of expensi ve cloth and beautiful fabric . The sculpture sits in contrast to To's large photograph of boys playing soccer in one of Hong Kong's vast generic neighborhoods. Seen in the picture is a banner, proclaiming that the soccer team is from one of Hong Kong's most prestigious all-boy schools, the ¡¥La Salle Boys College ¡V crˆome de la crˆome'. The sign using the language of the French Brother (monk) who was the school's founder, proclaiming that the boys are and will be, the best of the best. Put into the context of desire, the slogan reveals the singular weight of ambition and aspiration of the parents and society, while bringing out a (homo)erotic context certainly not intended by the institution. The artwork suggests a sly subtle tweaking of the expectations about achievement, gender and status.
DESIRE is a very open exhibition. As with longing itself, the exhibition suggests highly personal experiences. There is no predetermined message or fixed interpretation to the individual art works, they are instead leading offers and invitations and, like promises, the realization is partly in your hands. Some will fulfill instantly , some may take a while to carry out .
For more information, please contact Christina Li at 2517-4620 or info@para-site.org.hk.
DESIRE is organized by Para/Site Art Space and is generously supported by:
Para/Site Art Space is a registered charity art organization, financially supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and private donations. |
