EVENT DESCRIPTION
“Imagine the canvas frame as a window. The scenery beyond it carrying what your mind projects. Thoughts gather and dissipate […] the portal in front of you both a gateway to -and a fragment of- an unknown space.”
Yrellag is delighted to present the first Hong Kong solo show of art practitioner and researcher Clinton Pang, following his residencies in Japan and Taiwan.
The artist delves into the connections between language, (un)consciousness and drawing. He is interested in pushing the limits of these notions, meeting them where they merge and revealing new ways of exploring image-making in relation to his own subconscious. Inspired by the idea of automatic writing, Pang visualises a language of his own by intuitively separating the different strokes of Chinese characters and slowly accumulating them until they emerge as both language and picture.
Pang considers his work to be a way to document his mind: the splitting of each word is a way to better visualise the flow of his psyche while also comprehending the vocabulary on a minute level. The visual ambiguity we see becomes a map of the experiences he goes through. As much as language can carry information, it can symbolise a state of mind.
This deconstruction of Chinese characters also allows him to delve into his own heritage as a Hong Konger whose mother-tongue is Cantonese, and project the way comprehension takes place in one’s subconscious.
Drawing-writing becomes a method to inspect his environment, both past and present, internal and external. He builds a picture of ambiguity that is both a fragmentation and an accumulation, a wave of characters that becomes raw material to form an image.
