LAM WONG 王藝林
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Splitting Circle
UNIT 17
June 10 to July 11, 2021
Curated by Tobin Gibson
Artists: Gailan Ngan, Wayne Ngan, Paul P., Lam Wong
Mediation repeatedly emerges as a tactic through which artists disrupt art making practices - not only from a perspective of art history, but also through the reformulation of the artist-object-viewer relationship. Though the idea of “disruption” tends to conjure up visions of chaos and destruction, the mediations and interventions taking place in Splitting Circle are more meditative, poetic and cyclical. In this in-between space, the artists - Gailan Ngan, Wayne Ngan, Paul P. & Lam Wong - present material residuals of absent bodies, and engage in practices that disrupt the histories of materials as well as the socio-cultural spaces that house them. The artists’ works act as archives of gesture, feeling or an impression made by or for the body: the subject is always present, if not always visible.
Fitting for this era of social & environmental decay - commonly dubbed the “Anthropocene” - the earth repeatedly re-emerges in the works present as both informer and subject. In Gailan Ngan’s and Wayne Ngan’s works, the earth functions as both the aesthetic catalyst and the objects’ larger framework; inseparable from the earth, with its plethora of clays, metals, minerals and oxides. In addition, the works’ forms take on mimicries from the surrounding landscape of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. For this exhibition, Unit 17 will exhibit works by Gailan Ngan and Wayne Ngan that may not be immediately recognizable as their signature styles of working, but sit in parallel to their larger practices and material experiences.
Paul P. takes up landscapes in his watercolour depictions of Wreck Beach in Vancouver during intense forest fires in summer 2017, revisiting these memories through the single oil on linen work again in 2018. Landscape as a genre is often laden with ideological baggage, unsurprising given its role in numerous nation building projects from Canada’s Group of Seven to Ansel Adams in the United States. Rather than carrying on any of the pre-existing narratives often found in landscape art, the artist calls upon the liminality of this space as a meeting place of those on the social fringe, a place for queer bonding and licentiousness.
In this exhibition Lam Wong acts as a sort intermediary, who’s paintings of his wife contextualize the art historical subversion of Paul P. while activating Ngans’ ceramics from his own collection through a tea ceremony performance & installation. In dialogue with P.’s works on paper and linen, are Wong’s oil paintings that appropriate Dutch Baroque period pieces. Rather than a white, Dutch woman at work, he portrays an intimate subject of different, & subjective, background in the midst of lace-making (one of these portraits takes place at the artist’s home and another in the Louvre cafe; the museum that houses Vermeer’s The Lacemaker c. 1690-70). This symbolic subversion of the Dutch genre painting calls up all the figures not portrayed in the canonized images of the past - that is, the colonized subject, producing the material wealth of Europe.
Historical lineages and their subsequent shifts are a key focus for Splitting circle. Through exhibiting works by Gailan Ngan and Wayne Ngan alongside each other, this becomes all the more evident in how material practice might shift over time. Another sort of historical burdening that has been lifted in the 21st century is the arts-craft divide. Now fully acknowledged within the larger field of art history, the medium of ceramics has the ability to not only leave poetic traces of the artist's hand & relate to quotidian objects but also articulate a wide range of philosophies or intellectual traditions. Ceramics, like any art, can be activated by the viewer and new meanings can arise from this interaction, physical or non-physical. As ever, this viewer activation is contingent on form. For Splitting circle the artists have used atypical objects as plinths & other presentation methods, such as bricks, wood, paper & mirror, to further contextualize the materials and forms of their artworks.
Through the use of ceramics in Lam’s installation & performance, the artist draws out complex intellectual histories (such as reading the work as a kind of analog to relational aesthetics). Through this practice, meaning is produced through a social environment mediated by the artwork. Lam’s tea ceremony is both the art object but also the nexus in which new meaning is produced - not only through social relationship between artist and viewer - but through the activation of these artworks. The body - in its myriad, absent & invisible forms - is key to Splitting circle.