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Harlow’s Monkey

6 June 2024 - 6 July 2024

Free

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Drawing from the words of the artist Chloe Bass, we ask “How much of love is attention?” And what precisely captures our attention? Is it tactile sensations? The proximity we seek? In “Harlow’s Monkey,” artists E8MKBOY, Kary Kwok, Maari Sugawara, and Amy Tong critically examine attachment as currency, offering renewed positions that consider the forms of alienation prevalent today.

Unravelling the myths that cement subject-formation, Maari Sugawara, for her two-part video titled (S)mothering Myself (2024) commissioned by the Canadian publication Peripheral Review, hired and interviewed Suzuki-san, a veteran rental mother who specialises in the representation of motherhood. In Part I, Sugawara sets up the context for her investigation as Suzuki-san fulfils the filial role she was hired to play. The two are engaged in an interview wherein Suzuki-san responds to typical queries an archetypal mother would receive. In Part II, Sugawara utilises the interview structure again—albeit entirely scripted. Suzuki-san once again makes an appearance, but this time, she plays the mythical character Yuki-onna, and is interviewed by Sugawara, who plays Yuki-onna’s daughter. In the Yuki-onna (雪女) folktale, the protagonist, possessing the lethal ability to freeze men to death, contemplates killing her husband due to a broken promise. Ultimately, she decides against it, thinking about the children she bore with him. Giving particular attention to Lafcadio Hearn’s Orientalist iteration of the story, Sugawara layers alternate accounts of this countlessly retold story as she slowly unravels foundational myths behind the terms “wife” and “mother.” With the ideal recognised and reinforced, Suzuki-san sends uncanny reverberations to our childhood and the artifice of the mother as subject-position is made apparent.

Engaging simultaneously with a historical and personal archive, Amy Tong’s recent paintings and videos suture her lived experience of Hong Kong with the cultural memory of the city her late grandmother recalls. Tong’s Lying in Bed, White-washed, Worn (2024) merges two memories she had of her grandmother: one in her home and the other in the hospital. Over the last year, she has visited and revisited the canvas, applying various marks that conceal the original image; the process of obscuring becomes a mimetic process that follows the formation and deformation of memory. Fleshy tones punctuate the canvas, suggesting the presence of a body, meanwhile forms that appear to be furniture become obscured in layers of washed white paint. A diagonal line suggestive of the rails of a hospital bed cuts across the canvas, right above where the bed would be amidst the reclining figure. Titled after the eponymous Vera Lynn song, Tong’s We’ll meet again (2024) investigates the seductive power of propaganda in the building of a nation-state. Recollecting the stories her grandmother would share of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, a recent trip to Japan led her to visit the infamous Yasukuni Shrine, a controversial site memorialising the country’s 20th century war crimes. Overlaying the lyrics of the Vera Lynn song—written at a time leading up to WWII—with the video, Tong connects Lynn’s false promise of war and nation building to the production of the narrative of the nation-state.

Schematics of love and acceptance have intangible value in today’s discourse. In Kary Kwok’s self-portrait series I only want you to love me (1994), 11 photographs confront and complicate the human desire to be wanted. Shot at Metro Cinema, an underground theater in London where the artist worked as an usher from 1992 to 1994, the works come from a time when Kwok was interrogating his identity as a gay Chinese man in the United Kingdom. Referencing the eponymous 1976 film by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder about a bricklayer whose ardent yearning to gain his family’s affection leads to self-harm, Kwok’s tableaus melancholically navigate the violence exacted on queer bodies in an era plagued by HIV/AIDS. In I only want you to love me #1 (1994), Kwok presents himself as a wounded character in moments of vulnerability. The artist is captured bedraggled, beaten, and bruised in an equally bungled cinema storeroom. Donned in a frilled red dress and surrounded by overturned empty beer boxes and shelves of film, Kwok gazes absently into the distance with an arm reaching across his chest as if to protect himself from an aggressor lurking outside the frame. Meanwhile, In I only want you to love me #6 (1994), Kwok stands nearly naked, barring the union jack patterned underwear, as he drags a trolley with boxes and a formal suit. As his hands remain occupied with a Pepsi cup modified to read as a slur (“Pansi”), he tilts his head to hold the phone between his ear and shoulder. In one way, the artist reads as the image of mobility—mobility in class, body-type, and desire. As he transits from one room to the next, brim with these signifiers of mobility, we are asked to consider: what moves us?

Lying in wait for a future wherein bodies are mutable, Hong Kong artist E8MKBOY navigates power and desire in its portraits. In The Kiss (2024), for instance, E8 depicts two masc figures kissing each other, while a third one gently encourages the other two. Seeing its work as forms of love and care that might one day exist, the artist renders figures that bears resemblance to itself. This perhaps most succinctly informs the composition of Pink Fountain (2024) wherein two figures are in the heat of copulation. Complementing the careful application of paint used to render the bodies of the two are a flurry of strokes in hues of pink and blue that echo the energy of the moment. Finally in Marriage d’ Amour (2023), the artist depicts yet another figure that bears much likeness to itself. It is once again caught in a moment of embrace, but this time, only with itself as its eyes pierce the viewer, sharing with us an intimacy that we may have only encountered in the comfort of a lover’s arms (if we have been so lucky). In some instances, E8’s work read as an act of rebellion, jarring the viewer with bright colours and taboo desires, and in other moments, they read as a wish for an intimacy that is yet to come.

Details

Start:
6 June 2024
End:
6 July 2024
Admission:
Free
Event Category:
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