ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Toast Cheng Yuk Man
Cheng Yuk Man, also known as Toast, graduated from the School of Creative Media at City University. She is primarily interested in photography as a way of playing with time and space and the idea of transforming a 3D space into a 2D image. Her powerful work for this exhibition entitled “Peace, Imperfect Peace” was triggered by the events that occurred on 15 June 2019 during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB). On that day she witnessed the death of a young man who was hanging a banner and fell to his death from an elevated podium in Pacific Place. Toast explains that it was the first day she brokedown crying for a total stranger. “In the days since the Anti-ELAB movement, I could hardly escape from the agony and sense of guilt, rage, fear and melancholy of losing something or somebody eternally and irreversibly. I found that it is strange that I did not even cry on the funeral of relatives, who I knew in my life and whose faces I can remember clearly.” The months that ensued, Toast began to contemplate death and visited Sai Wan War Cemetery frequently and was touched by the many nameless tombstones of soldiers. Her work is a very large book, made to resemble a tombstone filled with the dates and locations of those who passed away during the last year since 15 June 2019. On the side are the words “LEST WE FORGET.” Photos of the familiar Hong Kong pavement patterns are reminders and memorials of these locations. Visiting the place of passing of each individual is performative where she dedicated herself into the role to open her understanding to the passed one, to reconfirm, or salvage, once more, their existence. Her art has many levels of metaphors and memorialises those that have passed within this year.
Sophie Cheung Hing Yee
Sophie Cheung Hing Yee is a current graduate of Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) of RMIT University, a programme co-presented with Hong Kong Art School, majoring in Painting. As an artist, Sophie is intrigued by the theme of freestanding – to treat objects as subject. Through the exploration of materiality of painting and drawing, she has been taking ready-made and daily objects: erasers, pencils, joss paper, incense or newspaper, as her instruments to explore the nature of offset. In this work, Erasing News: Time-Lapse Colours, made with 950 erasers, she spent one year erasing the images of the newspaper. Sophie's art practice is indivisible with her experience as a disability rights advocate, NGO founder and being rooted in uncertainty as a Hong Konger. “I just picked up an eraser and started rubbing the newspaper, while rubbing takes away something, it also resembles painting. Being consumed and retained, both seem to be able to coexist.”
Jessica Chung Wing Tai
Jessica Chung is a graduate from Baptist University, Academy of Visual Arts concentrating on sculpture and installation. She is interested in combining materials together to observe their contrast. Her sculpture, Bubble, is based on the theme of memory in relation to reality and fantasy. She explains that memories are like pieces of a puzzle in that they can be taken apart into fragments and put back together no longer resembling what is the entire truth. One might not even realize the moment when the memory changed its form because it keeps changing every second. She feels that the memories in our mind can be like fake messages recreated and affected by our emotions, imagination and feelings. Her sculptural work made of iron, glass and water aims to create a fragmented tower that delves into her notions of obscured reality through subjective memory. In the world where the term “fake news” is heard on a daily basis and individuals insist on a reality based on subjective truths, one wonders how memories can be warped or even manipulated.
Kimmy Hai Kam Lan
Kimmy Hai Kam Lan is a graduate from Baptist University, Academy of Visual Arts. She works in graphic design, painting, and installation. Most of her early artworks focus on investigating the relationship between humans, society, and the environment. After a period of trial and error, she began to use mixed media as her creative media. She often incorporates graphics into different media, such as three-dimensional forms and multimedia, and some bright-coloured plain blocks. Kimmy's work, “Hong Kong 2030”, aims to investigate and discuss the problems of social issues in Hong Kong’s society today. Creating a series of brightly coloured posters that touch on housing and environmental issues. Housing in Hong Kong comes at unattainable prices for most people in the city. The property developers advertise micro apartments as palatial dream homes. Kimmy’s posters advertise sardine-can “Luxury Can Style House” that is “One Size Fits All.” Her poster “How to build a cardboard ‘Dream House’” ironically comes with the sticker “Life is Good.”
Katrina Mendoza Raimann
Katrina Leigh Mendoza Raimann is a Filipino artist based in Hong Kong. She is an interdisciplinary artist who recently graduated with a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. Working across textiles, installation and performance, she tells stories of intimacy, relationships, and the body. The body, intimacy, love, tension, anxiety and power — her art practice focuses on the histories of material and action, gender and labour. The relationship between the body and textile is something that fascinates the artist. For the artist, the process of making through the body's actions is something that coexists within the textile and within the work. Embedded in the textile are both her physical and emotional memories. When the hands speak for the mind without conscious and rational decisions, a more honest abstract work appears. The work becomes a vulnerable but truthful conversation between the artist and the materials - empowering each other.
