Crossing the nights Filling the lines / Grotto SKW / Mar 8 – Apr 1, 2023 /
With what she calls her “emotional landscapes”, Bouie Choi continues to portray Hong Kong as a city on fire, undergoing perpetual mutation. Large, watery flows of paint merge with finer architectural elements in dynamic, poetic compositions where human beings seem lost: in the shape of either tiny figures or giants, they keep searching for their place in a reality that has clearly outgrown them. Despite its apocalyptic atmosphere and the many clouds that threaten the city, the artist’s new solo exhibition at Grotto Fine Arts is not about despair; on the contrary, an extraordinary vitality arises from each painting. A time of change and uncertainty is also a time for potential regeneration.
Walking inside the exhibition space involves walking into darkness. The night seems to be total, just like during the blackout that happened in the western New Territories in June 2022. At that time, Bouie Choi was commuting back home, and was trapped in sudden obscurity. She filmed with her phone the uncanny images of the opaque city, and this incident inspired her works displayed at this exhibition. In the gallery, a few beams of light and scattered luminous points guide visitors’ footsteps. At the entrance, Choi has installed a white light projection system that marks the specific moment when light illuminates her working table in winter. Further on, a subtle shadow is cast on the floor of partition walls, traditional in Hong Kong apartments, featuring flowers. The other lights that accompany visitors are the multiple sparkling points painted on Choi’s wooden panels: eerie lights, headlights, torches, streetlights and all the flickering lights from the tiny windows of Hong Kong buildings.
These lights not only guide the public in the exhibition space, but are also intended to guide the eyes inside each painted composition, while connecting and responding to each other through time and space. What kind of signals they send remains a mystery.
Choi’s conception of a landscape is inspired by classical Chinese shan shui paintings, which reflect reality and cosmology as a whole. Like most traditional Chinese artists, Choi adopts what is often called “a floating perspective”, embracing and combining multiple standpoints. The triptych Crossing the nights Filling the lines (2022), for instance, features a giant man walking through the city and collecting streetlamps that he puts in the pocket of his raincoat. When he pulls them, their light seems to fade. At his feet, among sewers, canals and houses, workers are busy cutting trees and a shepherd is looking after his goats, all represented at various scales. From all sides, nature is spilling out, with water and forests invading the urban landscape. On the left, a sitting man perched on a railway bridge ponders these extraordinary phenomena, overlooking the oversized octopus that stretches across the panels.
The large format of the triptych allows us to lose ourselves inside the composition, oblivious to the boundaries between reality and the painted landscape. Choi puts us in the same position as her figures, who can cross time as well as pedestrian gateways, being simultaneously inside, above and beneath the city while still surrounded by it. This permeability is perfectly expressed by the fluidity of colours that melt, overlap and dissolve. The circularity of the clouds also suggests a circularity of time, with urban ruins soon turning into forests, buildings into mountains or waterfalls, all in a continuous movement. The rhythm of her compositions evokes poetry, a balance between breathing spaces and highly dense areas.
Railings, balustrades, barriers, roadblocks – in urban spaces, our daily life is influenced by these elements of architecture that guide our bodies, conduct our movements and shape our mindset. Similarly, in Choi’s paintings, our gaze glides along the highways, arrested by buildings, oriented by the wind, constrained by lines. This theme of containment is pervasive throughout her work. The bars (2022) features a group of vertical pine trees that resemble the bars of a cage. A man crouching, barely visible, is hiding behind them, probably afraid of showing himself or to face social rules. Sometimes, she only paints limbs, the corresponding bodies having been perhaps swallowed by the landscape. In The red is too hot to stand (2022), it is the artist herself who is depicted as a giant, squeezed between two high buildings. We are left to wonder whether she is trying to hide herself or to fit in.
All the featured works are on wooden panels, most of them recycled from ancient floorboards or from the benches of an old church. Choi favours this material because it requires a long preparation time and allows her to engage in a conversation with the matter itself and its history. Although photographs of scenes from the city are often the starting point of her compositions, Choi likes to begin a work by letting washed colours flow freely on her panel, following the veins of the wood, forming inspirational clouds, after which she will take over. In Dimpled (2023), for instance, the knots of the wooden panel are magnified by the paint and seem to open like scars. A lonely pig, standing on top of a rock that could represent the leftovers of civilisation, watches how flows of lava drip from a burning sky. The colour of the wood provides the dark brownish, autumnal hues that characterise Choi’s work. It also evokes the traditional Chinese landscapes painted on silk. Choi is mostly interested in negative spaces, and she often intervenes by erasing the paint to create her own shapes. For her detailed figures and outlines, she chose to work with black acrylic because of its precision and texture. Unlike ink, acrylic cannot be totally washed away and will resist, offering a strong contrast with the fluidity of her washed colour effects.
Although influenced by Japanese manga and contemporary events, Choi maintains the essence of traditional shan shui paintings as depictions of landscapes from a very personal inner perspective. Her vision of Hong Kong is highly intimate, poetic and emotional. As a child, her dad had to face darkness at night to bring home water in a bucket from outside their village house. He is represented as the child in The light gatherer (2022) who tries to collect water, or a flow of light, running from a cliff. Just like him, as viewers, we collect from this bright exhibition the illuminating effects of poetry and imagination.
Featured image: Crossing the night Filling the night by Bouie Choi, insallation view at Grotto SKW.
