Intimate stranger
THE WASHROOMS ON the ground floor of City University's amenities building look exactly as they always have - off-white counters, simple sinks, oddly flamboyant potted plants. But early last month, a subtle transformation took place. With the help of the staff, artist Luke Ching Chin-wai swapped all of the light-bulbs between the men's and women's sides.
The point? That the light that has before only touched women will now land on men, and vice versa. Even the plants on each side will now be 'grown' by light from the opposite gender.
This mischievous switch seems a fitting introduction to Ching's work, which treats the whole world as a laboratory for off-kilter, strangely resonant experiments. Since he graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1998, Ching has consistently staged witty interventions, whether turning a storefront in Okinawa into a pinhole camera or teaching strangers on the streets of New York how to say 'I love you' in Cantonese. Ching's singular vision has made him a prize winner at the 2005 Hong Kong Biennial and one of the most influential local artists of his generation. He has just been appointed artist in residence at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre.
For Two or Three Things about Hong Kong II, his show at City U Gallery with Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen, Ching has taken the university itself as his testing ground, crafting more than 40 new pieces that display his unique approach to art and life.
A tall, 34-year-old with slightly shaggy hair, Ching comes across as friendly, unpretentious and modest. Pak says he was inspired by Ching's 2002 piece Wet Print: Rainbow, in which Ching painted the railings of a footbridge a different colour each day for a week. It was the first conceptual art he'd seen using 'local content'.
If pressed, Ching admits to being a conceptual artist, but says labels aren't necessary. 'In Hong Kong it's different from America - I don't feel a very urgent need to identify myself, because actually no one cares about artists.'
Categories are also hard because of Ching's incongruities. He has a master's degree in painting (but never paints), and made his first splash in 1998 with a gallery-sized pin-hole camera (although he says he doesn't know how to take photos).
His diversion into conceptual art was accidental. After arriving in Melbourne on an artist exchange in 1999, he couldn't find the double-sided tape he had been using for his 'paintings' and small sculptures.
'I had no money, so I thought, you don't need to use money in conceptual artwork, to work with people, so I started to make something interactive with the public.'
His audience now includes various members of the public from New York, Vermont, Okinawa, Fukuoka, Korea and, of course, Hong Kong.
There's always some form of conversation, whether each party is aware of it or not. The dialogue is implicit in large-scale projects such as Easy to Learn Cantonese, in which Ching videotaped himself and volunteers teaching Cantonese phrases such as 'I love you' and 'sorry' to strangers in the US and Japan.
Sometimes the interaction is more invisible, like the small cockroach made of double-sided tape that Ching nonchalantly added to a rainforest diorama in New York's Museum of Natural History.
Ching likes being abroad because when he's working as an artist in residence, his only role is that of an artist.
'That role means you don't need to do anything - actually, you have no role in the city. You're nothing in the city. You're a stranger in the city.'
Inspired by this feeling, Ching is curating a show - his first - called Stranger, the second half of an artists' exchange between Hong Kong and Japan that will travel to Tokyo next month. The exchange focuses on how foreign residency programmes are a mechanism for turning artists into strangers, and the freedom that implies.
However, organising the show was mainly an excuse for Ching to interview his chosen artists in more depth, continuing the critical inquiry that he has long brought to his monthly columns in the Sunday Ming Pao. Asked if he wants to curate more shows, his answer s simple. 'No, no, no - certainly not,' he says, laughing.
He would rather be the stranger himself. Ching has brought this same impulse to Two or Three Things about Hong Kong II, treating the university as a foreign city and exploring its unusual channels and artifacts.
He casually contests authority by, for example, shooting video of the university flag being lowered in the evening, but running it in reverse so that it seems like a flag-raising, and by placing books on the top of a security camera as it rotates, to 'teach it manners'.
He finds odd coincidences such as two student lovers who are dead ringers for a pair of bronze statues called City Lovers.
He looks hard for accidents. In the Italo Calvino-like 'safety city' of City University, what kind of accidents could occur? Perhaps the most mundane misfortunes such as buttoning a shirt lopsided, dialling a wrong number or forgetting a friend's birthday. Ching tries to commemorate each blunder in simple but elegant installations (viewers are even invited to crumple a page from a calendar in order to remember the birthday next time).
Most of his work feels ephemeral, depending on a particular relationship between concept and environment, and leaves no lasting traces. As the most intimate kind of stranger, Ching continues to make the average moment count.
However, even after the exhibition closes next month, the gender-bending light-bulbs of City and Gender (1): Male and Female Light will remain in their new home. With a laugh Ching says: 'I think this will be in the permanent collection of City U.'
