EJAR Artist-in-Residency Programme 2024/25 Featuring Artist: LEUNG Hoi Shun
Curated and Presented by EJAR
Venue Support by EJAR
Dec 2024 - Jan 2025
Venue Support by EJAR
Dec 2024 - Jan 2025
This residency program fosters a variety of expressions and tensions, from physicality tomentality, interwoven with the designed and improvised body movement through the use ofsymbolic and physical bound constructed by emerging artist Leung Hoi Shun. During thethree-week residency, Shun has created a "two-sided heroic" character for herself toeliminate the daily unpleasantness she has been dealing with. The whole ironictransformative process manifests in performative actions and site-specific video installation,where her bodily expressions serve as a powerful commentary on the complexity andirresistibility of her confrontation in everyday's challenges.
The formulated constructive installation plays as the vestige where the room is calminglyempty, yet one can experience the unspeakable sense of suppression and powerlessness.The artist’s body, as the carrier, has always borne the brunt of cruelty and mercilessness asinevitable rebound — sometimes entertaining, sometimes self-destructive, sometimesreflective, and most of the time contradictory. From the video, we see the artist's intention ofbalancing her binary opposition through bodily expression: spontaneity out of the regulatedcontext represents a gesture of resistance; repetitive movement as motif and as obscuresymbol can only be associated under the artist's personal subtle framework. The everyday'schallenges of the artist's situation might not necessarily be described or shared accurately,yet fear and feeling of uncomfortability could be universal to all of us.
Look.
In this space:
Objects for the fragmented testimony,
fragments misplaced.
Bodies perform what words cannot.
Screens flicker with what once was.
*
"Look, Vanilla" Noir says.
"Look, Noir" Vanilla says.
Noir knows that Vanilla hates that color, hates that flag.
Vanilla knows that Noir likes that window, likes that shadow.
*
Alter-ego without Freud’s shadow,
a phantom twin, simple dialectics akin.
Liberation becomes weight —
the mask that conceals ( ),
the mask that binds ( ).
*
"Why did you lift yourself up, Noir?"
"And why did you choke yourself up, Vanilla?"
*
Sartre’s No Exit:
No door besides the promised ones,
no escape from the circular mirror.
The gaze ricochets:
I see
you see
me seeing you.
*
"I see you Noir"
"I see you Vanilla"
"You see me Noir"
"You see me Vanilla"
*
Submission as mere choreography.
Don’t think, just
*
"Look, Vanilla"
"Look, Noir"
At the skin of things.
At the way we are permitted to see.
At the absence left behind.
And fill up the bubbles
that had already exploded
with whatever untold.
*
"Thank you for looking, Noir"
"Thank you for looking, Vanilla"
Thank you for being here.
The formulated constructive installation plays as the vestige where the room is calminglyempty, yet one can experience the unspeakable sense of suppression and powerlessness.The artist’s body, as the carrier, has always borne the brunt of cruelty and mercilessness asinevitable rebound — sometimes entertaining, sometimes self-destructive, sometimesreflective, and most of the time contradictory. From the video, we see the artist's intention ofbalancing her binary opposition through bodily expression: spontaneity out of the regulatedcontext represents a gesture of resistance; repetitive movement as motif and as obscuresymbol can only be associated under the artist's personal subtle framework. The everyday'schallenges of the artist's situation might not necessarily be described or shared accurately,yet fear and feeling of uncomfortability could be universal to all of us.
Look.
In this space:
Objects for the fragmented testimony,
fragments misplaced.
Bodies perform what words cannot.
Screens flicker with what once was.
*
"Look, Vanilla" Noir says.
"Look, Noir" Vanilla says.
Noir knows that Vanilla hates that color, hates that flag.
Vanilla knows that Noir likes that window, likes that shadow.
*
Alter-ego without Freud’s shadow,
a phantom twin, simple dialectics akin.
Liberation becomes weight —
the mask that conceals ( ),
the mask that binds ( ).
*
"Why did you lift yourself up, Noir?"
"And why did you choke yourself up, Vanilla?"
*
Sartre’s No Exit:
No door besides the promised ones,
no escape from the circular mirror.
The gaze ricochets:
I see
you see
me seeing you.
*
"I see you Noir"
"I see you Vanilla"
"You see me Noir"
"You see me Vanilla"
*
Submission as mere choreography.
Don’t think, just
*
"Look, Vanilla"
"Look, Noir"
At the skin of things.
At the way we are permitted to see.
At the absence left behind.
And fill up the bubbles
that had already exploded
with whatever untold.
*
"Thank you for looking, Noir"
"Thank you for looking, Vanilla"
Thank you for being here.
