Art HK 10

I was doubly lucky today. Yesterday, a fellow blogger 舸兒 wrote a piece on her blog about the second annual Hong Kong International Art (not Arts, which include more than just visual art) Fair 2010 or Art HK 10. In addition, a meeting with the provisional liquidator of company which I liquidated for one of my clients supposed to be held this afternoon at the liquidator's office in Wanchai had to be adjourned because the debt claimed by one of the company's creditors was called into question and accordingly its capacity to vote at the creditors' meeting was also in doubt. But we needed at least three of the 4 creditors to be present at that meeting before its proceedings could be considered lawful. As the 4th creditor was absent, there was thus an insufficient quorum for the originally scheduled meeting and it had to be aborted. After a technical discussion on how to bring the matter of the winding up of the company forward and the time frame within which further steps should be taken, I could go. The afternoon I originally set aside for this meeting was now free. As the meeting took place at a building just less than 10 minutes on foot from the Convention Centre, where Art HK 10 was held, I decided to make a whirlwind tour there just to have a general idea of what is on offer so that I can go there again on Saturday to look at the those artworks which deserve my undivided attention. But once I was in, I was hooked. There were so many interesting works of art on offer that I could hardly bear to leave until well past 6.30 p.m.!

 

I could not possibly introduce each and every artist whose works I had seen. So I will  just single out two. The first was the work of a very talented Hong Kong artist called Teddy Lo. He returned to Hong Kong from North America some time in 2003 and now runs an LED design and consultancy company in Kowloon Tong doing LED light and wall monitor displays for various buildings in Hong Kong and also computer controlled Christmas lighting which now earns him his bread and butter. But in his spare time, he is researching into the use of computer-controlled LEDs for artistic purposes and possibly later commercial exploitation. At the exhibition, he has got a darkened booth inside which he sits on a little desk close to the entrance cum exit. At the time of my visit, two Germans journalists were looking at his display. It seemed interesting. So I joined in. There was a screen about 6-7 feet by 4-5 feet on whose edges lights of various colours were constantly flashing, sometimes yellow, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes orange, sometimes red and sometimes white. You may think that there is nothing unusual about that. But the interesting thing is that from time to time, you seem to see the faces of certain men and women. Half of their face might appear inside the frame or the screen and half outside and sometimes, the whole of their face would appear but only for extremely brief moments. Later the artist explained to me that if we want to see them more clearly, then all we have to do is to move either our eyes or our heads! The reason is that we have got something called "residual vision". What does that mean? When we see an image, light will enter our eyes and fire certain cells at our retinas, either cones or cylinders, which help us to process light of different frequency wave lengths and light intensity. But it takes time for the visual images received by our retinas to reach the brain through our optic nerves. The interval of time between the moment the relevant light hits our retinas and the time such light signal reaches the visual processing centre of our brain is crucial.  If that interval is too short, our brain will simply "fail" to see or register any meaningful pattern and we will normally say we did not see "anything". However, after the images of one picture is seen, they stay in our brain for a little while so that we may have sufficient time to be "conscious" of what we have seen. The time interval is about 0.5 seconds. Therefore even if by the time our brain perceives image 1, image 1 has in fact disappeared from our field of vision, we can still see that "after image" of image 1. In other words, we always see image 1 NOT at the time the light from image 1 hits our retina but always a little bit of time AFTER that moment. In the same way, when we say we see a star, the light originally emitting from that particular star might already have travelled light years through space before hitting our eyes or our telescope: the light that we "see" at that moment in time might well be the light from that particular star maybe thousands or even millions of years ago! This is a principle which is in fact "exploited" to produce the films, and the TV that we see every day. If the time interval between image 1 and image 2 which is slightly different from image 1, by less than 1/24 second, the "residual" image of image 1 will "appear" to be "continuous" with image 2 and we will see the person as "moving continuously" as if there were no interval beween the time when image 1 was flashed upon our eyes and the time when the slightly altered image 2 was flashed upon our eyes. Thus when disparate images of a person are flashed at us at different points in time, they will still "appear" to be a "continuous" image of that person moving in a particular direction! This is the principle of "continuous motion" in film and cartoon production. Thus if we show one frame of film per 1/24 second, our eyes will "see" motion as continuous. Making use of this principle skilfully,  Teddy Lo has now "invented" a method whereby he may flash an image for a very brief period of time so that when we move our eye-balls or our head, the very briefly flashed images projected on to the LED screen will become more visible than when we look at the images without turning our heads! But at the moment, he has not yet produced any very "artistic" images using this technique of flashing periodic images at a speed faster than the processing speed of such visual images by our brain.  I asked him if that is not the principle of "sublimal" vision  employed by advertisers when they tried to influence consumer choice "unconsciously" or "sublimally" by flashing images of their advertised products at a speed faster than the speed which it takes our brain to process and consciously register those images. He said yes! But what he does here is that he would flash an image at a slightly different place on the screen so that our later vision will tie in with the earlier residual image which by the time we see the second image, will already have disappeared. In a sense, he is just making "reverse" use of this principle by adjusting the position of the later images to our vision!

