Nov 25, 2023–Feb 24
Kwan Sheung Chi: Not retrospective
Kiang Malingue
Hong Kong

Has Kwan Sheung Chi ever had an “original” idea as an artist? It would appear not, if you had visited Kwan’s “Not retrospective” at Kiang Malingue, a presentation riffing on the artist’s earlier prematurely self-aggrandizing exhibitions “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi,” by the 22-year-old art student in 2002, and “100 things, a little retrospective” in 2012. This decade, the now-middle-aged artist’s self-initiated “Not retrospective” comprised (as the gallery’s text conspicuously phrased it) “less than 40” previous works and several recent video installations that continue the artist’s glorious tradition of hackneyed riffs on conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s and thinly veiled political allegories.

You could understand the “less than” quality of Kwan’s “not retrospective” retrospective immediately from the outset. Pathetically draped with a strand of masking tape above the show’s entrance was a small, hapless banner of three triangular flags made from the covers of Karl Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital, a work redundantly titled Karl Marx’s Capital (2015). This display ironically signposted something like “a critique of capitalism is happening in this space” while also inadvertently suggesting that only a book-cover-level depth of critique would be in operation—as became obvious enough almost immediately. Facile, derivative appropriation is obviously Kwan’s main interest and comically marginal ability as an artist. It’s all charmingly groan-inducing, like art-school pranks that have become, over time, dad jokes.

This mercifully compact survey, staged in a shipping-container-sized ersatz “white cube” space built within Kiang Malingue’s larger industrial space, showcased more than 20 years of Kwan’s egregiously self-referential practice. “I am an artist” Kwan repetitively, narcissistically printed by hand in English and Chinese, line after line in school notebooks more than 20 years ago in a series of works titled I am an artist (2003). Perhaps this work was an “exercise” in artistic translation in post-handover Hong Kong (the British-looking school exercise books were labeled as those for his “BA in fine art” from Chinese University). Does rote repetition make one a “postcolonial” artist? Belatedness is, after all, another oft-recycled trope of the postcolonial condition.

In the quasi-parodic shop-like display of “Not Retrospective” “homage” was too superficially generous a word for Kwan’s wink-wink blatant rip-offs and remixes of conceptual strategies and tropes devised by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, and Felix Gonzales-Torres, with superficial references to the iconic works of Hong Kong’s Antonio Mak and the first video artist in China, Zhang Peili, among other canonical male artists from art history. Exemplifying this mini purgatory of “bad” artworks was a foggy mirror sprayed with hair spray and the sand-papered product containers beneath it in Wet Mirror and Four Bottles (2023/15). A derivation of Joseph Kosuth’s iconic works pairing objects and photographs of objects, Little flowers in a Duralex glass Duralex (2023/15), is a basic gag with the dead-looking artificial flowers in a vase appearing next to a photo of living-looking fake flowers in the same vase. More eye-rolls come with the knife-sharpening stone painted to look like an extended Marlboro cigarette box and a lumpy cast appendage paired with a photo of a knife cutting an image of a toe. There was a pair of torn black-and-white photos of Kwan and partner, artist Wong Wai Yin, posing like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, respectively (complete with a fake Warhol-esque Brillo Box in the background), each completed by a pencil-drawn reproduction of the missing parts.

Kwan’s best Gonzales-Torres’s knock-off is his version of the late Cuban-American’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), with two pairs of cheap-looking identical plastic clocks showing different times (in one pair, one of them is slowed to 61 seconds per minute; in the other, one clock runs backward), stripping the latter’s practice of its pathos of the HIV-AIDS epidemic’s impacts on the gay community. A video monitor showed the Bruce Nauman-esque video from 2011 of two hands (Kwan’s and Wong’s) attempting to clap continuously, offering a “brilliant” metaphor for collaboration or partnership. In the vein of Duchampian self-referentiality is the cheap-looking perfume container that once housed artist’s sweat as if it were a luxury product, L’art s’évapore (formerly known as Eau dévoilé) (2023/12). Collectively, these art-school-grade riffs on famous conceptual projects are impressively facile.

