Art Plus#17, p.40-45
17-3-2013
written by Samwai Lam
translated by Jenny Wong
+interview+with+Tang+Kwok-hin_(Meta-)Symbol_p44_art+plus%2317Mar2013.jpg)
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.
