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15-10-2013

interviewed by art4d.asia

Kwok-hin Tang creates mixed media works based on context and documentation, appropriation and process, all of which fall somewhere between the realms of everyday life and artistic practice. Google becomes an artistic medium, rain puddles a source of inspiration and repetition a means of exploration.

Your recent work, 'I Call You Nancy,' tells the story of an estranged sister brought into focus through information and images obtained on the Internet. Could you please describe your inspiration for the piece and Nancy’s character? The video amplifies our ability to use the Internet as a tool for accessing a seemingly endless amount of very personal, yet questionable information. When information cannot be validated is it useful? ... or harmful?

Over 25 years ago, my mother stopped her pregnancy, although she occasionally reminded me of this during my youth. Therefore, I imagine if the unborn baby were still alive. How has his/ her life been over the past 25 years? I try to name him/her Nancy, a character who has a different personality, characteristics and gender from me. I use Google as a tool to find images because, in a way, it convinces me of her absence. I imagine she went to study abroad and never came back. I can only use a search engine to search for her photos and information. As you may know, Google is so powerful. If we type and search the same keywords in the same region, like tree, car, road, people, you may probably see the same images, due to Google's ordering of the results. It is the norm now and leads us to understand the world through certain specific angles. It seems to be free to surf yet it is narrow. In this case, you can see all the people in the photos are called Nancy or Hung-jin, her Chinese name. Viewers can even try to search “Nancy” and “Hung-jin” and will achieve the same selection of images as mine. Dealing with the Internet, people normally upload images onto the web and the images are turned into a public collection online. On the contrary, I searched and downloaded images, converting the public collection into a private photo album. If you watch the video, you may discover that the selected photos haven’t created a clear appearance of her, they leave room for imagination.

My recent projects often begin with personal issues and conclude to include wider social concerns. In my mother’s generation, their parents normally have ten kids in the family. This situation changed sharply in her generation, with the majority having only one or two children instead. The expectation of parents shifted suddenly from forming a big family to raising the next generation with a better quality of life.

Your installation, 'Before Rain After,' describes that, “man encompasses nature, and nature, in its degraded form, encompasses man.” Could you please describe the many elements of the work, from puddle to object collection, and how the installation brings elements of surroundings typically viewed as background into foreground?

I have lived in the countryside since I was born. The first time I went downtown was during my first year as an undergraduate. I went out for an exhibition opening. At that time, I was shocked by the environment in the central region. There were different buildings and faces, many foreigners walking on the streets. I was therefore triggered to think about the contradiction between the mainstream and independency. I collected containers around the exhibition venue and my home just like a person of the past living without running water. People would place objects outside in the rain, any utensil they could find, to catch the life-giving liquid. We have different purposes though. I boiled the collected water but apparently it was useless due to the humidity. The act was an expression of my reverence to the sky. Rain drops fall thousands of kilometers to the leaves on the ground. The distance in-between, to me, represents massive natural power but we don’t really seem to care. I try to state my modesty. However, the ironic part is what I used to collect and boil the water. The utensils and the gas stove are products of our modern city, which is a consequence of over-development and capitalism. Essentially, I use what made it happen.

The first part “Before Rain” After talks about raining. The second part Before “Rain After” talks about the time after rain has fallen. I recorded the puddles along the way from my home to the exhibition venue to reflect the differences between skies of the countryside and downtown. Since the modern city is artificially created, fake nature and renowned chain stores occupy the streets everywhere. It is no longer possible to differentiate the two by only looking at parts of the whole. Furthermore, the shapes of the puddles interest me. The circulation of rain remains usual for millions of years, but the shapes and positions of puddles may change every year. The puddles temporarily exist in a specific time and space.

The performance included the boiling of the water in the windows and reflections of the puddles inside the well, one is a habit of looking at rain from the interior, while the window is split into pieces showing several channels of video altogether like a combination of various scenes. As if seen from the bottom of a well, they create a mirage that represents the absurd relationship between truth and illusion, towards our life and situation.

Your piece 'The Weak Are Meat,' satirizes the powerlessness of mankind with an individual’s lack of retaliation towards commercialization of society.” Please describe the piece and, what seems to be, your disappointment in mundane routines and a homogenous lifestyle.

In 2008, there was an exhibition about Hong Kong Food exhibited at the Hong Kong International Airport. It was a really difficult topic to deal with because in Hong Kong one can normally eat many different kinds of dishes. Finally, I came up with an idea to use packaged food. It is normal for families to eat these foods and also in offices. I began eating packaged food for one month and finally I lost weight. All the packages were used to make a sculpture in an acrylic cabinet. After the project, I began eating different kinds of packed foods at certain periods creating a habit to follow the mainstream.

