Para/Site Dual Solo 2005
Phoebe's Vaudevillian Park and Florian's "Op-scape" Para/Site would organize a dual-solo exhibition every year. More than to introduce Hong Kong artists, it is also an occasion for these artists to have a more intricate and intimate communication. In this year, Para/Site has the pleasure to present two emerging artists Phoebe Hui and Florian Ma graduated respectively from The Art School, The Hong Kong Art Center and The School of Creative Media, The City University of Hong Kong. Their works reveal their attempts to break the conventional implications of visual images, and illustrate the distinct artistic styles nurtured by the two Hong Kong art academies.Comic and photography are by no means have become a usual and popular culture, especially among youth. Theses artists both work on different artistic forms, however engage in the re-interpretation of the plain/2D media via the access of new media or technology. We are inviting the viewer to heighten their imagination and explore the many possibilities of art itself. Phoebe HUI Fong-wah has participated in many group shows and events including Third Text: Image + Media International Experimental Art Festival and Someone's done it before. Her various creations have involved art direction, illustration and film editing, etc. The concrete conceptual framework and audience's participation are both significant in the Hui's works, this resembles my impression of those artists graduated from the School of Creative Media.. The meanings and interpretations of her works would be unfolded through the audience-artwork interaction. To transform the planar comic into a three-dimensional space, the audience can "read" comic by their own physical movements in the space and Hui explores the possibilities of comic's narrative structure. While there is an international celebrity on the comic's artistic status due to the success of Murakami Ryu's exhibition "Superflat", the younger Hong Kong artists like Hui already view comic as an art form that shares an equal status with other conventional. They also investigate and ponder the creation of comic on a more profound level. Florian MA is a designer and the emerging artist who is now studying Fine Arts at The Art School, The Hong Kong Arts Centre. Out of the interest in the semiotic approach on manipulation of images, Ma engages with various mechanisms of image building, in order to examine different possible interpretative metaphor among the methods. His work reflects artists' contemplation on possible applicability of different media. Ma uses the pixels retrieved by domestic digital scanners as the basic element of his work and reorganizes it into lines of color images. By employing a wide range of editing methods to convert the original images into multiple flows of images and installation works, Ma attempts to turn the fleeting moments in his images into eternity. This reflects the contradiction of evanescence and eternity in the issue of the photographic medium. When the popularization of digital cameras has made photography more usual and popular, the topics of reproduction and representation hence become more and more essential and controversial. Ma transforms the conventions of digital scanning to produce new images, this not only bring another imaginative dimension to the original images but also signify his interpretation of the intrinsic characteristics of it. Different from the artist-oriented solo shows in the past, I, as a coordinator, have actively participated into its formation and its artistic objectives. Although I have not reached my initial goal of combining Hui's and Ma's works into a show, we have already enriched by our discussion and the new inspirations and ideas have really permeated into our own future works. This exhibition hopeful would mark the meaningful values and goals of Para/Site's curator-oriented approach in the future exhibitions. On behalf of Para/Site Art Space, I would gratefully acknowledges the volunteers for the exhibition and the support of Shun Hing JVC Limited for the sponsorship of audio visual equipment for the success of this exhibition.