Sophie Cheung: Erasing Time: Backwards and Forwards

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ora-Ora is pleased to announce a new solo show by Hong Kong-based artist Sophie Cheung at its Tai Kwun gallery space. The title is “Erasing Time: Backwards and Forwards.” This is the Sophie Cheung’s second solo show with Ora-Ora; she will also be part of Ora-Ora’s forthcoming line-up at Asia NOW in Paris in October 2023.

The show marks a moment of reflection, of looking back on past episodes, travails and traumas, before moving forward with a sense of renewed purpose and optimism.

Sophie Cheung’s art practice frequently harnesses erasers and newsprint to produce abstractions. In this exhibition, she embraces the specific and the personal. This journey into her teenage years allows for an immersion in recollections and memories, as a form of embrace, a letting go, and a farewell to the past.

The title partly alludes to the words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” There is value, understanding and wisdom in looking back on where we came from, before resuming our path onwards and upwards. In between, there is time for joy and celebration. Ultimately, the exhibition is an affirmation of the power of art, not only for the viewer, but for the artist, who is able to forensically self-reflect, self-discover and bear witness in a public forum.

Sophie Cheung’s second solo show with Ora-Ora features several new works from the artist’s “Erasing News” series, which are created of newspaper ink on erasers. Within the context of this exhibition, the newspapers become divorced from the current affairs they once heralded, and evolve into markers of time, raw materials emblematic of the past. In “Emitting Air from Aerial Roots,” Sophie recollects physical sensations from adolescence: pangs of cramping and distress which would lead her to seek refuge on a park bench under the shelter of the trees. The discomfort finds a visual echo in the confused distortions of the tangled aerial roots of the banyan tree. “Crying in the Park at Night” recreates those trees in vivid purple. The white, negative spaces become the spotlights of the garden, which take on the orbed appearance of eyeballs staring in judgment. Her artworks celebrate a diversity of tone, tones which naturally occur in newsprint. Blackness offers myriad depth, and whiteness takes on new meaning. In her new work “Fault Zone,” Sophie Cheung harnesses white, negative space to suggest a rupture or chasm, resembling the fault lines of the earth’s crust. This landscape of erasers becomes a metaphor for seismic upheaval, dislocations of identity and time.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Sophie Cheung Hing Yee was born in Hong Kong in 1983. She received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from RMIT and Hong Kong Art School and completed an MA in applied anthropology and community arts at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2022. She lives and works in Hong Kong.

A life-long advocate of social inclusion, with a particular interest in disability rights, Sophie Cheung explores in-betweenness: acts of simultaneous addition and subtraction. Her work seeks to maintain a careful equilibrium of construction and disintegration. Reminiscent of classical painting, yet rooted in contemporary social issues, her practice harnesses found objects in oblique reference to arte povera and mono ha. Her use of plastics delineates the passage of time and allows her to draw comparisons between the understanding of colour and art history in east and west.