Mixed Message David Boyce and Ling Lai YY9 Gallery Until Nov 20
Conceptually oriented abstraction can be a tricky subject, and the current show at YY9 Gallery presents two widely disparate positions on the genre. The exhibition features Ling Lai's pleasant, colourful, hard-edged paintings paired with David Boyce's small-scale photographic sequences of markings in and around sports fields in Hong Kong.
While Lai's abstract paintings are decorative and well executed, the show is dominated by Boyce's elegant photography. Short Stories is a series of long, vertical contact prints from one entire roll of medium-format, analogue film. Primarily shots of various painted lines on the grounds of sports facilities (below, left), the photographs are at once calligraphic abstractions and evocative of the human activities that have created, and later altered, these surfaces over time.
Boyce's images tend to work on two levels. On the surface level, the heavily vignetted images of abstract, small, circular objects filled with carefully composed texture and line tend to look like a series of toy balls, photographed from several angles.
On a second level, the images come across as linguistic inventions, suggesting an as-yet indecipherable syntax or grammatical structure. Once the connection is made between the photograph's source - playgrounds and sports fields - and this approach, the images become evocatively ambiguous, willfully conflating a formal surface with textual gestures of play, organisation and human movement.
It must be said not all of Boyce's photographs work quite this well; some are of actual text, closely cropped graffiti that paradoxically become too readable, undoing much of the clever ambiguity found in the works featuring painted lines.