Shirley Au critiqued Chan Ting's Dreamskin in PHD Group 【艺鵠藝評 ACO Art Critique】
Green Object-materiality
In my review “Travel Art” for Chan Ting’s travelling series in her MFA graduation showcase in 2023, I have discussed the travelling minds through literary and visual narratives and the temporality of found objects. In this review, I’ll explore Chan’s green object-materiality that was further explored in the “Dreamskin” exhibition.
To begin, Chan’s mixes of industrial plaster and different green colourants simulate the growing state of mosses between the gaps in the urban environment, which are inseparable from one another. The shiny, reflective effects hint that the mosses thrive in damp climates like Hong Kong and form slippery and thin skin coats on top of concrete and rocks. Those plasters then filled the inner walls of abandoned objects and became saturated green clumps to give them a second life.
We were invited to a dreamy spatial experience. Various boxes, boards, screens and tiny doors were hung in the form of paintings. Boxes, like the vintage sewing box “Cracks Sewing Box” (2024) and the antique record case “Dreamskin” (2023-24), were deliberately opened to manifest the anti-gravitation, which exists only in dreams or galleries. Some of the green plasters, like “Milk Spills On The Ceiling” (2024), were integrated with the texture of gallery walls. Some looked more artificial, like “Luminous Forest in the City Center” (2023-24), to serve as paint on the doors, layering the exhibition space and functioning as passage to uncertainties and spontaneity. The dark green board cultivated the mood for the natural ambiance “Through The Garden and Up the Stairs” (2024) while hiding the mirror, original setting at the gallery so that audiences couldn’t recognise their mirror (autonomous and separate) selves in a Lacanian sense. Otherwise, they realised the dreamy state was fabricated in the theatrical setting, with one door leading to another one.
Here comes the paradox of dreams. A week after visiting the show, I dreamed about walking in the river as deep as my knees among greenish debris, like the industrial pigment I saw in the prewar aluminium box in “Galaxy Under the Ocean” (2023-24). In our chat, it was no coincidence that Chan dreamed of flooding rural areas and Neil, the gallerist, dreamed of rain during the exhibition installation. With the language of local story telling, the green plaster penetrated our minds mysteriously. In our dreams, were we the microorganisms nurtured in “Lake Dream” (2024), a scholar stone stand left by the 1970s clubhouse before the PHD Gallery? Or was it the slipperiness or coarseness that provoked our desire in the damp heat concrete jungle in an ambiguously sensual way and ultimately led to something else?
As the curatorial revolved around the histories of found objects, the boxes reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Untitled (Scatole Personali)” (1952–53), a series of wood or metal boxes that contained art historical and musical found objects. Similarly, Chan explored the notion of found objects in both materiality and ways of finding, which was extended to the shells of framing and containing. However, the object histories interweaved and they constructed a linear temporality from the world wars to the late 20th century based on actual events in the past. Being both uncanny and unfamiliar, the simulacrum of mosses evokes the paradox of whether the symbols of the primitive state were real or merely representational.
Back to the question of dreams, do audiences pick up the visual and literary clues and improvise in their dreams? Or were these dreams common experiences to people in this city? The causation relationships in aesthetic and linguistic language were ambiguous. In his 1924 “Surrealist” Manifesto, Andre Breton defined Surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” In short, our unconscious, yet subjective experiences expand from dreams, the pure psychic state. It seemed that the object-materials were offered meanings because the owners and founders’ subjective experiences were parasitic. Our minds then create associative memories framed within object shells and within the walls of gallery space. Of course, Breton’s ideas of objecthood are doubted in some sense because of human subjectivity that is against the mutual relationship between objects and mosses.
The hypnotic effects only began once I left the gallery. Walking along the streets in the city, the mosses on the sides are no longer subtle but become vibrant. The patches of green among the concrete joined, crawled, and filled our eyes so our senses were eventually invaded from all around the city. The paths between places suddenly flow like rivers, especially in the sloping, greenish, shadowy lanes full of mosses between tall buildings. Our urban experiences transit from the streams of paths to the resembles of dreams that liberate the psychic truth. In a surreal sense, Chan’s artificial greenness is a gateway to dreams. The object-materials of mosses live in their own subjectivity with a fluid mind.
Source of Image : Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s website
On-site images were taken by the writer.
@artfilmsider
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Chan Ting's Dreamskin in PHD Group
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展覽日期：15/6 - 31/8 (Wed- Sat)
展覽地點：PHD Group
Private, by appointment only
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