With everything growing stagnant due to the pandemic, it is easy to lose one's sense of time. The pandemic may have started two years ago but a lack of clarity about its ending makes it feel like an eternity.
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Is 2022 turning out how you imagined it to be? Curator Chun Poon invited five Hong Kong artists, as well as audiences, to explore their thoughts on this set of numbers in the exhibition, 2022.
Focused on lesser known local artists, Poon took inspiration from books - the George Orwell book 1984 and 2001: A Space Odyssey- and how they explored the theme of imagining the future for the exhibition.
Poon said: "One year is a bit short. Ten is more like a long-term goal, maybe too long to see the result. Two sounds more achievable if you plan something ahead, like a short-term goal between a long-term goal, so you will see the result, adjust and improve, and keep going further."
Poon deliberately left the numbers to the artists' interpretation.
Iris Tsang began to brainstorm the project at the end of 2019 before the pandemic.
"2022 reflects an apocalyptic uncertainty of the future and the artwork was started during a time of looming unrest. Part of me really thought the world, externally and internally, was ending," said Tsang.
Exploring the narrative of paradise in the form of gardens such as the biblical Garden of Eden and Persian paradise garden, Tsang's Paradise Garden became "a quick escape and a meditative process" for the artist, who described her favorite work as "a dialectic past and present then interwoven with my imagination of the future."
Fung Chim also looked into nature when he was asked to create for 2022, but the world was very different from what he had predicted.
"When I knew the title of the exhibition, I searched the internet and found that the prediction was that Germany will stop nuclear energy, and this would become the focus of the world," said Fung. "Instead, it turned out that today's focus is not about nuclear energy. It is about Covid and world war."
Illusionary Teal shows a tree placed in front of small mosaic tiles of various shades of turquoise, a combination of nature and the man-made.
"In 2022, the man-made disasters that people face are all related to the blind pursuit of technology. The development of science and technology is swift and there is no possibility of slowing down. Maybe in the end, only nature can give people a little bit of soothing of the heart."
King Lau saw the numbers as "a timeline trilogy, including past, future and present," which he fleshed out in his three works Treasure, Isolation and Look!
"Look! is my favorite piece because it strongly presents my current emotion toward the future. Extremely climatic conditions such as rain, fire and wind are here, but we still have to fly."
Muses Sze Mei-ting focused on her feeling of uncertainty and change toward the year with an optimist's approach and implemented it into her own clay creations.
Clay-making also helped her relax while facing the unknown.
"When using ceramic sculptures with glazes, there will be more uncertainty and error. I seldom used glaze in sculpture works, but now I believe that the material itself will lead me along, like how I try to let the changes flow in my life."
Stephanie Sin's Are We Only Having Sea Sickness shows a dreamy scene at sea that looked vaguely like Hong Kong, reflecting that the view is subjective toward one's interpretation.
"The scenery itself is neutral, it is the way of thinking that makes for opposite sides. It is the way of thinking that leads to a different way of painting," said Sin. "This is how I have been looking at the situation in Hong Kong."
So what about the curator himself?
"2022 is a question I want to raise," said Poon.
"2022 is a mid-term exam for everyone in Hong Kong, that's my initial approach. It's a time for looking at yourself and asking yourself what you have accomplished if you care to."
