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Hou Lam Tsui: Blind Curve

12 February 2022 - 31 March 2022

Free

EVENT DESCRIPTION

RNH Space is proud to present Blind Curve, Hou Lam Tsui’s solo exhibition. Spanning videos, photographs, and installation, this exhibition features newly commissioned works that mirror commodified love, emotions, and bodies amid a capitalist society. The artist examines the perversion of reality in contemporary romantic relationships as well as our quotidian activities, rethinking the inevitable commodification through fragments and floating signifiers.

A significant part of Tsui’s artistic practice revolves around the media’s all-pervading portrayal of intimate relationships and sexuality that manipulates our understanding and expression of love, happiness, and sadness. To collect the most infamous evidence, the artist situates her interest in Shōwa aesthetics and City Pop music in Japan during the 1980s, wherein a bubbly filter was added to the entertainment industry which offered people a way to escape from the harsh reality of the economic bubble. Tsui seeks inspirations from such a fascinating era with a needle in her hand–she pierces the bubbles for the unapologetically authentic human emotions to resurface. Just as the sad lyrics were sung along the upbeat rhythm and the inspirational idols fearlessly revealed their own heartbreaking stories, Tsui’s works always enable an honest space for women’s vulnerable, miserable and masochistic emotions as a form of resistance.

As suggested by Eva Illouz in The End of Love, in the times of penetrating capitalisation, what is marked as an attractive quality we look for in our love interests is merely a consumer substyle – we define them by the commodities they pursue or possess. What is seen as a heartfelt affection is in fact an audience reaction to the economic performance. Tsui selects a Japanese City Pop song Blind Curve by Momoko Kikuchi as the exhibition title, suggesting to view love from an alternative angle when the complexity as well as the dangerous side of love are less visible.

Tsui addresses the staging of specious meaning through a parody of such staging, where impersonal love formulas should disintegrate and feelings of uncertainty, vulnerability, and melancholy are exposed. The artist’s photography works are situated in a meticulously calculated mise-en-scène, shedding light on commodities, cheap loose jewellery items, and decoration parts. The images look surreal, unsettling but somehow familiar. Some of them are presented as a series of prints as in the work we are only human, loosely referencing fashion and commercial photography. The others are presented as part of the window display with gift boxes in GOLDEN☆BEST BEFORE THIS DATE, reminding us of the disposable, short- lived nature of both wrapping paper and commodification. In the photographs, the fake tears made of cultured pearls reimagine commodified emotions. Pearls share a similar nature with tears – or the formation of pearls is coerced by the shells being injured or attacked, just as tears also come from pain. The artist’s employment of cultured pearls, which is produced by human-manipulated attacks to the shells to induce pain, reflects and responds to the brutality of commodification and emotional manipulation. From Tsui’s perspective, female’s sadness can be a power to challenge the phallocentric order, but the appropriation of the sadness in favour of promoting a consumer item is a devaluation of the power, a malicious deed by capitalism.

Tsui’s video work our love is not destined juxtaposes new monologues with a compilation of different Shōwa commercials to further explore the commodification of emotions and unfold the politics of love. Hyperreality could be observed when the consumer sphere is saturated with in-genuine intimacy that leads to a commodification of our private sphere, whilst the original reality is then nowhere to be found. In this piece, Tsui attempts to reassemble the lesser-known reality of intimate relationships whilst subverting the original narrative of these commercials with murmur-like monologues and questioning the definition of love.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) lives and works in Hong Kong. Tsui received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art at the University of Leeds in 2018. Her practice centres around personal experience, gender politics, boundaries, and peripheral storytelling. She also writes poems.

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