 

The second invention by Teddy Lo is an interactive "visual harp". There is a leg-high pillar-like device which can sense any movement our hands make on top of it and/or and at its side. How far we are from the -measuring sensor and how fast we move our hands will cause the individual "strings" of his "visual harp" connected to the measuring device to change colour. The colour change can occur on one string alone or on different strings at the same time. But again, apart from this change of colour of light with physical movement of our hands, he has not yet found any application. Teddy Lo told me that he wished to introduce this concept to the public at the exhibition first and will see if he can get a sponsor for the commercial exploitation of this new technique later. Who says Hong Kong lacks creative people!

 

Another artist whose works impressed me at this exhibition was a Korean artist by the name of Chun Kwang Young. What he does is that he would fold paper into various shapes like triangles, rectangles and squares of various sizes, hand dye them and then paste them together to form very beautiful patterns, as if they were rocks, pebbles, sand etc.  I told the gentleman manning his stand (which I later discovered to be the president of the studio) that I love the way the artist was able to use such innovative methods to create the realistic "illusion" of texture by turning something as "delicate" as paper into something as "solid" as granite screes or pebbles or big or fine grains of sand or powder and other geometric shapes and also the very clever way he could create order by making some artificially regular lines like oval, ovoids, circular-shaped hollows to give form and focus to the otherwise formless or chaotic bigger, smaller rectangular or pyramidal looking  "pebbles" or sand and the clever way he created or highlighted the contours of lines, a sense of three dimensionality and of light and shade simply by gradually increasing the colour tint of the relevant "component elements" .. I told him that the way the artist makes use of the hollows, voids and emptiness is very much like the way a Chinese philosopher advises us to make use of emptiness or the void viz.  in the philosophy of Laotzu. I told him that Koreans might  probably have heard of the name of Confucius but not many may have heard of the name of Laotzu but that in my opnion, Laotzu was a much deeper and far wiser philosopher than Confucius. He was very surprised. I told him that if he was interested, he should get a copy of Laotzu's Tao De Ching which is book of just about 4000 words divided into some 80 or so chapters and might well be worth his while to read for its wisdom.  He immeditely asked me to write down the name of the philosopher and the names of some bookstores in Hong Kong where he might find one. After that, I asked him if there was any catalogue of the artist for sale there. But he said that unfortunately, the only catalogue that he had was not for sale. They were printed only as promotion materials for various galleries! I told him I love the works of that artist very much and whether he could somehow ask for permission to sell me one. He said he would have to see if it could be arranged and told me to give him my email address so that when he got something, he would email me. But he told me that if I were interested, then I could find out some pictures of the works of that artist on the internet. After I got back to the office, I did so. This is the website: http://www.google.com/images?q=chun+kwang+Young&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=ynb-S9bgD8-gkQWZv6TFDQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCkQsAQwAw. There you will find many examples of the artist's very creative use of paper! The manager at the booth told me that the artist does not use airbrush at all and insists on hand dyeing each one of his paper artifacts! I really admire his meticulousness. Really wonderfully creative and most impressively beautiful patterns and textures! I find that there is a kind of serenity, a kind of peace, a kind of purity, a kind of distance in his world that is so calming, so soothing that it is almost spiritual. I do not know if he is a Buddhist. To me, it certainly has a very strong Buddhist feel to it. There you find a kind of distant and cleansed emotion that one can only find in the dust free world of Zen contemplation. I do not know if I am right. Even if I were, I do not think he probably knew it. As an artist, he merely feels it, lives it. He may not even think about it! Nor has he the need to. I really must thank my blogger friend.

The gentleman at the booth apparently felt grateful to me for drawing his attention to LaoTzu and asked me if I would like to visit his stand again. I told him I intended to come again on Saturday when I would be less pressed for time. He was so kind. He gave me a guest ticket!