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EVENT DESCRIPTION
Ora-Ora is pleased to announce a new solo show by Hong Kong artist Halley Cheng, which will take place at its Tai Kwun space, titled Never Describe a Sunset. The spotlight will be on Cheng’s Kapok Series of paintings.
The Kapok Series marries reflective surfaces with ferocious reds, yellows and oranges to underline the majestic beauty of nature. Fleeting appearances of found objects and unexpected layers and unpredictable materials underline the leading role that chance and coincidence play in our lives. Rejecting stringent frameworks and constrictive worldviews, Cheng makes the case for randomness and chance as powerful governing forces. Navigating the amorphous and unstructured beauty of the natural world relies on sophisticated intuition which is the essence of what it means to be human.
The title Never Describe a Sunset refers to a quotation from art critic John Berger, whose thoughts on perception as laid out in his 1970s book Ways of Seeing are an inspiration to Halley Cheng. As Berger wrote: “the relation between what we see and we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” Berger’s words acknowledge the futility of verbal and artistic description, the supremacy of nature, and the value of surrendering to the powers of the universe.
The latest development in his Kapok Series, the new paintings enhance the reflective surface, introducing a mirror-like sheen which amplifies the interaction with the artworks. Their musing on happenstance, coincidence and mystery is encoded in the abstraction of the flowers themselves, which appear as fiery-hued blotches, reminiscent of a Rorschach test. Subjects in the paintings appear in their own time, threatening to disappear imminently. The joys or discomforts of chance manifest themselves in unplanned yet occasionally meaningful encounters.