Industrialization is the dominate structure of our surroundings, what we use, see and consume. Repetition can create trends and packaged foods can describe the real situation very well. If we reversely pack them, the sliver and white colors of the inner packaging match the industrial elements creating, to me, a poisonous sort of aesthetics. The forms are even beautiful but they are actually a waste of an excessive use of materials. There’s no way to reject their presence, however, as modern citizens cannot survive without being a part of the consumers. You dislike and you are a part of it, essentially acting as an accomplice. A well-planned and organized lifestyle often narrows imagination, providing the ultimate power of correctness which we call a preconception.

Many of your works use multiple channels of video in their installation. What is it that you find attractive about multiple videos working together within a piece?

I would describe my work as a kind of conceptually-based mixed media containing strong documentary elements. By appropriating daily objects, context and content, the creation experiment creates blind spots and hidden stories between life and art. The transformation emphasizes the process. The process may be regarded as performances, or more likely experiences, of how to connect with situations. Therefore, the outcome of the final presentation can partly reveal my concerns. To trace the artistic intention, ways of documentation are important, including writings, photos, sound and video.

Your work, 'Lower Legs,' describes that “collective constraints transform into laws” and uses constructed imitations of signs placed in the public space to highlight the “excellent concealment of day to day crises.” I can see that the piece amplifies the need to ask or read carefully, especially elements of our everyday landscape that often aren’t questioned. Could you please discuss your inspiration for the work and its potential to encourage critical analysis of our everyday environment?

This work exhibited in the show entitled “Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep,” questions the existence of our choices in real life.

It is natural to think of laws as a symbol of real controlling power. There is no exception to live without these laws in modern cities. We are taught to follow; we are told to learn; we are warned to avoid, etc. Families, schools, offices, society and countries set rules forcing one to behave. It doesn’t suggest that breaking rules is incorrect, but it destroys the possibilities of other ways of living. Moreover, the laws insert a rightness of value in part of our deepest mind of manipulated intuitive ability. The whole surroundings advise you to act properly while making it difficult to get rid of the box that reflects various aspects of our everyday environment. The laws have already been judged for you; it seems that there is no need to suspect the “truth.” While the laws are visualized, they are then turned into signs spreading over the town. To transform the content of the signs into everyday anxiety, this is a means of revealing hidden dangers.

Your piece 'A One-Man Factory,' in which you locked yourself in a recycling factory and documented yourself creating sculptures over a 24-hour period, one sculpture per hour, raises some really interesting questions that you highlight on the project webpage such as: “When art is converted into an assembly-line, do continuous and efficient production make creation become commercialized and meaningless? General daily working patterns are condensed into a whole day industrial activity. Does my mental state and behavior change over time? At the end of the road, 24 hours later, is the meaning of art completely drained? Or is there another way around from which one can derive new stories?” Following completion of the work, did you find answers to any of your questions?

One will probably start questioning the meaning of art creation during the process. If art is no longer about beauty, then what does it leave? Due to the condensed time period of production, where I produced one piece of sculpture per hour, though I tried to struggle against the repetitiveness and avoid being a machine. However, I cannot dissent. I gradually discovered my own pattern like software. The 24-hour act not only challenges your bottom line of knowledge, it also tears off the sacred coat of art to the ground like product. Hence, art should remain uniqueness of thoughts or techniques to reserve the value stay away from declining.

What are you working on currently? What can we look forward to?

I am now taking part in a residence program in Taipei. In addition, I need to finish a solo exhibition in August and several group exhibitions in the following half of the year. I am also curating a show at a gallery booth for next year Art Basel Hong Kong. I look forward to having my residence in New York next year and exchanging ideas with more people in Taiwan and more in other countries.

Boxed in by Food Packages

Boxed in by Food Packages
Meniscus, meniscus's link
24-5-2013

written by Chan Yuan-kwan

Technology, an ever-deepening well of information access and other factors have simultaneously made life both easier and more difficult to manage. When time is of the essence, having a ready-made package for sustenance proves to be convenient to save precious minutes…and restrictive in terms of adding nutritional variety to one’s day.

