ART-PRESENTATION: Summer Triangle

The astronomical asterism the Summer Triangle, with its defining vertices at Altair, Deneb, and Vega An, is an essential navigation coordinate in the Northern hemisphere’s Summers. Showing artworks referencing Hong Kong’s cityscape, the exhibition “Summer Triangle” at OCAT Shenzhen attempts to examine how popular media construct the image of a city.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: OCAT Archive

“Summer Triangle” is a seasonal exhibition comprised of works by: Jon Rafman, Adrian Wong, and Lantian Xie. The name of Jon Rafman’s ongoing photo project “Nine Eyes” alludes to the mechanical compound eyes of Google Street View camera cars, the sights captured by their mechanical gaze make up a city’s official identity, transforming our physical experience in urban space into one of déjà vu. By trolling Google Maps to capture unexpected moments, the artist discovers dissonance in everydayness. “Neon Parallel 1996” (2015) features Hong Kong’s night scene that is a standard of dystopias in sci-fi films, to deploy an archeology of the future. Here, grainy images of Hong Kong’s night view, captured from a computer game, the sound of someone typing on a mechanical keyboard, outmoded fonts, and poetic dialogues all blend together to form Rafman’s work.  Lantian Xie’s work employs a carousel slide projector to accentuate the movements and sounds of the TV celebrity’s cooking, creating links between food and the human body through sensory experiences other than the taste. The “Home-delivery Bike Parked Outside” (2014) shows  electric bikes for delivery purposes detained in the exhibition hall, revealing a tension between inside and out related to the act of ingestion as well as the (physical and epistemological) walls of the museum. “Hong Kong Restaurant” (2013- ) is an installation project that features the menu of a restaurant named after the city Hong Kong. Mass media and tourism have turned Hong Kong into the equivalent of food heaven, a sign effective even beyond the confines of the city. “Improved” Hong Kong cuisine symbolises a non-place where globalism attempts to satisfy everyone’s taste. With a background in developmental psychology, Adrian Wong projects ideological structures into urban space, “Hypnagogia IX” (2016) comprises traditional barbershop poles, evoking the sense of this iconic urban site while simultaneously paying homage to Brion Grysin’s Dreamachine. In Hong Kong, people are often blind to door grills, a ubiquitous object in the city, but their role as a divider of space, and the negative freedom they imply, cannot be denied. These grills consequently become the research subject and artistic form of Wong’s works “Untitled (Grates VI/VII: Shun Tak Ferry Terminal/Derrick Industrial Building)” (2014) and “Untitled (Grates VIII/IX: Derrick Industrial Building/Shun Tak Ferry Terminal)” (2014).

Info: Curator: Venus Lau, OCAT Shenzhen, F2 Building, OCT LOFT, Enping Road, Nanshan, Shenzhen, Duration: 31/7-23/10/16, Tue-Sun 10:00-17:30, http://ocat.org.cn