Yuting (Roxy) TANG

Hong Kong Qi
Mangrove Gallery, Shenzhen
September 14 to October 26, 2024

Mangrove Gallery recently held a new exhibition “Hong Kong Qi”, which raised the issue of regional ecology through the concept of “qi”, making the “Greater Bay Area Narrative” finally usher in its extremely important “Hong Kong section” after many discussions in the south, but it has been absent for many reasons. When talking about Hong Kong, people can always extract some interesting or profound fragments from their own experiences to pile up their imaginations of this place that is always in flux; but Hong Kong people obviously have more detailed and complex feelings about Hong Kong – this also fits many people’s feelings about hometown and ties.

In the past three to five years, Hong Kong, whether as a region, city or context, has been closely related to great changes/dramatic changes. The exhibition lineup was settled on 6 young Hong Kong artists in a two-way selection: Deng Boxuan, Liang Wangchen, Wen Meitao, Yu Yuanyu, Zheng Tianyi and Zhong Zheng. In addition to the obvious age range, they also share the following “labels”: leaving Hong Kong to study abroad, an independent and relatively complete body of work, subtle and gentle creative media, and a narrative style that sees the big from the small… What exactly is “Hong Kong Qi”? Wan Feng, a curator who lives in Hong Kong, took the lead in providing some surface paths that are easy to observe and identify. It can be said that he has carefully picked out a safer, softer and lighter clue among thousands of completely different regional expressions.

If “Hong Kong Qi” is a sensory experience of the other, then this exhibition has already begun from a distance before entering the gallery – “airflow” is gushing out of the window. Zheng Tianyi is good at using ready-made daily necessities as materials, and her splicing language can also be regarded as a Hong Kong experience. Her image work “Fools Ship” and video work “Fools Ship Cannot Return” (both 2023) attempt to anchor the elusive and no longer stable relationship between people and places, and are constantly chasing an imaginary home for displaced people in the wandering world she created. Pushing the door open, Wen Meitao’s white porcelain sculpture Skin Lines III (2024) breaks into the viewer’s sight with almost the same force. The 27 pale “skin” blocks stripped away the vital signs under the original image, and instead used fragile and intuitive material textures to realize the superimposed explanation of the human body and the land, living things and dead things, intimacy and silence.

The exhibition space introduces Liang Wangchen’s visual symbol “candle” in many places. Whether it is the burning white candle that disrupts the rhythm of time in the video Anxiety (2022), or the trinity structure installation established by the artist using three prisms and a candle, the candle envelops the surrounding oxygen and approaches the end of the candle burning in the silence of a nearly religious ritual. For Liang Wangchen and many Hong Kong artists who also use candles as a medium of expression, the intertextuality between this white artificial flammable object and the current social situation is self-evident. Liang’s cross-media creative language also pays special attention to the manifestation of negative emotions such as anxiety in different social and political contexts. The camera in the video seems to have been trying to capture the jumping flames of meditation, but unlike most timelines that are deliberately slowed down, Liang Wangchen accelerated all the jumping moments of the flames by 800 times, forming intermittent flashes of light in the picture. The viewer seems to be waiting for the critical point of loss of control in a continuous nervous spasm.

The exhibition has so far shown its basic features in the smooth and flat space. From the extremely unstable air flow environment, the invisible objects that are difficult to capture, the uncontrollable burning and body traces, and the geopolitical topics that need to be treated carefully with more empathy, “Hong Kong Qi” can be said to be a new generation of discussion site that points to regional issues from all dimensions. Today, it has been moved to Shenzhen through the cooperation of galleries and curators who pay close attention to the ecology of the two places. In a sense, it cannot be regarded as “imported”, and there is no problem of “not adapting to the local environment” – but the differences and relationships between the two places will indeed become the background of thinking in the exhibition. These thoughts about the logic behind them that were condensed immediately were soon released on the second floor of the exhibition.

Deng Boxuan, born in 1994, and Yu Yuanyu, born in 1996, first shot an 11-minute video called “Meguro” in 2023 under the name of the “fish tank” group. Later, Deng Boxuan created “Resonance Elegy (I)” this year, which is based on plant-shaped antennas. “Meguro” must be entered with Cantonese and English as the text background, and the title also uses the Cantonese pinyin with tones as a special highlight. “Meguro” means “seeing darkness”. In a certain section, the pupils of the two people in the picture are facing each other, trying to shorten the distance between the two people, but what they see is an extremely scattered and unfamiliar scene. The repeated blinking action is imprinted in the viewer’s sight and memory. The physiological actions of closing eyes, crying, dizziness and other conditioned reflexes and the cramped intimate distance create an uncomfortable feeling and stimulate the viewer. There is a sentence in the work, “When a person is dying, his pupils are infinitely dilated in order to play the memory as quickly as possible.” The viewer is stared at by strange pupils in a completely dark and narrow space, and then it all ends in a black and white world with strong flashes and sudden loss of focus. “Bauhinia” and “White Orchid” (Bauhinia alba) appear on the giant screen of “Resonance Elegy (I)”. Both hybrid plants are closely related to Hong Kong’s regional cultural identity. Bauhinia is the well-known city flower of Hong Kong (i.e. “Bauhinia”), while White Orchid is more widely planted than Bauhinia. Bauhinia is naturally infertile and relies on artificial pollination; the metal “flowers” in the installation rely on occasional resonant tuning forks to continuously capture microcurrents in the air, simulating pollination in bursts of mechanical buzzing sounds.

Returning to Wen Meitao’s “Hoarding Light and Clouds 1”, we will be attracted by the black substance that must be passed through when searching for the exit – the tangled hair – and will also be slightly stung by the “apple core” made of materials such as marble and beeswax placed by Zhong Zheng in the sculpture “Break #01” – the thin kernel left after the plump flesh is peeled off, which is the last shared memory between him and his grandmother on her deathbed. The depression that permeates the exhibition and is hidden in the works evokes the mutual assistance and separation experience shared by local audiences.

Some people say that this exhibition is obscure, while others say that the expression of the works is very concise. Different ways of understanding ultimately lead people’s topics to a general term mentioned by the curator: “Southern Wisdom”. This can be said to be a guerrilla far away from the political center, with both backbone and black humor, but it is by no means a direct response. After 2019, many works that directly respond to social reality and violence were born in Hong Kong. Several years later, in the Greater Bay Area across the river, “Hong Kong Qi” did not directly display these experiences that can be directly identified. Perhaps, “Qi” refers to those experiences that have been purified and restrained.

*Originally published on Art Review China (Winter Issue 2024). ISSN: 1005-7722 | CN31-1128/J