In Kwan’s shows, the worst joke is always yet to come. After a crash course in the artist’s past projects, viewers stepped into a space with new works prefaced by a notebook page written with the repentant sentences: “I will [or, alternately, ‘did’] not make any political art.” This litany of repentances and pledges functions like a self-initiated campaign of communist-style self-criticism, or elementary-school detention. These vows reappear in a video bearing the eponymous title I Will Not Make Any Political Art. I Did Not Make Any Political Art (2020), the perfect encapsulation of Hong Kong’s post-protest, National Security Law-era where Hong Kong’s political and cultural sectors were forced to disavow any inkling of non-“patriotic” intentions past, present, or future. 

In the history of performance art, audiences have often subjected to long bouts of repetitive, jouissance-sapping speeches or actions meant to manifest a profound but usually obscure theoretical exploration. Working in that august enervating tradition is Kwan’s new three-channel video installation bearing the arc-cliché title of Handover (2023). Shot in black-and-white, it portrays three sets of hands passing around a water glass-shaped mold made from ice, until it melts completely. Keeping in mind Kwan’s pledge not to “make any more political art,” a viewer would find themselves in the awkward position of trying not to find significance behind the three parties here (two parents, one child), the title, the idea of the disappearance of the fragile melting object as it is passed back and forth between the two larger powers.

Similarly, one might find an allegory in the frantic rush to self-censorship that grips much of Hong Kong today in a video of three hands holding permanent markers that attempt to blot one another out in the video, Three black pens (2023), if author hadn’t (wink, wink) declared his unwillingness to engage in such art. Appropriation allows a measure of disavowal, of course. The nearly 12-minute video Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated (2023), comprising repeated textual refrains on screen and spoken by AI voices in various accents of the dialogue lifted from Star Trek of the alien group the Borg’s declaration to their subjects, is again humorous and tedious in equal measures—while being overt and yet covert at the same time. “What is the ‘Borg’ in this allegory?,” wonders no viewer.

In this new era for arts and culture in Hong Kong, the “patriotic” are beyond reproach. The female spokesperson (Wong Wai Yin, again) wearing a blue suit and standing behind a lectern performs her duty in the video In Defence of Kwan Sheung Chi (2023). Speaking in halting Mandarin, she addressed the topic directly, refuting the “unsubstantiated criticisms” of Kwan’s artworks as “irresponsible, discreditable manipulations, totally unfounded and one-sided . . . sabotage” of the “prosperity and stability of Hong Kong in the name of so-called ‘freedom of speech’” that “not only undermines our fundamental interests, but also openly challenges our cultural traditions.” Such “dissidents who try to manipulate and sabotage the relationship between the artist and the public” are but an “extremely small amount of people . . . relying in vain on double standards, manipulating truth and forging facts, sullying the artist’s reputation in order to deprive Kwan of his artistic freedom.” Ultimately, in her words, these criticisms are “a blasphemy that taints the purity of art, a distortion that twists the spirit of the nation.” While the spokesperson proclaimed: “Let us assemble and march towards the glorious future of art!” perhaps we could agree that glory and marching are far from what we need, especially from art. Besides, that would be yet another dismal act of appropriation.

The lectern returns in a subsequent room and is a revealed to be nothing more than a cardboard cutout suspended from wires. The weight of this authority revealed as cheap and just a few millimeters thick. But we knew this already, and that is what makes this power so brittle and angry. The work, titled Starship the Defiant (2023) is also another Star Trek reference, as the lectern becomes like a spaceship navigating the dark vastness of the universe. Laugh while you still can, was the subtext of Kwan’s recent projects—the “Borg” is looming. Another voyage, another allegory, for the people of this tiny special administrative region.    

HG Masters is deputy editor and deputy publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.