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Asian Traffic at Hong Kong Visual Arts
Centre Work by young Australian artists of Asian descent were showcased side by side with work by artists from the host city. The Australians are promoted in the exhibition brochure as "the most interesting and daring Asian artists from Australia." In Hong Kong, the local component of the show was titled Line Feed, in a reference to the mechanism by which data is given a physical presence when sent to a printer. The adjectives used to describe the Australian selection seem rather overwrought. To be sure, Koky Saly, from Melbourne, is somewhat daring in the way he bares his soul and declares how every gay sexual encounter is preceded by an aversion of the eyes. His inference is that this response is more to do with cultural conditioning rather than either antipathy, chagrin, or shame on the one hand, or demure coquettishness on the other. However, despite being visually strong, Renee So's knitted depictions of vintage photographs or masks used in Chinese opera do not have the same intellectual rigor as her fellow Australian Narelle Jubelin's petit point tapestries, and Owen Leong's videos of himself smearing runny honey over his face or lapping at a bowl of water seem merely self-indulgent. Sangeeta Sandrasegar is more successful with an intricate cut-out paper lantern that casts shadows of images drawn from many different cultures to make a work which is thoughtful, evocative, and technically accomplished. We are led to wonder about the power of signs and symbols, even when they are manifest in nothing more substantial than a shadow. Similarly, Mahmoud Yekta uses the simple device locating his video projector directly behind the silkscreen onto which his images are projected in order to give his work a somewhat confrontational and interrogatory quality. When we view his work, our gaze flickers from the image on the screen to the light being shone in our eyes and back again. The Hong Kong respondent exhibition was interesting and, at times, a little daring. Magdalen Wong's Hong Kong Sound Score Series: Vitasoy Original uses the bilingual product information printed on object packaging as the libretto of a chant for two or more voices. The notation used to document the interplay of voices is a new form of language, albeit not dissimilar to the rather corny illustrations of feet used to describe or teach a new dance step. Kwan Sheung Chi's digital collage The Arch examines the morality of the methods used by Hong Kong's immensely wealthy property developers to sell their vast new housing estates when homelessness is still an issue. Yuk King Tan's sculptural installation reads at first like an architectural model but is actually a more complex examination of the interactions between signs and spaces and people and places. Other works were less well-developed. Pak Sheung Cheun's practice of ringing the telephone number found by observing a sequence of bus route numbers printed on a bus shelter and recording the subsequent conversation is senselss, and Leung Mee Ping struggled, and failed, to find a connection between a recording of a blind child who likes McDonald's hamburgers and doodles by other children on McDonald's restaurant paper napkins.
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