Matthew Ronay and Vaevae Chan's Tactile Confirmations
It was a serendipitous transition, moving from one high-rise to another to see two shows in distinctive Hong Kong settings that tapped into similar concerns: Matthew Ronay's first solo with Perrotin Hong Kong and Vaevae Chan's installation at the artist's space, Juen Juen Gung.
Matthew Ronay, The Tombs Are Upset (2023). Basswood, dye, gouache, primer, flocking, plastic, steel, epoxy, HMA, and pen. 86.4 x 360.7 x 42.5 cm. Exhibition view: The Tombs Are Upset, Perrotin Hong Kong (5 May–10 June 2023). Courtesy the artist and Perrotin. Photo: Ringo Cheung.
Both exhibitions represent journeys into subterranean, psychodynamic worlds. In Ronay's case, The Tombs Are Upset (5 May–10 June 2023) is named after a 2023 landscape of hand-carved polychromed basswood biomorphic forms assembled on a three-and-a-half metre pedestal. United by white, yellow, orange, red, and purple shades, interlocking shapes evoke the contours and textures of underwater coral habitats.
A paradoxically inanimate life force charges Ronay's forms. Like the curved, peach-toned branch from which a spike of black hairs push down from a globular tip like an unkempt nostril, and the yellow lyre-shaped branches stacked in rows of three with mollusc-like eyeballs balancing at each tip.
On one end of the pedestal is a pair of smooth jaundiced legs with fine black hairs drawn on, bent to form limbic pyramids. These realist outliers recall Ronay's comparison of his urge to add, combine, and sequence with restless leg syndrome: a compulsion to move, or in this case, create, that counters what the artist describes as an equal urge to reduce, rarefy, and sublimate.
'The tendencies to reduce or add appear to be at odds with each other,' he wrote for Ligatures, his 2022 exhibition at Casey Kaplan, New York, 'when it is likely they are two banks of the same river'. That tension defines the mediation of precarity and balance contained by Ronay's interconnected objects.
Ronay aligns his sculptures with Carolee Schneemann's description of 'tactile confirmation', referring to people seeking refuge from 'the somnambulism of contemporary life' through physical connection. There is no space to react to the paralytically isolating deluge of bad news, Schneemann said in 1970, in an observation that resonates with the present. 'You're reading some horror in your newspaper while eating your doughnut. And if you were a natural animal, you'd at least scream for 15 minutes....'1
That sense of a suppressed or sublimated primal scream resonates with Chan's She Told Me to Head to the Sea (16 February–31 May 2023). As does the transition from Perrotin to the San Po Kong industrial neighbourhood where Chan's show is located, which invokes Schneemann's description of terror being transmuted to chronic numbing.
Getting to Perrotin in the first place is an exercise of procedural submission. Visitors register at K11 ATELIER's reception to receive a keycard allowing passage through security turnstiles and access to a buttonless elevator that takes you to your visit's specific floor, which Perrotin shares with Humansa's eye centre.
Part of an elevated healthcare concept founded by art world mega-patron Adrian Cheng, the developer behind the K11 brand, the scent of disinfection wafts into the gallery where Ronay's sculptures seem to quiver amid pristine white walls and light wood floors.
A parallel sense of protocol defines Chan's show. After registering online, visits are confirmed by emails directing visitors to the 17th floor of the Max Trade Centre, armed with a door code for room 1703.
Both exhibitions represent journeys into subterranean, psychodynamic worlds.
Security won't stop you when entering the building, nor is anyone on the 17th floor to direct you to the right space. It might take a minute to realise 1703 is actually a line of four doors, three of which open up to lenticular walls printed with waterfall images accompanied by the sounds of rushing water.
The transformation of rote procedure into a quest amplifies inside the space, where Chan has created a cave that admits no more than three people at a time. Armed with a hand torch, visitors are invited to explore the nooks in rocky walls, which host black plastic, metal, and ceramic objects, from animal figurines and black ceramic steamed buns to household items like a Toilet Duck bottle.
There are statuettes of deities, too, like the war god Guan Yu and the bald, bearded Shouxing, the high-dome foreheaded member of the Fulushou star-god trinity.
Statues of that trio hang from the ceiling in a corner beyond the cave. They look to a desk with a bronze bell, whose activation opens a door to another room. There, a blue spiral light shuts off and a tiger's growl triggers She Told Me to Head to the Sea (2022), a video where Chan, wearing a tiger bodysuit, enacts this cave's allegory.
An introduction marked by scenes of Chan crouched under a powerful waterfall describes a tiger-woman who woke up in pain—the project emerged from the artist's grief of losing her father in 2018, and then losing Hong Kong as she knew it following the 2019 protests.
A sharp edit showing the artist hanging over pipes crossing a nullah follows. Like an octopus strung on a line, her limp body jerks to the sounds and images of a knife cutting a heart on a butcher's table.
We learn of a wounded being who digs herself the very cave located in room 1703, and is comforted by a jar of Tiger Balm ointment. Chan's tiger-woman then appears on the grounds of Tiger Balm founder Aw Boon Haw's Hong Kong mansion, once home to a popular public garden that featured a terrifying diorama of the 18 levels of Buddhist hell.
With sculptural sequences framed by artificial rockscapes fusing Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist concepts, Aw apparently wanted Tiger Balm Garden to connect Hong Kong people to their heritage during Britishcolonisation.
Effectively an act of resistance against occupation, his creation recalls Ronay's sculptural impulse to mediate the tensions between erasure and continuity, which Chan locates in the metaphorical heart of a fast-changing city. —[O]