Local artist Kwok-Hin Tang (鄧國騫) explores the idea of compartmentalization in his latest works showcased at Art Basel Hong Kong 2013. Whether serving as the gift wrapping for supermarket-purchased ingredients or holding the contents of takeaway provisions, Tang piles the outer shells of our fuel into even more constricted transparent cases, barely giving them space to breathe. The ability to, literally, think outside the box when the necessities of life have themselves become mundane serves as a warning of what happens when one allows routine to descend into ennui. The packaging starts to look vaguely similar, and a part of the day that could provide enjoyment has become a means to take a mandatory pit stop, refuel and motor on. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Oven,” a clear plastic cabinet that contains a cube of neatly stacked packages previously containing foods that can only be consumed after they are heated up in its namesake.

This is not the first time that Tang has explored the idea of food packaging as societal commentary. Last year, he created his work “Garden” (嘉頓) – in a similar aesthetic to “Oven” – after consuming nothing but heated packaged food produced by a company with the same name, accompanied by manufactured soft drinks the whole time. In “Coke” (可樂, 2008), Tang spent a week to scrape out all the red color from a Coca-Cola can, the drained results still showing an eerie corporate logo and lettering despite the hollowed-out shell.

Drawing on Experience

Drawing on Experience

48 Hours Magazine, SCMP, p.16

15-8-2013

written by Edmund Lee

THEN BEGIN WITH AN AIRLINE TICKET

am space

Between 2002 and 03, Tang Kwok-hin spent seven months on the mainland learning from a painting graduate of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The training focused on realistic drawing and Tang believes the experience has helped form the basis of his conceptual-based practice, which often involves innovative ways to appropriate familiar objects.

"Most of the works I do now are not defined by their media," says Tang, who has since established himself as one of Hong Kong's best young artists. "And this is down to my drawing routine, because it is all about observation. Drawing involves reading something and breaking it down to its basic elements. The observation process has become so significant to me that it's turned into my core value."

That much is apparent from his solo show at am space, "Then begin with an airline ticket", which started out as a meditation on the act of drawing before morphing into a mixed-media exhibition. As the title indicates, it began with a couple of circles that a flight attendant had written on Tang's plane ticket.

From there, the artist proceeded to discover the similar writing pattern on the small pieces of paper which customers tested their pens on in stationery stores, before deciding to imitate and repeat this mechanical movement of the hand for his own artwork. "I bought several dozen pens and tried to draw with them. It was a state between trying out the pens and drawing - the latter is actually a habit developed through repetition."

In a free association exercise where he followed his instinct at every turn before eventually considering the steps he had taken, the glass Tang drew on for the work "Then begin with an airline ticket" gave him the mental picture of a bathroom cabinet, which he then turned into the installation "excuse me". The cabinet's mirror in turn reminded Tang of his early school days, prompting him to use a classroom desk-and-chair set for his next work, "The Lonely Island".

This spontaneous flow of creative impulse feels oddly in sync with Tang's original objective, which is to trace the primal connection between his brain and his drawing hand, as well as the impact of his surroundings and his free will to create. "I've been trying to find an explanation for our need to paint," he says. "It's similar to the need to eat when you're hungry or the urge to swear when you're angry. I think it's a way to leave traces behind, so that others can remember the images through the illusions of drawings."

(Meta-)Symbol

(Meta-)Symbol
Art Plus#17, p.40-45
17-3-2013

written by Samwai Lam
translated by Jenny Wong

Applauded for his mixed and border-crossing artwork, the local talent Tang Kwok-hin (Hin) started his artistic pursuit as a painter. He spent a year in Dan Shui, China and studied arts and English after sitting for the public examination. Away from the lure of the city, Hin dedicated himself to sketching and painting day after day. It was not until he entered university that he realized arts was more than pencil and paper. As a Fine Arts student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hin leant about different forms of media and their function as a representation of ideas. He has then become obsessed with the meaning of symbol, and set out to deconstruct objects via “replacement” and “appropriation”; by unearthing the signified and what could have been signified, the artist attempts to record the existent world and explore the latent one.

Collaging Images and Words

“Symbolic Collage” is Hin’s signature style. He first developed this approach to art in 2007 when he created Yi Shui Xi Cheng. Images from the labels of wine bottles seem to share a certain style from the Medieval Europe regardless of their origins: they all feature knights, castle or mountain. Hin collected and combined these imageries to form an imaginary landscape. Appropriation as an artistic concept is at work here: wine bottle primarily functions as a container of alcohol, but Yi Shui Xi Cheng appropriates its meaning as a container by alienating its function from the actual usage. Hin highlights that the notion of “appropriation” can be understood in two forms, he quotes from Liu Fan’s “The Meaning of Appropriation” in his thesis: “…Appropriation can be the extraction of elements from Nature or art work, be that of image, symbol, material or colour; it can also be the borrowing of ideas, subjects or content from other work. Appropriation can mean the creative reinvention of art work; it can also mean repetition, copying, or even stealing of other work. It also involves art’s limitation of Nature, and the transplantation and localisation of techniques and idiosyncrasy”. In fact, “appropriation” is not very different from “intertextuality”. They both reinvent existing text/symbol to create a new text/symbol that becomes part of the totality and something beyond it.

