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EVENT DESCRIPTION
Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present “Weather-world”, a group exhibition of seven artists from Hong Kong, Taipei, Manila, and New York who re-imagine atmosphere as a blend of poetic and political landscape. Showcasing recent and new works by these artists including videos, paintings, collages, installations and sculptures, the exhibition explores how art alludes to atmosphere as a formative and contingent way of being in the world. It reveals the broader non-human world through aesthetic categories such as landscape, naturalism, romanticism, and idioms. The exhibition’s title is inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who examines how the notion of atmosphere is molded by the fusion of the meteorological perspective — viewing atmosphere as a measurable and observable external phenomenon — and the affective viewpoint, which sees atmosphere as an extension or projection of inner psychological conditions.
The exhibition offers different entry points into thinking about the atmosphere, portraying it as an external phenomenon represented in art, a facet of planetary conditions. Mark Salvatus, who is currently representing the Philippines at the 60th Venice Biennale, considers the atmosphere as a condition that cultivates improvisational methods. In C_rafts (2011-2024), Salvatus takes inspiration from the vessels that urban city dwellers in Manila devise during typhoon catastrophes: rafts from various everyday materials such as water gallons and airbed mattresses. In Watermarks (2024), Salvatus presents a personal collection of postcards that he has been collecting from second-hand shops, recording connections between the Philippine archipelago and other countries. Many of the postcards have considerable moisture-related damage: the pristine and unchanging photos of idyllic places featured in them succumbing to a volatile atmosphere.
Matina Partosa presents paintings that track changing weather and its effects on her surroundings— intimate details of interactions between elements and instruments that create form, such as a mirror that renders these elements into characters of light and color. Zhang Xu Zhan, Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” awardee (2021), creates paper puppets and maquettes from delicate paper-mache. In his latest film, Termite Feeding Show (2024), Zhang playfully integrates stop-motion animation and live action to narrate the news story of termites causing major blackouts in mountainous cities by chewing through power cables. Each maquette creates its own atmosphere, shaping and being moulded by the cinematic context established by the artist.
Other artists view atmospheric conditions as a technology for staging reality, utilizing natural phenomena as frameworks in their artistic conceptions. Continuing a series that explores the materiality and objecthood of books, Lesley-Anne Cao imagines books made from different materials, ranging from textile to fruit wrappers. Each book is placed inside water-filled tanks, within which it interacts with water and artificial waves. It is an
experiment that ponders what constitutes the task of reading because here, the human reader is displaced by an atmospheric activity of pages gently undulating from one to the next. Yuen Nga Chi’s Family Tree (2024) uses the metaphors of water currents and enchanting melodies to convey impermanence through a fantastical lens. Her video journal explores 19th-century population emigration dynamics from Japan to Southeast Asia, emphasizing personal stories that are often overlooked within the broader, overarching macro narrative of migration experiences.
Yip Kin Bon uses photographs and paper crafting techniques to illustrate the impending impacts of ecological change on Hong Kong’s expansive skies. The bird silhouettes that appear cloaked and confined evoke a sense of desperation and uneasiness, highlighting the tension between nature and human influence. Stella Zhong’s Nùo. (2024) and Nùo.. (2024) installations comprise discreet and compact clusters of pebbles, resembling sticky rice grains. They conjure the imagery of man-made stone landmarks inuksuit which in modern settings symbolize various weather signals. Zhong’s works induce close examination, as they are held together by a magnetic mechanism, defying gravity and provoking a poetic exploration of ephemeral atmospheres and visual viscosity.
Drawing from Ingold’s idea of the “weather-world”, this exhibition explores how our environment remains in a state of flux and evolution. A network emerges as we view separate islands as a world interconnected with its surrounding lands and waters. Considering the shared vulnerabilities and the ever-changing conditions in an expanded archipelagic world, be it pertaining to weather or politics, what emotional and social experiences might emerge for us as a result?
“Weather-world” is curated by Jims Lam and Carlos Quijon, Jr., Curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. The curators will be present at the opening reception, together with Lesley-Anne Cao, Matina Partosa, Mark Salvatus, Yip Kin Bon, and Yuen Nga Chi.
