巴塞爾藝術展香港展會
莊萃瑋：噓 電影就黎開始啦
Kara CHIN: Shh the Film Is Starting
香港會議展覽中心
香港灣仔博覽道一號
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
1 Expo Drive, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
LINSEED很高兴于2024年巴塞尔艺术展香港展会“艺术探新”（Discoveries）单元呈现出生于新加坡，现居英国纽卡斯尔的艺术家庄萃玮 (Kara CHIN，b.1994) 个人项目《噓 電影就黎開始啦》（Shh the Film Is Starting）。从艺术家近期对于末日电影的研究展开，此次展览的主题围绕着一种当下被未来牢牢笼罩的时空错乱性。展览通过一系列按独特韵律排布的 3D 打印品与手工雕塑，探索人们对于不可知而产生的亘古不变的恐惧，以及对现代生态与技术的神秘想象而来的集体焦虑。
试图等比例还原的电影院门厅装置，与不及腰的放映厅观众席模型之间的不成比例，让观众踏上红地毯时就会产生一种错位感。近距离的观看会发现微型座椅上散布着冒芽的植物和快消垃圾。与世纪末荒芜的场景相呼应的是，密密麻麻火焰色触手像真菌一样不可思议地布满《入口 3》（Entrance 3）表面。视线高处的地方，庄萃玮以层叠结构“装裱”的作品试图模仿售票厅高处的信息牌。多层框架上混沌的颜色也经常出现在她过往的作品中，这种似乎搅拌了有机与人工的颜色常常暗示着后人类的场景。无论如何，这是一个满目疮痍的地方，我们好像是站在“未来”看“古老的”现代电影文化遗留下的东西——或用艺术家的话说——“旧文物”。
PLA, resin, polymer clay, digital print, carpet, felt, cardboard, LEDs
与《漫游者》（Rover）顶端灼眼的聚光灯不同，其底座灯箱中散发着诱人的光亮。底座内部空间里厚实的绝缘材料和人类的生活痕迹营造出庇护所般的安全感，而外墙遍布的是指向不明的出口伪识—与此呼应，陶瓷雕塑《入口》（Entrance）和《出口》（Exit）好像弥漫着神秘之气。灯箱外表陶瓷测温锥和窑内火苗的图案，似乎还暗示着艺术家制陶时相伴的火光，与屋内幽幽的光线之间的关联。日本小说家谷崎润一郎曾这样描述光影：“当我凝视着那些矗立在闪烁的火苗投射出的阴影中的盘子和碗时，我发现这些漆器的光泽中蕴含着一种深邃和丰富。”[2]美国哲学家尤金·沙克尔（Eugene Thacker）由此指认了这样一种不可知的黑暗，它既不被推入宗教的神秘，也不被科学所吞噬，他只是对一个仅仅围绕着人类旋转的世界的漠不关心。[3]
参考文献：
[1] Mark Fisher. What is Hauntology? in Film Quarterly. 2012
[2] Eugene Thacker. Tentacles Longer Than Night. 2015
[3] Eugene Thacker. Tentacles Longer Than Night. 2015
庄萃玮 Kara CHIN
庄萃玮（Kara CHIN）1994年出生于新加坡，2018年获得伦敦斯莱德美术学院艺术学士学位，现工作于英国纽卡斯尔。她的创作涉及动画、陶艺、雕塑和跨媒体装置。当科技无死角地渗透进日常生活点滴时，艺术家试图解开人与科技之间的关系之谜。庄萃玮运用不同的材质，包括有机的、合成的、甚至是“电子生成(digital manifestations)”的，重新审视当世界日渐虚拟化时感知的欺骗性。庄萃玮的作品编织她想象中的未来场景与原始或神秘的人类活动，反思生物黑科技、健康文化和超人类主义背后的心理机制。通过混沌无序的构图、怪诞诙谐的编排、超出常规的材料，艺术家试图探索今天的人类生活愈发被未来所劫持的状态。
LINSEED is pleased to present British-Singaporean artist Kara CHIN’s (b.1994, Singapore) solo project “Shh the Film Is Starting” at the Discoveries sector of Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. Stemming from Chin’s recent research on apocalyptic and posthumanist movies, the presentation centers around the feeling of anachronism, a sense that the present is haunted by the future. With a suite of 3-D printed and handcrafted sculptures rhythmically orchestrated, the exhibition explores the ever-present horrors of the unknown and the contemporary collective anxiety toward modern mysticism regarding ecology and technology.
As the viewer steps onto the red carpet, a sense of disorientation is enticed by the disproportion between life-sized cinema foyer installations and cinema auditorium dioramas at waist level. A closer look unveils sprouting vegetation and consumer goods scattered over the miniature seats. Echoing the desolate scene, the surface of Entrance 3 swarms with flame-hued tentacles, like fungi, the existence of which is inconceivably frenzied. Above the eye level, a pair of works framed with multilayered structures imitate the billboards high in the ticket office. The muddled color on the structure—seemingly a mix of the organic and the artificial—is often employed in her past works suggesting a posthumanist landscape. By all means, it is a devastated place. The viewer is standing in the “future” observing the relics or, to use the artist’s words, “old artifacts” from the bygone modern cinema culture.
