【Vagitus – Hong Kong New Artist Series】Looking Through The SurfaceJCCAC
Looking Through The Surface is the first solo show by Wing Tung So in Hong Kong. It features new paintings which blend perspective and theatricality through enigmatic illusory forms.
Expanding on her fascination with the process of intensely composed digital collage and its metamorphosis to painting, Wing explores the motif of the architectural window in her works. A rhetoric yet in its tangible manifestation, it is about surfaces found in frames and the transformative nature of a surface: how a two-dimensional surface imitates the qualities of a three-dimensional space. Disassembling and reconstructing fragments into meticulous, vibrant compositions, her canvases are ablaze with colour – bursts of exuberant fuchsia, lemon yellow, blue, violet to hues of periwinkle dance across, engulfing the edges.
Wing’s source material stems from her immediate surroundings and found imagery – cropping, reforming, and compressing – until mere traces of architectural remnants remain. Controlled, gestural mark making has also taken shape on her expanses, instinctively extracted from the post-production processes of her digital renderings. At their core, Wing’s paintings embrace the aesthetic and atmospheric qualities of paint, the dramatic saturation, and celebrate the particularities of painting and digital collage. In the context of medium specificity and the post-medium condition, she recognises their autonomies, yet the moment the two forms become inextricable is ever so alluring: the flatness of paints and the glimmering sheen of screens.
/About Wing Tung So (L7-14)/
Wing Tung So is a contemporary artist whose playful articulations are often marked by the visual obscurity of vernacular and iconic façades. Working with painting and video, it is a translation of planes of multidimensionality: when surface moulds into space, painting reacts with video, when one medium consumes the other. Scenes of our contemporary city in flux take centre stage in Wing's practice, from an active engagement with landscapes that defy singular planes to ambiguous expanses conjured by mirrored reflections and transparencies in glass architecture. From optical plausibility to perspectival impossibility, she mediates the fluid relations between material and virtual spaces.
The artist's exploration of postmodern architecture introduces a fantastical peculiarity to her colour palette. The modulation of colour originates from the façades of her homeland Hong Kong, yet there is a striking resonance to the 80s’ aesthetic and movement of pixelated screens. Capturing the rhapsody of colours, in fluorescent neon hues, raw primary tones, to soft pastels, the psychedelic ethereality lends to the deliberate disorientation and warped geometry.
Wing graduated from Central Saint Martins, BA Fine Art (2019), London, United Kingdom. She has exhibited in Loading, Freya Fine Art Gallery (2021), Free Range: States of Mind, The Old Truman Brewery (2019), Degree Show One, Central Saint Martins (2019), Imagined Landscapes, Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Heath (2019), Made in Arts London Annual Exhibition, TM Lighting Gallery (2018). Wing currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
More Details: https://www.jccac.org.hk/?a=doc&id=8506