History of Reconstruction

Internet is one of the important tools of appropriation. “I assume the position of ordinary citizen and their understanding of history is constructed via Internet, Google search engine, images from Wikipedia; such is the generality of things”. For instance, in order to recapture Hong Kong, Hin searched and collected hundreds of images of trees, birds or cars, all of which are ordinary things that filled tourists’ first impression of the city. Internet has dismantled all physical boundaries as Hin collected worldwide images with a click. These images belong to a world called “Mu Mu Dao”, in Chinese, it literally means the ‘island of eye and tree’; while the Chinese characters of eye and tree can form a compound which represent ‘photo’. In The Photobook of Mu Mu Dao, one can also spot the rural-urban relationship which is characterized by development, succession and tension. For example, Hin collaged images of the closing of old shop and the opening of chain stores. The “photobook” project is highly successful and the artist was awarded first prize in the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards 2009. Appropriation is also the bridge between personal memory and imagination. In the installation I call you Nancy, Hin imagined his unborn sister had lived and led a life in Mu Mu Dao. This imaginary work is carefully crafted, “If she was as girl, I imagined that she was Nancy. I began to search for pictures of Nancy on the Internet. This fictitious girl was born in 1984, and this photo album recorded her 25-year life. Her personality was set according to the expectation of my parents and the photos I gathered online”. There are 20 pieces of work in the collection, and the first one is the floor plan of an exhibition other works also represent fragments of the city in Nancy’s eyes. Apart from collaged image, the project also involves a video of Hin’s mother flipping the album. It is appropriation in multiple forms: it draws resources from familial and personal memory and expectation, reflects on the universal value of Internet, and displaces the meaning of symbol from its social context. A series of accidents and coincidences are drawn to the discourse of imagination, which leads to the birth of a new way of reading.

“Reinventing the existent”

Hin describes his mode of creation as “reinventing the existent”. As the artist states in his thesis, he does not use traditional “inventive” tools to create meanings. “For the artist, this concept is different from creating from nothingness, that is, drawing on tabula rasa; ‘reinventing the existent’ means drawing on a used canvas or covering the drawn parts and disguising it as an untouched canvas. Appropriation is not limited to two-dimensional art. In the 2011 Urban Utopia: If and only if, exhibition by Ho Sin Tung and Tang Kwok Hin, Hin collected various abandoned wooden objects from ruins and garbage areas. The wooden objects were then divided into two halves and transformed into different entities: on one side, Hin removed the colour and non-wooden parts from the object, thus restoring the wood to it “original” state; on the other side, the artist “preserved” the abandoned state of the wooden object, which is a product of over-exploitation and over-consumption in modern society.

Hin’s three-dimensional work intentionally restores/preserves the originality of things so as to accentuate the social aspect of the readymade, Food Cabinets an example. For one month, he only ate and drank packaged products from Garden, a packaged food industry giant. He would then re-pack the package as if it had never been consumed. The restored package was stored in a transparent cabinet, a blatant representation of the urban myth of (over-)consumption. The meaning (or the loss of it), of these empty consumed containers is an issue Hin continues to explore.

Tang Kwok Hin is a versatile artist unrestricted by forms and genres, and his concept-based works are supported by a very cohesive and consistent attitude towards arts and society. The philosophical questions he poses resonate with the experimentation of avant-garde artists in the 1960s, as they both challenge the presumed and normalised status quo. His work speaks to the nature of art and uncannily links work of art with everyday life objects. A few decades ago, avant-garde artists declared commodity as art; in 2013 Hong Kong, Hin “(re-)appropriates the commodity and transforms it to art. Hin’s work is self-reflexive, it is more about questioning the nature of being, than a realistic portrayal of it. Such is the perpetual pursuit of the artist.

Snow White Silver 白雪銀

Snow White Silver, 2014
Aluminum cans, handmade boxes on pedestals
Dimension variable

“Coke” is an art piece part of the series “Soft Drink Cans”. Soft drink cans are kind of mass production product. Different manufacturers add different patterns and colors for their product. It is normally pleasant to drink with those elements and flavor. However, the cans turn to scrap metal when they are done. What do industrialization bring to us? It brings us unified mechanical techniques, sustainable exploitation towards natural resources and endless dumping of waste. There is inevitable contradiction between nature and modern live of humans.