On the lightboxes in the middle of the room enshrines two ceramic portraits of dogs. According to the artist’s study of apocalyptic movies, ‘the concerned dog’ is one of the motifs often incorporated in apocalyptic movies foreboding imminent calamity. Other motifs include flocking birds imprinted on the ticketing kiosk resembling an intaglio monument stone. These images function less as rhetorical devices to advance the narrative of the film than to evoke the feeling of horror, the irony of which is suggested in the behind-the-scenes pictures in Dolly Zoom, Scale Model, Seating Plan. To this extent, the audience in the movie theater seems to be no different from, for example, our ancestors accustomed to totem rituals; the "future" viewer strolling in the “cinema ruins” strikes a chord with the museum visitor admiring archaeological discoveries. Absurdity rooted in these parallels courses through Chin’s works. Through transforming the bird motif into adorable decoration— as knickknacks in Uneasy Over Head Wall Display 2 and as dangling ornaments in Uneasy Over Head Wall Display 3 ; through overlaying on the wall displays uneasy lines (odoro おどろ) commonly seen in Japanese manga, the artist deploys unique humor to mock what British scholar Mark Fisher calls "the failure of the future.” [1]
Contrary to the blinding rays on Rover, doors on the lightbox plinths emit a subtly mesmerizing light. Space inside the plinths with insulation and human traces seems safe like a refuge with yet other disorienting exit signs on the outside, which resonate with the Entrance and Exit ceramics oozing uncanny overtones. Images of the ceramic cone and kiln fire on the exterior wall connect the small chamber with the flame that often accompanies the artist during ceramic making. Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki once described light and shadow: "But in the still dimmer light of the candlestand, as I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness […]." [2] From this, American philosopher Eugene Thacker identifies a darkness out of human cognition: neither yielded to the realm of religion nor gobbled up by science, it is simply indifferent to an anthropocentric world. [3]
References:
[1] Mark Fisher. What is Hauntology? in Film Quarterly. 2012
[2] Eugene Thacker. Tentacles Longer Than Night. 2015
[3] Eugene Thacker. Tentacles Longer Than Night. 2015
About the Artist
Kara CHIN was born in Singapore in 1994. Chin obtained her BA in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2018, and currently lives and works in Newcastle, UK. Her practices, spanning animation, ceramics, sculpture, and installation, attempt to unravel our relationship with technology that has assimilated into every corner of the quotidian life. Working with different materials from the organic to the synthetic or even ‘digital manifestations’, Chin reexamines perception and deception in the increasingly virtualized world. By interweaving imagined future scenarios with primitive and esoteric events, her work reflects upon the psychology behind biohacking, wellness culture, and transhumanism. With injections of humor delivered through unconventional materials, chaotic compositions, and bizarre fabrications, Chin explores how the present is haunted by the future.
Her recent solo exhibitions and projects include: “Shh the Film Is Starting”, 2024, Art Basel Hong Kong with LINSEED, Hong Kong; “Flames Painted on the Backcloth”, 2023, Frieze London with VITRINE, London; “Concerned Dogs”, 2023, Goldsmiths CCA, London; “Showreel”, 2022, Humber Street Gallery, Hull; “Fountain of Youth”, 2021, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London; “You Will Knead”, 2021, VITRINE, London; “You Will Knead”, 2021, VITRINE Digital; “Blue Screen of Death”, 2020, Off-Site Project, digital; “Sentient Mecha Furniture”, 2020, BALTIC39, Newcastle; “Subsequent Hotchpotch”, 2020, DKUK, London. Her recent group exhibitions include: “life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot”, 2024, CCA Glasgow, Glasgow; “Voyager 1", 2023, Hive Becoming, Shanghai; “Wailing Moon”, 2023, Staffordshire St., London; “New Eden”, 2023, ArtScience Museum, Singapore; “Swallow Mountain, Drain Sea”, 2023, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Splendor of the Sun”, 2023, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong; “FILM-Fabricated Realities”, 2023, ART SG, LINSEED, Singapore; “Garage Band: Architects of the Future”, 2022, HATCH, Paris; “Information Wants to Be Free?”, 2022, ADM Gallery, Singapore; “Acting on Behalf of Thinking”, 2021, PINK, Manchester; “The Sun and the Moon”, 2021, VITRINE, Basel; “A Letter to the Future”, 2021, EKO 8 International Triennial of Art and Environment, Maribor; “Springseason”, 2020, Fieldworks Gallery, London; “This is a Not Me”, 2020, IMT Gallery, digital; “Bloomberg New Contemporaries”, 2019, South London Gallery, London; “The Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize”, 2018, Gallery North, Newcastle; “Bloomberg New Contemporaries”, 2018, Liverpool Biennial 2018, Liverpool.
Kara Chin's work is held in notable collections including Arts Council Collection, UK; Government Art Collection, UK and is included in private collections internationally.
