gdm Hong Kong proudly presents Tang Kwong San: Rootstock from 12 September to 9 November 2024, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using the bauhinia plant as the main motif, Rootstock approaches diasporic identity like a sterile plant that is grafted from intergenerational histories. Through graphite drawings, oil paintings, handmade objects, photography, and installation, Tang’s new work navigates between deconstruction and reconstruction, examining how the tissues of our identities are splintered and joined.
Born in Dongguan in 1992, Tang immigrated to Hong Kong with his father when he was five years old. His mother joined them five years later. Straddling between two homes, between colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, Tang’s work is saturated with a sense of loss and grief.
First discovered in Hong Kong by a French Catholic Missionary in 1880, the bauhinia × blakeana is also known as the Hong Kong Orchid. Unable to self-reproduce, the bauhinia plant can only be propagated through grafting. In a series of new paintings, Tang maps connections between the dependent nature of the bauhinia and his diasporic identity, which often feels circumstantially shaped and not easily defined.
Through found objects and transposed plants, Rootstock examines the familial, social, and historical fragments that forge one’s identity. In the echoes of Tang’s destruction and under his painstaking documentation, these fragments are rejoined in a sublimation of grief and ultimately, hope.
