Lee Wing Ki and Simo Tse: Observations in Katharsis
Akin to a conversation between two artists, a story of the human condition unfolds in Lee Wing Ki and Simo Tse's Katharsis: The Body Forgets, The Body Remembers (15 October–28 November 2021), a satellite exhibition of the Hong Kong International Photo Festival 2021.
Exhibition view: Lee Wing Ki and Simo Tse, Katharsis: The Body Forgets, The Body Remembers, EJAR, Hong Kong (15 October–28 November 2021). Courtesy EJAR.
The intimate photography exhibition is organised by EJAR, an experimental gallery and studio space housed on the fourth floor of an industrial walk-up on an unmarked street in Kung Ngam Village, Hong Kong.
Central to the show is Simo Tse's only presented work, Living in a Blur (2020)—a video installation on two handheld-sized screens brought to eye level on a light stand. A 12-minute video is shown on each screen—one in 'normal' order and sequence, and the other in reverse.
On display is an edited weave of at-home workouts, ASMR sounds, and footage of the artist moving between close-ups of a bare body, face, and muscles. Emanating from faded scene-cuts and morphed body positions are feelings of tension, anxiety, and discomfort. The audience can hear sounds of heavy breathing amid clips of stretched ribs.
Lee Wing Ki's more placid works sit on either side of Living in a Blur. Like the central video installation where two screens face each other, images of naked bodies are placed across the two sides of the gallery space in loose symmetry—nine on either side—to highlight the cyclical nature of the human condition. Of rebirth and death as a process of catharsis.
No photo in Lee's series reveals any faces, exemplifying a sense of collective humanity through anonymity—a purification of sorts, that elevates the body to symbolic form.
Lee's first piece in the show is a dramatised, black-and-white image of the body seen at ground level, positioned next to the exhibition text, printed with white text on black. Negative – 01 (2021) is a close-up of a naked torso with contorted ribs and limbs, its title describing the inverted colours of an undeveloped image.
Resonating from faded scene-cuts and morphed body positions are feelings of tension, anxiety, and discomfort.
In contrast, large prints on cardboard reach chest height: a total of six black-and-white photographs that lean against the white-walled gallery, at times in pairs. Katharsis (Lean – 02) (2021) depicts a curved back with a grey background and is the darkest-toned piece in the series; a shade whose intensity is heightened by Katharsis (Lean – 01) (2021), which is paired by its side, of a masculine, fully naked backside.
Obvious in the photograph Katharsis (Hug – 02) (2021) are the pixels left over from blowing up of the digital image to a metre in height, as are the blur in the shadows of the body and its skin tone as a result of the retouching process. This added effect adds to a lo-key suspense that infuses this show, with its blurred lines between body and affect.
There is a stillness coming from the opposite wall, with a trio of salted prints hung in small white frames that are brought to eye level on their large plywood mounts.
Each work is screen printed from negative film onto watercolour paper and treated under sunlight and salt to produce black, white, and grey portraits, again of the naked body. Among them is Karthasis (Cleanse – 02), which shows a close-up of a single hand, fingers spread over a shadow of itself.
The 19th-century screen-printing technique used by Lee here embodies the process of purification in its form, as noted in the poetic exhibition text, which reads: 'Catharsis. A process to purify, pleasure and recognise oneself. Salt to cleanse; body to be revealed.'
Here, the process of development—of creating a photographic capture of the human form—becomes a point of purification: a process of revelation. —[O]
