Ticko Liu: Nonsensical Ways of Seeing

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Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Ticko Liu’s solo exhibition Nonsensical Ways of Seeing. The title plays with the Chinese title of 觀看之道 [Ways of Seeing] (1972) by John Berger. By prefixing to it the word “無厘頭,” roughly translated to English as “nonsensical,” Liu references a popular form of slapstick humour from 20th Century Hong Kong, which plays on the subtleties of the Cantonese language such that the jokes seem to emerge from nothing. In this new body of work, Liu discards his rigid studio practice and instead pursues a form of disengagement from the present.

“Set your sights,” or more formally “to set one’s sights on,” is a curious idiom, but it is appropriate to grasp the desire for disengagement that has set its roots in Liu’s practice over the last two years. It suggests that we can project a certain future and, with the necessary discipline, achieve it. This conception underlies the very logic of Hong Kong, which favours fast-paced structured development with measurable outcomes.

Looking upon the current predicament of the city, its perceived character erodes and its fractures emerge. In Liu, this initiates a particular response: his sights are no longer set on the future, but on his surroundings, and perhaps a world that lies just beyond them. Half in jest, he refers to the wandering as a “necessary evil,” recognising both the ingrained need for structure to feel productive and its function as a self-protective mechanism. Read this way, Liu’s new body of work emerges as a poetic and seemingly playful critique of Hong Kong’s fraught relationship with identity.

A poignant examination of his subjectivity, Liu’s series develops in two directions. Excavating seemingly insignificant aspects of his everyday, he ruminates on the structures which map his childhood recollections. One set of paintings effuses fantastical domesticity. A cat daydreams on a decorated rug, oranges repose in the kitchen, and cookies crumble on a couch. The napping cat and his daily and his history / 關於大貓的夢境，日常和來歷 (2022), the centrepiece of the show, features the aforementioned cat. Wispy and black, it luxuriates on the centre of the canvas, carrying in its furry body a dismissal of the world, a dismissal idiosyncratic to the species. A whimsical attempt at self-portraiture, the feline rests in limbo between dreaming and waking. It is surrounded by a series of signs the artist has deployed in recent work — a toy fish, a child-like drawing of a bee, and frames opening unto tufts of grass. Sequenced like numbers on a clock, the composition of chanced-upon objects suggests a chronographic disruption and dissociation, initiated and sustained by the unplanned eye.

Taking a second direction in the same series, the works move away from the plurality of the theme into the amplification of a single object: the milk carton. It not only reminds the artist of the circadian rhythm of family life but also of an aphorism imparted to him by his mother — “to have good dreams, drink a warm
glass of milk” — captured poetically in the lush blues and yellows of There is milk only but no honey / 只有
牛奶，沒有蜜 (2022). The cartons flattened and, in a sense, recycled, give way to fantastical landscapes, bridging his painterly practice with his mother’s maxim. Conjuring the terror and beauty of the sublime, The great wave is all painter’s dream / 大海浪是所有畫家的夢 (2022) depicts the junk boats of Victoria
Harbour battling the ocean. Caught in a moment foreboding their inevitable wreck, the scene is rendered within the mundane mass-market container, merging a distant anxiety of seafaring with the contemporary neurosis in culture.

Comprised of 31 small paintings, A milk a day / 一日一牛奶 (2022) exemplifies the marriage of the prosaic and the magical. Each features a milk carton. Each represents a calendar day. Each archives a specific disengagement. Each gives way to a new world. Each evidences an attempt to discard.

The gaze is no accessory nor apparatus. It is vital.