All posts tagged: Lee Kit

Another Garden of Remembrance 另一個紀念花園

Published by John Batten

By John Batten / So, you have entered the Garden of Hong Kong.  (Something like) ‘How to…’ instructions (with extra comments) to listen to a DVD, or appreciate a broken washing machine or refrigerator, in Lee Kit’s Hong Kong Garden:       Be comfortable and confident as you walk in the garden.       Walk around to get a good overview of what’s inside.       Don’t touch, just look.       Listen, to the music. There’s not much, but it’s everywhere.      And there is thumping. Thumping.             Thump thump thump.       Can’t hear it? Listen again.      It’s quiet, and only heard intermittently, near the two swans’ video.            Thump thump thump       (I remember the banging of hands or sticks or anything hard against the       city’s street-signs and steel barriers, just like this, a strong tinny-steel thump).       Don’t walk in bare feet.      There are smashed-up bits of washing machine …

Lee Kit

Published by Artomity Magazine

We used to be more sensitive /Hara Museum / Tokyo / Sep 16 – Dec 24, 2018 / John Batten / Lee Kit’s exhibition occupies, as a single installation, the entire Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, an adapted modernist 1930s former residential building surrounded on two sides by a Japanese garden with an open lawn at the rear. Selections from the museum’s permanent contemporary sculpture collection are shown outside, and permanent installations are also displayed within the museum. It is necessary to appreciate the architecture, the architectural detailing – particularly the windows – and the other art and areas of the museum, including the shop and cafe, to fully appreciate Lee’s exhibition.  Rather than ignoring or competing with the museum’s architecture and its installed art, Lee actively embraces the museum, and both strategically and subtly places his own paintings, videos and installations within it. Lee’s entire installation beckons to be quietly looked at, but it also works if viewers quickly pace through the galleries, ideally accompanied by their own (loud) ear-plugged music, passing through the museum’s natural light, shadows and reflections layered by Lee’s added …

Lee Kit

Published by Artomity Magazine

Something You Can’t Leave Behind By Charlotte Chang The introduction to Lee Kit’s first solo show with Massimo De Carlo Hong Kong, Something You Can’t Leave Behind, opens with a lengthy quote containing sentence fragments and abrupt imperatives that is at once baffling and transcendent. After a series of disjointed declarative statements – such as “there is a movie in every corner”, “a bus ride might make you smile” and “our time has gone” – Lee commands viewers to “mute the voiceover”, before ending by saying “something you can’t leave behind”, the show’s titular reference to elusive and ineffable but persistent traces of life and memory. The intimate narrative of the show, composed of eight site-specific works with complex combinations of projections and Lee’s characteristic mixed-media paintings and drawings, is as much a stream of consciousness as the quote. While the show’s “something” seems intertwined with Lee’s individual consciousness, manifest in ghostly imprints of mundane objects, disembodied gestures and idiosyncratic expletives, the multifarious interplay between tangibility and intangibility, light and shadow, sharpness and blurriness, and contrasting scales brings out something more universal: that, in myriad ways, …

Sylvain & Dominique Levy

Published by Artomity Magazine

Sylvain Levy, co-founder with his wife Dominique of DSL Collection, chooses his favourite pieces from their collection. Levy nominates Untitled  Calligraphy by Tsang Tsou Choi as the most iconic work by a Hong Kong artist in the collection. Known as the King of Kowloon, the artist, who was often mistaken for a homeless person, wrote critical messages on walls and utility boxes around the city. He went on to become Hong Kong’s most recognised artist, with his calligraphy displayed at the Venice Biennale in 2003. This piece was included in the seminal solo exhibition The Street Calligraphy of Kowloon Emperor at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1997. Its historical significance meant the Levys were particularly happy to have it in their collection. Another artist that symbolises Hong Kong for them is Chow Chun Fai. They were introduced to the artist by Roberto Ceresia from Aike-DellArco and Aenon Loo from Gallery Exit, and immediately felt a connection to Chow’s works. Levy also remembers visiting the artist’s studio and being impressed. He and Dominique have always …

Mina Park

Published by Artomity Magazine

Para Site director and arts patron Mina Park discusses her favourite works from her collection. Lee Kit was the first young Hong Kong artist Park heard of before she moved to Hong Kong in 2010; when she moved here she sought his work out, after first seeing images of it in the book for the 2009 show Younger than Jesus at New York’s New Museum. In some ways her relationship with his work tracks her relationship with Hong Kong. In 2011 she visited his solo show at Osage Gallery in Kwun Tong, and remembers vividly spending the entire afternoon with gallerist Jade Ouk, learning more about the pieces in the show and talking about how they had both adjusted to life in Hong Kong. In 2013 Park visited Lee’s exhibition when he represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale, and saw his paintings on wood, in this case small ones, for the first time. There is an often-discussed residual quality to his work that is very palpable to her; some of his pieces refer to a presence that is no …

Lee Kit

Published by Artomity Magazine

Hold your breath, dance slowly at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis. May 12 – Oct 9, 2016 By Sheila Dickinson A saccharine, instrumental version of the song Can’t Help Falling in Love greets the viewer on entering the dimly lit rooms built into the Walker Art Center’s large gallery that house Lee Kit’s Hold your breath, dance slowly. Hints of intimate, private spaces occupy each room: a floor lamp, carpet fragments, folding chairs and plastic storage bins with a few household objects in them. The small paintings that dot the walls, looking decorative, reveal a barely visible word, usually a brand name like Johnson or Nivea, or an isolated image such as a hand. Hold your breath, dance slowly coaxes the viewer with comforting, familiar objects and brands, but these are a ruse, because the exhibition intentionally pushes and pulls the viewer around the space in an uncertain swirl. Floating on the walls of the gallery’s small rooms are projections of colours, shapes and occasional images. The projectors sit low on stacked plastic bins or waist-high podiums, causing the viewer’s body …