Redundant Passion
This is an exhibition about metaphor. All the images have wandered between civilisation and wilderness. Take a closer look, and you’ll find traces of eruption—before restraint and clarity took over. Some works in this exhibition will slowly fade away, albeit joyfully, while most will remain reliably on the walls, holding back their senses.
Zhou Qiang’s works hover between documentation and abstraction; his images are no longer accidental captures of reality by the camera. Guided by the principles of ‘poetic’, he designs structures, crafting tacit metaphors that map the unknown onto the known. His works contain no text, yet rhetoric permeates every corner, as if embodying T.S. Eliot’s pursuit of universalizing personal experience. He is his own theatre.
Wong Sze Wai’s works have unmistakably ventured into the wilderness and lingered among ruins. Soil and minerals are materials she finds endlessly fascinating. Sometimes, you can’t explain why you love the shape of a tree, a stone, or the murmuring sound of a stream lapping against the riverbank—just as she can’t explain why she fell in love with the fragmented state of murals.
When it came time to submit the artist’s statement, Yorkson offers the image belowed—a fitting self-portrait indeed. For this exhibition, Yorkson orchestrated an incident—her work being damaged by an audience during the opening. While conventional art institutions (museums, galleries and the like) would typically recoil from such an awkward scenario, she deliberately chose to highlight it. Through her recent study of Ikenobo flower arrangement, Yorkson has fundamentally reexamined the relationship between artist and material in contemporary art practice. “The eternal green mountain keeps moving forward”—and now, her mountain has taken its place in this exhibition.
Yagi Eri is from Miyako Island. As a child, she travelled between Tokyo and Okinawa frequently. No matter where she was, she never quite felt like she belonged to the land beneath her feet. This sense of drift led her to take refuge in fantasy, gradually forming a desire to “hook memory to image.” She spreads out her scenes with clarity reminiscent of IKEA manuals, offering a kind of guidebook for entering her imaginative space.
The artists in this exhibition have honed their experiences, adjusting the grayscale of their perspectives, bringing multiple “scenes” before us. Let us remember this moment—because you and I have lived for these “redundant” passions.
