困在。 Being Trapped. A graduation work.

Being Trapped (SO Ching-yee, 2011) in Beijing

I thought that's the end of the School of Creative Media (SCM) on the old campus, the end of my 13 years with this basement, also the end of my initiation period into art education and art-making at SCM, now that we have moved to the spectacular Creative Media Centre designed by Daniel Libeskind. But the spirit lingers... A door that freezes by itself and a clumsy chair on a lowly mound quietly dwell the abandoned garage space -- thanks to two Critical Intermedia students, So Ching-yee and Fiona Lee, who decided to stage their graduation thesis work in the place where they have spent their past four years as an art student.

So Ching-yee, whose graduation thesis I supervised, finally completed her work Being Trapped in an oral presentation yesterday. The final work on the spot was a sculpture, a rugged chair frame mounted on unleveled cement and concrete, dimly yet dramatically lit in the dark, in the newly evacuated former common area of SCM's. Barely for a seat -- and only if you struggle to climb up and allow your legs to dangle, the chair is somewhat larger than life size and yet just big and strong enough for one. The entire set-up invites me to stay at a distance to look, observe and meditate, rather than to relate to it or to sit on it.

To me, what really makes the work interesting is the staggering and prolonging life of the chair on the mound, its transposition from space to place, and the very different meanings and effects it picks up as it travels. The sculpture was made in Beijing, shipped to Hong Kong, and since then transported to various temporary storage spaces, including a street presence in the busiest part of Mongkok in the pedestrianized zone over the past weekend. In Mongkok, the artist was present with her work, inviting people to try the chair, talk to her and leave comments.

In its initial phase, the piece was personally motivated. The young artist's intimate thoughts about her own inadequacy to express and communicate, as well as her handicapped feelings being an exchange student in Beijing, evolved into a thorough process of working out shut-off emotions via 'massaging' physical materials. The 'journey' of the chair afterwards to me is not an epilogue, but the beginning of a different life, a new trajectory. I am therefore a bit puzzled by how Ching-yee has turned the chair-on-the-mound's adventures into just a back-story for the spectacle of the sculpture. There is a definite struggle between keeping the chair-on-the-mound as a pure object of intimate expression and exploring its performative potentials. Whatever she will do, I would not want to see the performative aspect as just the documentation, or stories that need to be told or added of the sculpture.

Whatever the case is in future, I am moved by the thoroughness of the creative process, and the rigorous strategies to give multiple lives to this piece of work, to sustain its presence, and to turn the chair-on-the-mound into an element of an open generative process.

For the artist's documentation of the work process and what happened in Mongkok over the weekend, visit her site: http://chingyso3.wordpress.com/

(Linda C.H. Lai)