To mark the closing of ‘Liquid Ground’, the curators invite three participating artists—Travis Jeppesen, Yi Xin Tong, Alice Wang—to share their practice, focusing on the works they contributed to the exhibition. In ‘Liquid Ground’, Jeppesen has transformed a section of the exhibition space into a display room of a faux-archaeological museum housing a series of calligraphic works. Titled The Sagosian Markmakers: An Anthropological Interlude (2021), this new commission is Jeppesen’s attempt to ridicule the colonial fetishisation of indigenous cultures while also paying homage to the anarchic nature of many extant island cosmologies worldwide and throughout history. Meanwhile, in the video The Birth of Julung-julung: The Aquatic Dragon (2019–20), exhibited alongside two sculptural objects from his ongoing ‘Petrified Sea’ series, Yi Xin Tong ruminates on the changing ecology and spirit world of Southeast Asia. Alice Wang’s table sculpture Untitled (2021), another new commission, is the artist’s formalist interpretation of the exhibition theme. Inspired by a section of the Los Angeles River the artist frequented last summer, the work extends the notions of surface and ground beyond the urban context into the cosmological and the illusionistic.
The event will also include a brief virtual tour led by the curators for those living outside of Hong Kong unable to travel and view the exhibition due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.
About the artists:
Travis Jeppesen (b.1979, Fort Lauderdale; lives and works in Shanghai) is a writer, artist, and currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Industry at Shanghai Jiaotong University. His books include Victims (2003), The Suiciders (2013), and Bad Writing (2019). In addition, he is known as the creator of object-oriented writing, a metaphysical form of writing-as-embodiment that attempts to channel the inner lives of objects. Jeppesen’s calligraphic work, rooted in his notions of ‘scrawl’ and ‘bad writing,’ has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Yi Xin Tong (b.1988 in Mount Lu; lives and works in Chilliwack) creates objects, moving images, and sound to understand himself, to study human culture’s dynamic relationship with nature and, with a wry sense of humour, to intervene in societal beliefs in value, decency, and rationality. This year, he has been making art models in the kitchen during the day and shooting videos in the wilderness at night.
Over the past several years, Alice Wang (b.1983, Xi’an; lives and works in Los Angeles and Shanghai) has been working with the mantra ‘planet Earth is plummeting towards the Sun while just missing it.’ Bringing together physics, geology, astronomy, phenomenology, Eastern metaphysics, and the practices of meditation and yoga, Wang examines ontological questions related to the nature of being through a materialist conceptual approach in sculpture and film.