Gabriel LEUNG 梁思鳴: And with the benefit of hindsight
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Gabriel LEUNG
And with the benefit of hindsight 11 January - 22 February 2014 Gallery EXIT is pleased to present “And with the benefit of hindsight”, Gabriel Leung’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Zigzagging between calm and detached contemplations, photographs of radioactive artificial flowers, suspended bags of self-sustainable ecosystems, paintings of contaminated clouds from power plant explosions and copper plates with news of Greenland’s Iceberg breaking off are just some of the visual clues of Leung’s inquiries over the ubiquitous and paradoxical limits of progress. The depicted upside-down reality exhibits nature treated as the involuntary beneficiary of a temporary suspension of civilization. Nature is in turn portrayed as inheritor of a space freed from its civil constrains and made hospitable for it to take over and flourish. This suspension of civilization is what French philosopher Alain Badiou refers to as the ‘crisis of negation’. That is the crisis of the ability to negate the established order and by reflex to think of a new kind of order. In a way, the paradisiac and yet contaminated scenario depicted in the exhibition departs from the ashes of such a crisis and presents the unintentional aftermath of political and economical deadlocks. By focusing on the periphery of such catastrophic events (i.e. nature), the artist seems to suggest a kind of hindsight, a lingering in the interval of events. In this threshold of future-past moments, the viewers are seized by the utter silence of these disasters and faced with reality assaulted by surreality. Gabriel Leung (b. 1983) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Hong Kong. His works address the ambiguity of information transmission and reception. The artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art MFA in 2013. His recent exhibitions include Glasgow Malmö International Artists’ Exchange, Glasgow, (2013), How Many Shades Would An Artist Pack For Holidays, Nicosia, Cyprus, (2013); An Eye For An I, New City Space, Glasgow, UK (2013), Beyond the Wall – 2012 Jeonju Photo Festival (Contemporary Chinese Photography), S. Korea, (2012) and Transnational Art 2012, Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Osaka, Japan (2012). |