Kate Tang Hiu Ki
Kate Tang Hiu Ki is a graduate from Baptist University, Academy of Visual Arts. Her work experiments with digital illustration, graphic design and jewellery. During a study exchange in Germany, she was inspired and started to develop her ideas on contemporary jewellery. She enjoys pushing the limits of materials in jewellery making and using daily objects instead of the refined metals and stones. She believes that jewellery is more than just a decorative object for our bodies and thus, she continues to question the relationship between the wearable item and the wearer, in order to find ways to tell their stories. In her work, Pandemic, she has created a silver necklace, ring and earring that incorporate hand sanitizer bottles into the work. She states, “inspired by the global virus outbreak, Pandemic presents an elegant and minimal collection of jewellery, which are designed to show ultimate functionality and aesthetics. Each piece is individually made with diligence. Carry your precious daily sanitizers with handcrafted sterling silver – Stay Safe and Stay Shimmering.”
Felix Tang
Felix Tang is a graduate from Baptist University, Academy of Visual Arts.
Since the outbreak of the protest between June 2019 to now in Hong Kong, much pro-democracy propaganda has appeared across the street, the government attempts to erase these images almost as quickly as they appear, after this action by the government, there are many traces and marks left on the street by the glue. Artist Felix Tang noticed those glue-mark patterns and felt they would be an interesting element representative of the atmosphere on the streets, which he has chosen to use in his artworks. As a graffiti artist, he is well aware of Graffiti culture’s rule on the street. If a Graffiti artist doesn’t like a certain Graffiti work, he or she will create a new one next to it, resulting in a situation like a battle on the wall, where the audience will be the judge. If the challenger removes or covers a work by others, the action will be considered disrespecting, and the creator of that certain work will usually go find the works of the challenger and destroy them as a revenge. From the perspective of Graffiti culture, according to the above rule, the Hong Kong Government is disrespecting the Hong Kong protester, in other words, this can be regarded as a challenge for the protester. In the process of his work, Anti Words《 反 話 語 》2020, Felix Tang used this idea to cover the text on government documents, just like the measures done by the Hong Kong Government. Rather than to explain reasons for covering the text he relies on the rule of Graffiti culture to set it apart from political interpretation. The Hong Kong Government is the character of the challenger and the artist is the avenger. This is an attempt to reproduce Graffiti history in a current event. As the avenger, Tang finds his opponents works (government document - Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistances in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019) and destroys it back.
Isaac Wong
Isaac Wong is a graduate from Savannah College of Art and Design with a B. F. A. in Painting. Wong’s oeuvre examines the collective history and his own past denial of the practice of “left-hand conversation”, he uses concepts and references on the left-hand conversion. Through utilizing text and visual elements, Wong reinterprets history, memory and experience; composing pictorial arrangements that communicates the fading past and re-trains his left hand, questioning the mainstream at large and its alternative.
Wong Kwan Ho (Kwan)
Wong Kwan Ho, Kwan, is a graduate from Baptist University, Academy of Visual Arts. He is a multimedia artist who aims to reinvent alternative aesthetics when exploring the disorientation of being alive in a turbulent, technology-dominated and desire-driven world.
Wong Sze Wai
Wong Sze Wai graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), MFA Program in CUHK. She majored in painting. In her works she focuses on the relationship between memories and imagination. Her artworks highlight the loss of memories and represent the process of recollection in a way of inscription and erasure, which is also known as palimpsest. Wong was first inspired by the ancient Chinese murals in Dunghuang Caves as well as, the murals from the medieval times in Eastern Europe. To reflect how memory and history have been written and erased, Wong applied multi-layered painting techniques and numerous washout processes to her paintings. By means of exploring different types of painting materials in the ancient world, she tried to apply clay, colour and Chinese ink to her artworks. She created her own painting method in order to depict a sense of depth and show traces of time passing. As for the subject matter, Wong is fascinated by ruin for its metaphorical representation of lost and concealed memories. Ruin has been regarded as a body of memory and history as traces of human activities and changing times fill such abandoned places. She would like to arouse our sensitivity about what we have been forgotten and how do we deal with forgetting. Wong’s artworks provide the audience a space to imagine the history of ruins as well as our own memories.
ABOUT 10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY
10 Chancery Lane Gallery is committed to playing a major role in documenting the development of art within the Asia-Pacific region by consistently holding survey exhibitions by country or theme of emerging, mid-career and established artists, talks, forums and publishing books that bring together the individual historical context of the artists with the development of the arts within Asia. The gallery focuses on the Asia-Pacific, however, keeps its eye on international opportunities around the world, bringing international cultural appreciation to Hong Kong.
The gallery was founded in 2001 by Katie de Tilly. Katie de Tilly is President Emeritus and one of the founders of the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association, awardee of the 2019 Women of Influence ‘Master of The Arts” given by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Art Power HK board member and a member of the M+ Museum Patron’s Committee.