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31/1/2003

City Mapping

Lee Ka-sing Gallery, Toronto

This winter LEE, Ka-sing Gallery is pleased to present City Mapping: Rough Cuts, the photo-collage and installation work of Hong Kong artist Leung Chi-wo, Warren.

Leung Chi-wo is one of the most important artists to have emerged since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. He was chosen to represent Hong Kong in the Venice Biennale in 2001. His work has been exhibited in different cities including Hong Kong, Vancouver, New York, Oslo, Venice, Hamburg, Shanghai, Graz and Melbourne.

The series City Mapping: Rough Cuts was a work accomplished in New York City in 1999. In this work, using the pinhole camera, Leung selected certain locations and shot towards the sky from ground level. It is not the landmarks nor architecture that interest him. It is the sky, that "negative" or "void" space which is to become the centre of his work. He would shoot the sky from different corners of the streets and later cut out the skies from the contours of surrounding buildings. Different pieces of "skyscapes" were then reassembled into a fan-like 2-D photo sculpture.

Read more about Leung's project in an article Leung Chi-Wo: Something About City Sky by Hitomi Iwasaki, the Assistant Curator of Queen's Museum of Art, New York.

Leung Chi Wo: Something About City Sky

Leung Chi Wo’s primary subject is space in the city. For an artist born in Hong Kong and now residing in New York, it is natural that he employs the urban environment as an immediate visual reference. After all, next to New York City, Hong Kong has some of the world’s tallest buildings. Both metropolises are of equal high-voltage, resting on great rocks where cultures fuse in the explosive political and economic shift. But, it is his home town of Hong Kong and its socio-cultural construct that led the artist to contemplate the issues of visuality and memory. Leung is driven by the fear of loss of memory - the memory, for example, of Hong Kong before Great Britain returned its sovereignty to China on July 1, 1997.

Photography is the catalyst for Leung’s study of human perception and its relation to the endurance of memory. He finds the pinhole camera best simulates the physical reality of the world. The images projected on the interior walls of a pinhole camera correspond to the inverted pictures projected on the retina of the eye. This facsimile of reality illuminates the malleable line between what is abstract and concrete in our memory. Indeed, how abstract or concrete is our memory when sustained by visual indices?

From the bottom of New York City valleys, Leung looks up and points his pinhole camera at the sky. However, it is not the landmarks of modern architecture that his photographic work captures. It is the sky serrated by the contour of buildings. Rather than being a void hovering above massive structures, the silhouette of edifices neatly delineate an abstract shape - a space that embodies the negative of the physical/positive city. These shots are pooled in the repository of the artist’s memory of actual locations in his works such as Washington (1999), Franklin meets Broadway (1999), and Empire State (1999). Fragments of each sky occupy the center of the picture as a visual index for the site, replacing traditional representations of figures, mountains, and architectural elements. The skies, cut from the contours of surrounding structures, are enclosed entities in dramatically complex geometric shapes: what remains are edges of buildings, traffic lights, and trees looming against the faint tonality of the sky.
Multiple shots are combined to represent each site; two if taken in opposite directions, or four if taken from all corners of an intersection. Tompkins (1999), for instance, employs as many as twelve sections to complete a panoramic view. In their extreme fragmentation and abstraction, the images demand to be deciphered and identified. In this way Leung effectively interrogates how memory is constructed and degenerates. Does memory occur in the negotiation between our perception and imagination, or between the palpable concreteness of reality and the abstract metaphysics of representation?

Leung takes his study of perception beyond the realm of the visual. In Chambers (1999-2000), he erected a three-dimensional fabric structure derived from his own photograph of the street in downtown New York. It is a cell-like structure of seventeen chambers in a single mass hung horizontally above the floor. Each partition bears the cut-out frame of the skyline captured in the photograph. Cut through the entire structure is the original view of Chambers Street. Leung walks through the separate entrances of the sky from one end to the other. The sky that was only visual is now a temporal and spatial experience.

A reincarnation of the abstract sky also comes in the form of cookies. The artist and his collaborator sara Wong created a happening, City Cookies (1999-2000), during which viewers were invited to consume sky cookies. This is a humble, yet idyllic, transliteration of ''intimate immensity'', a subject which the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about in his book, The poetics of Space (1964). Materialized in flour and sugar, the city sky reconciles human perception and the world, which science alone does not allow.

The sky is now the medium for framing and carving, for crawling through and eating. This formless and massive expanse above our head is already a curious concoction of the abstract and the tangible. Leung Chi Wo transforms the sky into an unfamiliar object, teeming with evocation - as if to imitate the way memory dwells within us.
Hitomi Iwasaki
Assistant Curator New York Queens Museum of Art

Lee, Ka-sing Gallery
993 Queen Street West, Candy Factory Lofts suite 116 (buzz 0238) Toronto ON, M6J 1H2
Gallery hours: Wed - Sat (1-6pm)

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