ANDREW LUK, CHU TEH-CHUN

Redeveloped for the gallery space, Andrew Luk’s large-scale installation Haunted, Salvaged is a giant suspended mobile with disfigured orb-like objects hanging from steel branches that stretch outwards above a sea of sculptures. Constructed using layers of carved and corroded polystyrene, the orbs are arranged to compose an artificial constellation of imagined psycho-geographic entropic accumulation. Underneath the swiveling orbs, smooth cement geometric blocks and perforated stainless steel rise from the ground, each interjected by exposed, cactus-like, tumorous blobs of dried expanding spray foam. Closer inspection also reveals that many of the protrusions are built using concrete artifacts of recently antiquated devices, such as Walkmans and Gameboys - remnants of civilization embedded within a futuristic past-present wasteland.

In aggregate, Andrew Luk’s installation is a floating, fictitious representation of an urban landscape filled with anthropogenic contamination. The installation binds the natural and the man-made together, owing to the artist’s realisation that not only is humanity a part of the natural world, the entities and forces of humanity are as well. For example, despite culture and technology being implements for contemplation and actualisation, their organic development acts biologically with inherent needs. They exert effects as well as create byproducts. Contained in these entities is also the capacity for self-destruction, an inevitable stage in the cyclical progression of nature and evolution. As humans, we are both participants and subjects of this process.

On the other side of the gallery, Chu Teh-Chun’s broad expressive brush strokes elicit vast unexplored landscapes that are illustrated through a deeply rooted consideration of the traditions of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Nature unfurls within Chu Teh-Chun’s canvases by distorting the viewer’s expectation of horizon and perspective. His poetic expression of natural expanse uncovers realms of the abstract form and in doing so conjure an alternative interpretation of the medium and its capabilities. His artwork is immersed in the core of nature and landscape while remaining true to abstraction.