Lam Tung Pang is featured in "On Smallness in Hong Kong Art" by Winnie Wong in M+ Magazine.
If smallness is understood in the formal terms of size, we can observe its gradual emergence in the work of the painter Lam Tung-pang (Hong Kong, born 1978), whose art in the past ten years has pulled the viewer from the large to the minuscule. Lam paints in a variety of mixed media on plywood, and his imagery draws recognisably from both Chinese landscape painting and Hong Kong graphic design (cutesy, line based, flat, and often anthropomorphic). Even though much of his work is done on large supports, the tone is calm, the palette soothing, and the human or anthropomorphic dimension presented with a soft touch. In 2008, during a residency in Beijing, he drew in charcoal, and then partially erased, a mountain range on multiple panels of plywood, titling it Faith Moves Mountain. It is a sparse and nearly abstract work reminiscent of ink-blackened and cut woodblocks. While a large work, its surface is impressionistic and fleeting.
In 2011, Lam developed that large landscape motif into a series of smaller mixed media mountainscapes dotted with skyscraper clusters roughed in pastel colours and painted on plywood panels again. This time, tiny plastic models of lonely figures and domestic objects are affixed in relief, sometimes inside small boxes, to the paintings, mixing the antique look of ink landscape with very contemporary and very unextraordinary vignettes. In those years, Lam also experimented with arranging vignettes inside his studio desk drawers, making assemblies in those small and hidden spaces as if they were preparatory sketches for his paintings. By 2013, in a multimedia work entitled Things Happened on the Island, this use of relief elements on two-dimensional work had grown into a full-blown readymade diorama of children's toys affixed like a ledge to another very large landscape painting. The painted portion of the work, of mountainous islands manned by lonely groups of tall buildings, contrasts with the miniaturised toy cars and model roads that children are invited to play with before it. While the earlier work done in Beijing recognisably draws upon a mountain-sized reflection on mark-making and erasure, in his more recent work Lam has minimised that fairly common artistic theme with the literal foregrounding (and indeed projection) of boyish miniatures of the city. The variability of the sizes of found objects throughout Lam's work speaks to a formal search for a scale appropriate to relate against the picturescape of mountainous landscape paintings.
Text and image courtesy of M+ Magazine.
Learn more --
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/on-smallness-in-hong-kong-art/
