Works by Lam Tung Pang are on view at Tai Kwun Contemporary, as part of the group exhibition INK CITY.
INK CITY
Date: 23 April – 1 August 2021
Venue: JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun
INK CITY sets out an expanded vision of ink art firmly grounded in current social, political, and aesthetic concerns, featuring artists inspired by immediate encounters with contemporary life. Often caught between an overwhelming urbanism and intimate brushes with everyday life, the artists offer keen observations, commentaries, and sometimes even deconstructions of contemporary culture and society through their artworks.
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With works that often reflect on collective memory and fleeting nostalgia, Lam Tung Pang shares the experience of other Hong Kong artists whose coming of age in the 1990s coincided with a city in transition.
Reforming Landscape (2019) shows a figure studiously using his hands to shape a table of mountainous forms surrounded by water – clearly analogous to the islands of Hong Kong. Like a heavy hailstorm, the dark spots and black backdrop provide high contrast to his usual colourful and playful assemblage of images and objects. Here, Lam’s painting presents a sombre yearning and quiet malaise, suggesting that an individual (or a city itself, perhaps) is suffering a monumental trauma.
Water and weather, as conduits for change, also serve as the protagonists in Image Coated (2021). Lam’s multimedia installation integrates video projections on windows and walls with permanent ink marker drawings, sound, and performance.
Using a black permanent marker, Lam recorded the drops of water that streaked the windows as the wind blew the rain sideways. The rain, a symbol of cleansing, erasure, and silencing, increasingly blurs the city from view as a metaphor for an uncertain future. Not without optimism, the artist states, “No matter how heavy it rains, I still see Hong Kong through the gaps between raindrops.”
Text and image courtesy of Tai Kwun Contemporary
Learn more --
https://www.taikwun.hk/en/programme/detail/ink-city/785