彼月此日 / Grotto SKW / 2023年3月8日至4月1日
蔡鈺娟繼續以她所稱的「情感風景」，將香港描繪成一座著火的城市，經歷著永恆的變遷。大幅顏料如水般流動與精緻的建築元素融合在充滿動感和詩意的構圖之中。人類似乎迷失了方向，無論是大小人物都一直尋找自己的位置，但四周現實已發展得他們不能觸及。儘管這座城市充斥著末日氣氛和一片愁雲慘霧，藝術家在嘉圖現代藝術的新個展並不是關於絕望，相反地，每一幅畫都散發出非凡的生命力，充滿變化和未知的年代也可以是浴火重生的時刻。
展覽空間一片黑暗，就如2022年6月新界西停電的那個晚上一樣暗無天日，那時正在回家路上的蔡鈺娟突然陷入了黑暗之中，她用手機拍攝了這座城市一片漆黑的詭異，啟發了她創作這次展覽的作品。畫廊內有幾道光束和零散的光點指引觀眾的腳步，蔡鈺娟在入口安裝了一個白光投影系統，紀錄寒冬裡光線照亮她工作台的時刻。往前走一點，觀眾可以隱約看到地板上有香港舊式唐樓通花隔牆的投影。其他陪伴觀眾參觀的光還有蔡鈺娟在木板上畫的多個光點，有詭異的燈光、車頭燈、電筒、街燈和從香港建築物的小窗所投射出、忽明忽暗的燈光。
這些燈光不單在展覽空間中引導觀眾，也刻意指引每幅畫作內的眼睛，同時在時空上互相連結和回應。他們到底發出了怎樣的訊號仍然是個謎。
蔡鈺娟繪畫風景的概念靈感來自中國古典山水畫，反映出現實和宇宙觀。蔡鈺娟與大多數中國傳統藝術家一樣，採用一般稱為「散點透視」的方式，在畫中運用並結合多個視點。如在三聯畫《彼月此日》（2022年）中，一個巨人在城市中穿梭，將收集得來的街燈放在雨衣的口袋裡。當他拉動街燈時，光芒就會消失。在他的腳下，工人正在下水道、運河和房屋之間斬樹，而牧羊人就在照顧山羊，所有主體都以不同的比例呈現。大自然的元素從四面八方湧進，水和森林充斥了城市景觀。畫的左面有一個人坐在火車橋上，思考這些非凡的現象，俯瞰橫跨整幅畫作的大八爪魚。
巨大的三聯畫令我們沉浸在構圖中，忘記了現實與風景畫之間的界限。蔡鈺娟將我們與她的主體並排，他們可以穿越時間和行人路，同時處於城市的上下和裡面，而仍然被城市包圍。流動的色彩融化、重疊和消散，完美地表達了這種滲透性。雲的循環亦暗示了時間的循環，城市廢墟很快會變成森林，而建築物也會變成山脈或瀑布，一切都是個連續的進程。作品的節奏充滿詩意，平衡了喘息的空間和人口密集的地區。
在城市空間中，我們的日常生活會受到欄杆、扶手、欄河、路障這些建築元素的影響，它們帶領我們的身體、引導我們的動作並塑造我們的心態。同樣地在蔡鈺娟的畫中，我們的目光會沿著高速公路而看，給建築物攔住，受風所引導，被線條束縛，這種控制的主題貫穿在她的作品之中。在《鐵扇骨》（2022年）中，垂直的松樹就像是籠子的圍欄，一個若隱若現的男人蹲在後面，似乎是害怕曝露自己或面對社會規則。風景吞沒了人的身體，所以有時她只會畫手腳。在《The red is too hot to stand》（2022年）中，藝術家將自己描繪成一個擠在兩座高樓之間的巨人，不知道她到底是想隱藏自己還是融入其中。
展覽中所有作品都在木板上繪畫，其中大部分木板是從舊地板或舊教堂的長椅上回收得來。蔡鈺娟很喜歡在木板上畫畫，因為她需要花很長時間處理木板，讓她有時間與木板本身及其歷史對話。雖然蔡鈺娟的構圖通常都是以城市風景照片作為出發點，但她開始作畫前總是喜歡先讓水墨顏色在木板上自由流動，順著木頭的紋理，形成為她啟發靈感的雲彩。在《Dimpled》（2023年）中，顏料將木節放大了，張開的木節像疤痕一樣。一隻豬孤獨地站在一塊代表文明遺蹟的石上，看著熔岩從燃燒的天空滴落。木的顏色令蔡鈺娟的作品帶有獨特的深啡色、秋天色調，還讓人想起絲綢上的中國傳統山水畫。蔡鈺娟最喜歡的是負空間，她經常會擦除顏料，創造自己的形狀。她選擇用黑色的塑膠彩來繪畫細緻的人物和輪廓，因為它的精緻度和質地更合適。塑膠彩與墨水不同，不能完全被沖走，而且可以保護塗層，與她水墨效果的流動形成強烈的對比。
雖然蔡鈺娟受到了日本漫畫和當代事件的影響，但她仍然保留傳統山水畫的精髓，從非常個人的角度繪畫風景。從她眼中所看到的香港是個非常親密、充滿詩意和情感的地方。她爸爸小時候要在黑夜中從村屋外用桶裝水回家，爸爸就是《光明採集者》（2022年）中的孩子，收集水和光，從懸崖邊奔跑。而我們就像他一樣，從這個充滿希望的展覽中收集到無窮的詩意和想像。