Saan Dung Gei: A Hong Kong Artist’s Allegorical Train Ride

Description

Hong Kong artist Lam Tung-pang’s (b. 1978) coming-of-age coincided with drastic social changes, a result of his homeland’s decolonisation from constitutional monarchy and new allegiance to China in a short span of time. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound and video, Lam’s playful practice arises from a curious imagination that recombines traditional iconography and vernacular materials, innovating with a myriad of found objects and images to form new practices that are often experimental in nature. He engages the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia. In his allegorical landscapes, journeys and sceneries become essential passages connecting time and distance, longing and loss.

His solo exhibition, entitled Saan Dung Gei (“Mountain Hole Notes”), is inspired by his experience of taking the recently inaugurated high-speed railway from Hong Kong to Beijing in November 2018. During the eight-hour journey, there was a 20-minute ride through a dark tunnel in Hong Kong’s territory. On this brief ride through the black hollow, Lam’s usual optimism yielded to a magical realist vision of anxiety and social unrest that gave birth to the title of this work.

The exhibition consists of non-linear chapters that describe the allegorical journey of an itinerant traveler, “Eye”, who searched for, discovered and lost an anonymous novel’s manuscript. On show are Lam’s latest works, which he created in 2018 and 2019.

The exhibition will be companioned by a public conversation with curator Abby Chen and art historian Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel on 23 March 2013.