We are delighted to announce that Hung Fai & Wai Pong-yu will be part of the 12-hour Interactive Drawing Event connected to SOUTH SOUTH’s inaugural Curatorial Project ‘I draw, therefore I think’ curated by Jitish Kallat.
12-hour Interactive Drawing Event
23 October | 13:00 GMT (9PM BJT)
To participate please answer these questions. This is required for active participation in this part of the programme.
Click this link to register.
The collaboration involves three parts: the writing, the object, and the drawing.
- Part I
You will write down your thoughts on homeland, trust, and betrayal.
These three ideas are inspired by three poems in The Classic of Poetry, the oldest Chinese poetry collection. These three poems taken together are called The Fretted Waters. They each begin with a scenery of running water. Then they shift to the emotions and worries of the protagonists: a homesick solider guarding a foreign border; two brothers experiencing a critical moment testing their trust; an upset aristocrat betraying his weak nation for the stronger neighbouring one. The three extracted elements, homeland, trust and betrayal, like the atom, gene, or water, are the basic and long lived channels from ancient times which form the body of human society. By mixing and sharing these messages between you and the other participants, this project explores the idea that we might have inherited burdens and identities from a range of ancestors.
- Part II
The Object
A life-form is born from the mixture of the ideas. It represents you at the present time. We will ask you to take a photo of an object which you can associate with the questions and the answers. This captured image might carry entangled emotions. It will be like the remains, the fossil, the soil for the next generations to study and emerge. For example, in the collaborative drawing practice (Same Line Twice 21), the artists and the curator exchanged written paper slips and made them into paper sculptures — their objects. We encourage you to make a small object by hand. But we value the found object equally as long as it is associated with a personally true story.
- Part III
The Drawing
If we could imagine that many generations and dimensions have passed,we would become the drawing marks, the living beings on the Miro Board. The photos you provide will become an archaeological site, a pastoral field for many living creatures to grow, an organ where vital elements are being exchanged and reconfigured, or a patient whose different syndromes are being examined. On these different grounds, we study the ancient fragmented memories, we take nutrients from others to form ourselves, we take, give and heal.
Wai Pong-yu (b. 1982 in Hainan) moved to Hong Kong from Hainan at the age of two. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2006. Wai has developed his own oeuvre with ink from ballpoint pen on paper, spinning the thread of his emotion and mind continuously as one line as it multiplies in rhizomatic manner. His subject matter often relates to the notion of the cosmos, time, nature, across the fields of juxtapositions and metaphysical forms. Wai’s work has been collected internationally by public museums and institutions including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.
Hung Fai (b. 1988 in Hong Kong) graduated from the Fine Arts department of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. Exploring both Chinese and Western media, Hung has developed unique expression and presentation techniques on both paper and canvas. Through deconstruction of elements in traditional Chinese ink paintings, his works are reconstructed conceptually with series of experimentation and transformation, and extend possibilities in ink painting. His works are collected by M+ Museum for Visual Culture and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
About "I draw, therefore I think"
SOUTH SOUTH’s inaugural Curatorial Project I draw, therefore I think curated by Jitish Kallat invites intimate reflections on evolutionary processes in nature, thought and artmaking with contributions from 60 artists across 29 countries from 28 galleries. This drawing project is prompted by Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch Tree of Life in which he scribbled down a framework for his speculations in one of his early ‘transmutation’ notebooks.
