Huang Rui, Quadruple Happiness, 2014, Steel and restored furniture, 157.5 x 48 x 96 cm, Edition 1
10 Chancery Lane Gallery is proud to present “SPACIOUS” a sculpture exhibition. Featuring 15 artists from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Spain, France, America. The word spacious radiates openness and vastness which is the premise of gathering these works together. Put together partly through the private collection of gallery owner Katie de Tilly and artists represented by the gallery, the exhibition invites viewers to contemplate how this diverse group of artists negotiate the 3D of spatial elements into their individual story telling in the time the works were made. SPACIOUS has no time but hopes to show moments of enquiry among the artists, which have set their marks and carried them into expansive timelessness. The materiality of the sculptures carry soul with them and put forward an energy each of their own that can truly be felt.
As you walk into the gallery, the guardians meet you. On the right a mirrored stainless-steel work by Chinese artist Wang Du, entitled China Daily, looks back at you, who is watching? It catches in its reflection a panel by Frog Kong Kwok, where ink splashed on wood brings tradition to the everyday onto a found object.
The sculpture, Flight of Revelation, by Nigerian American artist Adejoke Tugbiyele hangs gallantly with outspread wings, the wall dances with its shadows peering through palm and wire strung together in a wistful angelic flight inspired by African Yoruba spirituality/cosmology and universal ideas around transformation, flight, and transcendence. Next to it is the Antique Space Fuel, a futuristic work by the Vietnamese American collective, The Propeller Group, a spear of crusted clouds seems as if the work is frozen in time, a stalactite of the future inviting us to go beyond the now. A chair by Japanese artist Koshimizu Susumu of the 1970s Mono-ha movement, grounds us back to earth as the minimalist wooden right angle sits solidly on a block of marbled stone. It sits in front a wall panel, Relief 01-3, of a carved wood mountain set with a delicate pink sky by the same artist. Soaring next to it is the hanging mobile of French artist Laurent Martin “Lo”, entitled Mai, the bamboo sways and draws moving lines and circles on the wall as it swirls in its lightness. Anchoring the mobile, is Huang Rui’s Quadruple Happiness, man and woman emerge from the Chinese characters made into 3D form of circles and lines, holding each other in an embrace of one. The work by Japanese artist Kishio Suga also of the Mono ha movement, Adjacent Gaps, Internal Separation (Kinsa-nairi), articulates his approach to mono (“things/materials”) as an ongoing investigation of "situation" and the "activation of existence," focusing as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves. The mother holding her child in Wang Keping’s Maternité is a tender circular maple wood carving of harmony and balance. His practice searches for the inherent aspects of the wood to intensify his forms. Continuing the wheel of time, Wheel Right is the work by Burmese artist Htein Lin, whose wagon wheel makes a wink towards Dali surrealism. The melting clocks in Dali’s ‘Persistence of Memory’ inspired him to break a wheel, fold it at a right angle, so that it is permanently braked and broken. Htein Lin and his wife Vicky Bowman have been arrested and charged in Myanmar and cannot be contacted. Vietnamese American artist, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, cast from a rhinoceros skull Magic and Mayhem, which is interlaced with a carving of a dragon to articulate how Vietnamese mythologies and superstitions contribute to the factors of extinction. The cast was inspired by the last rhino poached in Vietnam in 2010. It is balanced by another wall work by Kishio Suga’s assemblage of wooden sticks, Inclination of Entirety-1, which is mounted in a round and counterbalanced with a right angle painted in crimson. A breezy bamboo standing work, Dance and Swing, by Laurent Mountain “Lo” balances impossibly on a single pin and turns gently upon a metal ball. Sitting in a corner is a work by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, one of the few works he made with light, Bamhue/ROCI Japan was made in 1987. A Bamboo shaft conceals a set of colored neon lights that illume the walls on either side. Rays of red, yellow, blue, green alternate in cycles of glowing spectrums. A stonework by Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine entitled One Stroke Circle encases the zen approach to creation into a sculptural form. The curves of Sekine changes to straight geometrical lines as we look at the work of young Hong Kong artist Anton Poon. With the work Perplex, Anton aims to reconnect and rebuild his sense of identity and belonging with Hong Kong, a place where he was born yet feels distant. Anton achieves this through the use of three foundational elements, evolving materials such as Corten Steel, hollow repeating geometric forms and high contrasting colours. Indeed, we feel within a home with the works of Vietnamese artist Bui Cong Khanh with a table, The Wound Has Not Healed, and two chairs entitled Northern Chair and Southern Chair and a series of porcelain vases. The series called Porcelain Medals and Jackfruit-wood Grenades is the culmination of Bui Cong Khanh’s several years’ reflection on unresolved tensions emerging from the War and its aftermath. A set of traditional furniture made of jackfruit-wood is carved with symbols from the war and it’s North and South aspects. The vases marry the traditional materials of Vietnamese vernacular culture with Bui’s talent as a painter.
Earth, mountains and cosmos, spirituality, superstitions, man, woman, child, relationships, the existence and interdependency of all things, transformations, balance, tension, light, home, and identity, these are the themes that are crossing over from SPACIOUS where 15 artists navigate three-dimensional forms into a multitude of thoughts and creations.
