Critics' Picks in ARTFORUM

http://artforum.com/picks/section=world&mode=past#picks18840

Hong Kong
"Restore"
1A SPACEUnit 14,Cattle Depot Artists Village,, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, October 4–November 4

“Restore” aims to bring together works that rethink and retell their creators’ “authentic experiences.” Absent, however, are the highly insular vocabularies one might expect in such art. Instead, even the show’s sparser—or more specific—pieces reference the larger-scale predicaments of Hong Kong culture. Wallace Chang Ping-hung’s sculptures, stacks of dim-sum steamers towering precariously above eye level, are humorous caricatures of bamboo and become heartbreaking when seen as futile postconsumption reconstructions of nature—perhaps an apt parallel to the local government’s conversion of compressed garbage into new land. The show’s most performance-oriented piece, Adrian Wong’s Bless All Ye Who Enter Here, 2007, includes exorcists who arrived on opening night to bless a space atop a ten-by-ten-foot platform constructed by the artist. With its accompanying red and green architectural structures and talismans, Wong’s piece might be a reversal of Tom Friedman’s iconic Untitled (A Curse), 1992, if Friedman’s activated, invisible sphere atop a pedestal were allowed cultural specificity and a mise-en-scène.

The works by Cornelia Erdmann and Ivy Ma both explore Hong Kong’s commercial development. Erdmann’s shoulder bags, labeled CATTLE DEPOT on their exteriors, reference the name of the gallery’s environs—a former cattle house repurposed by the government as an arts venue. Playing with the double meaning of branding, the bags are a sly conflation of two phenomena driven by herd instinct: Hong Kong’s designer-label shopping and the art world’s name-brand collecting. The most salient part of Ma’s installation is a wall drawing of a silhouetted edifice whose menacing form nonetheless betrays traces, in its unobscured mark-making, of a human creator. The piece’s whimsy comes from its installation: The titular quote, THE HOUSE'S ALWAYS THERE, wraps around a corner to include, via proximity, a strictly functional hole cut in the gallery’s wall for access to air-conditioning controls. These components, along with a square of green light projected onto a sixteen-by-sixteen-inch floor tile (a bereft, virtual approximation of a park), tell a familiar Hong Kong narrative in which humans, coming face to face with the Frankensteinian urban spaces they’ve made, respond with anxiety, adaptibility, and profitless attempts to create small, aesthetic oases within highly regimented space.

—Dawn Chan