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Friday, September 25, 2020, 10:38
Diversity matters
By Chitralekha Basu
Friday, September 25, 2020, 10:38 By Chitralekha Basu

As a fresh iteration of Shirley Tse’s exhibition in Venice Biennale 2019 reopens in the West Kowloon Cultural District, the artist tells Chitralekha Basu about the core idea informing her practice and what makes it especially relevant at the time of COVID-19.

Los Angeles-based artist Shirley Tse owes her interest in packaging  material to her growing-up years spent in Hong Kong. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Shirley Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia in 2019. A new iteration of Tse’s Venice exhibition, curated by Christina Li, reopened at M+ Pavilion in the West Kowloon Cultural District last week. Suspended almost immediately after its July launch in Hong Kong, owing to its unfortunate coinciding with the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the city, Stakes and Holders is, once again, open to public viewing. 

COVID-19 lends context to the core idea informing the show, which is about the contingent and unpredictable nature of life. With the exception of the two world wars, never before was the provisional and interdependent nature of human existence made so brutally apparent until a pandemic spread like a multipronged chain reaction, altering the lives of people the world over, one way or another. 

“After COVID-19, I do not even need to think of a better example to illustrate the idea. One infected person can potentially affect everyone around them,” says the Hong Kong-born artist from her Los Angeles home during a Zoom interview. “In a world of interdependence, you are counting on others to maintain the equilibrium.”

Stakes and Holders comprises two installations, which, in turn, are an aggregate of numerous smaller sculptures. The installation titled Negotiated Differences is an assemblage of 393 wooden spindles, attached to each other by 479 3D-printed connectors. Pulling out a single unit from this chain of wooden sculptures is likely to destabilize the ones around it, if not bring down the whole thing altogether. 

The installation’s form has been compared to a rhizome-like growth. Handcrafted on a lathe machine, the spindles are modeled after an enormous variety of recognizable forms — from soy sauce bottles to a scaled-down replica of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. The connectors look like pipe elbows gone crazy. Some of these come with seven openings or more at one end. 

Different materials and sculptural methods used by Shirley Tse are thrown together in Playcourt. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The idea is to present a visual narrative without a clearly defined beginning or end. At first glance, the installation could look like a wanton growth of wooden and 3D-printed objects, mimicking wild shrubbery. The handcrafted spindles come in amazingly disparate, and unique, shapes, ranging from that of a badminton racket to a sound-wave graph. The anthropomorphic figures, entwined around a pillar or appearing to have a conference, seem to emerge from this assortment of wooden bits and bobs only after one is done admiring the incredible diversity of the components and has stepped back for a panoramic view of the installation as a whole. 

Playing with audience’s expectations is very much the name of the game. “Change, improvisation and play are the key things in both installations,” says Tse, as she informs that there never was an original design for either since the idea was to dismantle and reassemble the pieces in a different configuration each time they were installed in a new site. “I am interested in the idea of differences. The changes (in each iteration) are meant to show these differences,” the artist says. 

The significance of the term “negotiated” in the title is no less noteworthy, she adds. For example, at the time of putting together Negotiated Differences in M+ Pavilion, “we negotiated the installation piece’s movement in relation to the ceiling and around the air-condition ducts.”

“So in Negotiated Differences, there are negotiations between people and objects, people and objects in relation to a space, between two spaces (Venice and Hong Kong), and space and time as well,” Tse says. 

Negotiated Differences features 393 wooden spindles, held together by 479 3D-printed connectors. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Play is the thing

The co-existence of heterogeneous elements is even more conspicuous in Playcourt — the second installation of the show. In it are found wooden rackets with loosened netting, bikers’ helmets enmeshed in a net of plastic security loops, a lump of jade balanced on a folded sandbag, among other objects, which are strewn on and around two aluminum bleachers. The scene suggests a badminton game set-up, but one can’t be too sure if the match is about to begin or already over, notes Tse. 

Playcourt also includes three sculptures from Tse’s 2016 show, Lift Me Up So That I Can See You Better — a homage to Oscar Wilde’s heart-rending short story, The Happy Prince, in which trying to redress societal inequities ultimately destroys the protagonist. In one of these, called Jade Tongue, two polystyrene blocks are mounted on a metal stand, to create the impression of a robotic face. A slab of nephrite — sometimes called the poor man’s jade — sticks out like a tongue, as if to mock the sculpture’s own enterprise to pass off as almost human. 

“This show brings together all the material I have used and all the sculptural methods I have explored — carving, wood work, mold-making, 3D printing, assemblage — to show that contemporary sculptural practice can be very diverse,” says Tse.   

Indeed, one could probably read Playcourt as a slice of Tse’s autobiography. It references her growing-up years — playing badminton on the streets of ’70s Hong Kong, watching the automated movement of cranes at the Kwai Chung container terminal on her way back home after a night out with friends in the 80s and wondering about the mountain-loads of packaging materials used to wrap cargo in transit — a curiosity that would eventually lead to her research in plastic and polymers and the extensive use of such materials in her works. The somewhat eerie-looking shuttlecocks with dark vanilla bean pods for plumes and a red rubber base are a throwback to Tse’s ancestors who worked in rubber plantations in British Malaya and vanilla farms in Tahiti, alluding to the narratives of exploitation associated with such forms of labor. 

Stakes and Holders, now showing at M+ Pavilion, is sculptor Shirley Tse’s visual commentary on the theme of heterogeneity and connectedness of things. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Philosophy of art

For an artist and academic who has lived in the United States for 30 years, Tse is acutely conscious of her working-class ancestry and migrant status. “Being an immigrant in America, I feel I am always in-between, like a piece of Styrofoam,” she says.

Although she opted for studying sculpture over philosophy when she went to graduate school in the US because at that point words had seemed like an inadequate medium of self-expression, her fondness for word play is evident in the way Tse likes to name her works. What was Stakeholders in Venice is parsed into Stakes and Holders in Hong Kong. Playcourt contains connotations of both justice being served and courtship. Her 2003 exhibition, titled Does Cinderblock Dream of Being Styrofoam, invokes a cult sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick. 

She continues to draw inspiration from her reading of philosophical texts, especially those by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. And although she stops short of mentioning Jacques Derrida, I imagine the man whose concept of differance (spelled with an “a”) was about the distinction, and divergence, between words and their intended meanings is on her reading list as well. 

Click here to read excerpts from an exclusive interview with Shirley Tse

If yo go

Shirley Tse: Stakes and Holders

Curated by Christina Li with Doryun Chong. 

Dates: Through Nov 1, 2020

Venue: M+ Pavilion, Art Park, West Kowloon Cultural District

www.westkowloon.hk/en/stakesandholders/shirley-tse-stakes-and-holders


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