I have collected different types of soft drink cans. Through carving and sanding, I have removed their color and left the black and white words. Behind the vivid beauty, the cans own strong appearances of industrialization along with smell of rust. When you see a can with this changed outlook, you may think that they are more like an “object”. Have you thought about that when the surface of a can is being sanded, the metal powder may enter the can? In fact, things inside the cans have been all along on the brink of danger.


罐裝飲料是一種大量生產且風行世界的工業製品，不同廠商均在其產品的外觀上添加各樣的圖案及顏色，人們歡愉地飲用過後，就已淪為金屬廢料。工業化帶來的到底是怎樣的光景？統一的技術、機械；持續地開發自然資源以及傾倒廢料。當中永恆的矛盾是，個體思想在體制化的結構下並不重要；自然與人類的現代生活又本質地相違背。

經過多於一個世紀的發展，飲品罐原生物料的感覺不斷被加以雕琢，就如目下鋁罐被粉飾得美侖美奐，亦有著各種模樣。然而，歷史的足跡是否還藏於內？我藉罐裝飲料作為對工業種種的引申，收集了不同地方出產的各式種類，透過雕刻，將色彩磨滅並保留著那黑白灰色的文字。霓裳背後隱藏的原始工業化製品面貌，還有鐵鏽的濃烈氣味，因此同時被重新顯露出來。當再面對著這些已改變外相的製品，你也許會認為它比以往更像一件物品。還有，想過罐面磨擦時細緻的金屬粉末可有進到內裡的可能嗎？被包裹著的，其實一直在危險的邊緣上。

The Weak are Meat II 弱肉 II

The Weak are Meat II, 2014

Acrylic boxes and food packages

Dimension variable

Taking the Chinese phrase “The weak are meat for the strong to eat” in the Tang Dynasty as a point of departure, Tang Kwok-Hin’s solo presentation titled “The Weak are Meat”, satirizes the powerlessness of mankind with an individual’s lack of retaliation towards commercialization of society by habituating the ingestion of packaged goods. The produces are categorized by method of preservation as well as brand. The wrappings of the finished products are stored in the basement storage space after consuming. The hanging merchandise-oriented advertisement and related products paint a repetitive but polychromatic picture. In contrast, the colorless, transparent boxes present the objects within, not only glorifying but also in contrast projecting the gargantuan figure of a mercenary demon.

This presentation integrates works in video, mixed media, collages and a site-specific installation to exemplify the redundancy and tediousness of the contemporary society, of which are dominated by the basis of man-made civilization—mundane routines and urban structures. In the face of such monotonous daily practices, humankind gradually assimilates to homogenous lifestyle circles, becoming slowly confined to a synchronized world. The culprit of synchronization, capitalism, marketing, investment and sales are allegorized by Tang as slow progressing venom, which anesthetizes our senses using materialization and blinds our hidden apprehension. Aestheticized product wrappings and the lack of utility of the manufactures themselves create a beauty in the malady of compulsive buying. The glimpses of silver that signifies poison in industries represent the premonition of the overuse of products, and how its hidden devil gradually gnaws on human compassion.


日常生活跟都市共構的是人為的物質社會，關鍵地支配著現代文明及人類行為裡重覆既樣板的元素。每天一再展開繁忙的工作，衣食住行，已然無不被局限在相近的模子裡，經驗著被過度一體化的世界。

資本跟市場，市場的投資與買賣，籠罩著消費主義帶來的慢性劇毒。藥力痲痺了人們對於日常生活裡種種結構的敏銳神經，而個人意志面對物化社會更被隱沒了惶恐意 識，最終發展出有毒美學的追求，儼如儲物成狂的病態美，一同被導向經濟市場的洪流裡不省人事。產品在被使用之物外裹著主要為眼球服務以及解決衛生問題的包 裝。色彩、圖案及設計，將吸引購物慾之空殼幻化成產品的意義本身。工業化裡標誌性的有毒銀色與過盛的物質使用，潛藏了巨大的惡魔在啃食個人對於自身以外世情的關懷。

我將進食包裝食品這行為培養成習慣，每一段時間消費某一類別的食品，例如因應品牌、保存方法等分類，從而儲藏大量包裝。把它們倒轉再包裹，放到地下的儲物櫃裡，既重覆又斑爛。

古時地下儲藏珍貴之物的木櫃子轉化成像宣示及鼓吹工業萬歲的透明展示櫃，有毒之物就像被神聖化，投射出惡魔潛藏的巨大身影。當中，我們可還有餘力抵抗，作出另外的選擇？