The relationships between the individual and the environment are explored from very different perspectives by Kary Kwok Ka-chi and Eun-Myung Moon. In I Am Not What I Am, Kwok tries to use the site of the gallery as a metaphor for the artist's body. A small monitor carries an image of Kwok winking and raising his eyebrows to people walking past the full-length windows of the Fringe Gallery. Inside, located close to the ground, is a tiny faint video projection of a foot being pricked by a needle. Kwok has exhibited two different series of photographs. One consists of individual portraits, while the other is a set of diptychs, juxtaposing the artist with sceneries or architecture. The single photographs challenge the viewers with Asian-Western stereotypes (with a perverse twist) from Bruce Lee, to Chinese Red Guards and gay 'roles' such as a houseboy. More subtle and rewarding are the diptychs merging the 'body' with an outside environment. Kwok adopts a high-fashion street-styling to produce glossy magazine spread-like visuals to reveal his internal psyche through his external gestures. The most arresting image combines a European-style garden lined with huge potted Chinese mandarin trees with an image of Kwok made up like a 'China Doll', dressed in a cheongsam with a peach blossom fabric. Another work combines a view of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Christmas tree with another of the artist with grunge-rocker, long, crimped hair. Pointing to a sense of suffering and loss, emotions simmer softly underneath the print surfaces. Sometimes, they look lost and meandering and their impact is dwarfed by their modest scale. Moon's Artificial Grass at the Goethe-Institut is less successful. Hers is a statement on Hong Kong's preoccupation with imitations. The gallery space is lined out in fake grass, with the walls bearing iron boxes holding rice and a stem of silk rose. A foliage-covered hedge contains a television monitor showing soft silhouettes of real roses. Moon has made use of contemporary intellectual concerns - including ecology, hyper-realism and simulation - seemingly without working through them or fine-tuning her materials. This work is dry and unseductive, and it verges on window-dressing. Kary Kwok Ka-chi, I Am Not What I Am, Fringe Gallery, until July 20; Eun-Myung Moon, Artificial Grass, Goethe-Institut, until July 27
