Ko Sin Tung Biography

The series ‘Modern Home Collection’ (2013), for example, presents an array of framed archival inkjet prints of photographed domestic objects, collected from various ad hoc searches on the Internet. Pixelated and aggrandised, the familial items vary from a glass vase to an ornate mug. Despite their disparate aesthetics, what permeates throughout the ‘collection’ is that each element is lived with, that each photograph is not in focus, and that each item has been selected by the owner as a manner of ornamenting his or her respective household. Confronted with these incongruous images of disparate ownership, the viewer has an overarching insight into the aesthetic particulars of multiple households and more crucially is presented, through objecthood, with each milieu’s dictum of taste.

Ko Sin Tung’s relationship with the domestic, however, has an additional focus: that on light. Considering its literal impact on domestic space, as well as its various material and metaphorical manifestations, Ko Sin Tung sets through her works to collect, identify and present it. In her work ‘Sleep Tight’ (2014), for example, she presents a collected piece of starlit wallpaper, which stretched across a wooden frame, has been displaced form its usual wall-mounted abode. Highlighting each constellation in a luminescent yellow colour, Ko Sin Tung intervenes with the material-turned-object, effectively highlighting those individual elements that were explicitly brought into the interior realm so as to add a hint of the outside’s starry luminescence, something that in a congested city like Hong Kong can often be clouded by its surrounding manmade fluorescence.

The impact of condition is furthermore at the heart of Ko Sin Tung’s artistic inquiry. In her work ‘As white as you can 1’ (2013), for example, she carefully paints over the railings captured on a photograph taken of an outside view form an interior domestic milieu. These unassuming sights are reconfigured as liberated, barred of visual intervention. Yet, by this mere painterly act of erasure, Ko Sin Tung has indeed highlighted the exact protected condition in which we live; a circumstance that affects our livelihood, which prevents out ingestion of light, and ultimately conflicts with our persistent appropriation of material objects that one as owner considers beautiful, sentimental or even status-lifting. Indeed this work touches upon the permeating psychology of her work and how it titillates between liberation and effectively pointing to our own tautology. 

Ko Sin Tung is a highly promising, emerging Hong Kong artist. She has previously been exhibited at the 8th Vladivostok Biennale of Visual Arts, Vladivostok, Para/Site, Hong Kong and the Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, amongst other locations. In 2012 she completed a residency at the Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway and has been awarded multiple awards: Chu’s Creative Award (2009), Cheung’s Fine Arts Award (2009) and Professor Mayching Kao Fine Arts Fund (2012). Most recently she received two prestigious grants, one Project Grant (Emerging Artists Scheme) from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (2014) and the Pure Art Foundation Grant 2013-2014 from the Pure Art Foundation, Hong Kong. Ko Sin Tung lives and works in Hong Kong. 

Text courtesy Kiang Malingue.