Kwan Sheung Chi Pinpoints Paranoia

For 20 years, Kwan Sheung Chi has pursued an apparently fruitless endeavour in his native Hong Kong: challenging power with acts of absolute mundanity. He has tried to drink hot chocolate with a fork, domesticized a flag raising ceremony and performed an ‘A to Z’ of failed suicides, aligning the futility of making work with daily living under unchosen politics. His latest solo show, ‘Not retrospective,’ staged across three rooms at Kiang Malingue, can be startlingly melancholic but then idles in its continuation of this effort.                                             

The first gallery presents a concise overview of Kwan’s practice – albeit minus his more political projects. The earliest work on display here is a selection of exercise books from the series ‘I Am Artist’ (2003-2004), in which Kwan repeatedly scrawled the titular phrase, either as declaration or self-affirmation, over a year. The pressure of being an artist in a ‘money-worshiping’ city, as he wrote in 2002, is exemplified in One Million and Two Million (both 2013), a series of slickly looped videos of Turkish lira, Japanese yen and other currencies being counted.

Today, for those living in Hong Kong, the threat of censorship and further consequences is ever-present. Such is alluded to in the darkened, interrogation room-style installation of the artist’s five new videos (all 2023). The first video, aptly titled Handover, opens with a theatre of hands passing around a drinking glass made of ice and filled with water. The cast is the artist, his wife and his son, but we don’t see more of them than their hands, nor do we witness much water dripping nor the growing puddle below: the glass disappears before our eyes. When the last drop is shaken onto Kwan’s hands, we realize, almost disbelievingly, that something has been lost.

Two further videos, Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated and In Defence of Kwan Sheung Chi, flatly adopt the language of bureaucracy. The former intones via teleprompter threats of submission in a series of progressively garbled international accents, barely resembling English by the end; the latter is a staged press briefing, in which Kwan’s wife stands at a lectern using stock-language terms to denounce critics and traitors in an ironic intonation of patriotism. Both videos can be interpreted as critique, with the repetition rendering their messages meaningless. But is Kwan pinpointing the paranoia or yielding to it?  

More effective are I Will Not Make Any Political Art. I Did Not Make Any Political Art and Three Black Pens, which play simultaneously on facing monitors. In the former, Kwan’s wife writes the titular statements in jumbled handwriting as her son repeats them haltingly in the background. Is she making a promise to herself or is this a pre-emptive teaching moment for her son? Perhaps both. Meanwhile, in a return to the disembodied hands of Handover, Three Black Pens sees each family member holding a Sharpie while attempting to mark each other’s pens, mostly failing and staining their hands with ink. The denial and obliteration of the two videos together is starkly forlorn.

‘Not retrospective’ plays with nostalgia for an old Hong Kong, when Kwan’s more incisive work was possible; for unfamiliar viewers, however, the show can feel light. Kwan has always succeeded as an artist of emotional and political gridlock, mirroring reality with absurdity. Now that making provocative artwork in Hong Kong is so risky, will he keep pointing out the futility of the task, or find new modes of circumvention? In the last room of the show, the lectern from In Defence of Kwan Sheung Chi hangs from the ceiling. Made from shoddily painted cardboard, it is literally an unremarkable work. Now, that’s a good joke.

Kwan Sheung Chi's ‘Not retrospective’ is on view at Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong until 24 February 2024.

_{Main image: ​Kwan Sheung Chi, ‘Not retrospective’, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong  ​}