Emptiness in place of substance: Hong Kong express rail link in artist's eyes
Ko Sin-tung says her artworks on theme of costly railway to Guangzhou are a personal, not a political, response to the project
The title of Ko Sin-tung’s new solo exhibition is “Underground Construction: Failed” and it chimes with how many people feel about the Hong Kong-Guangzhou express rail link, the inspiration for the young conceptual artist’s new works.
Speaking ahead of the exhibition at the Edouard Malingue Gallery in Central, Ko says she has taken a personal approach to deconstructing the myths behind construction of the railway.
The works refer to the emotional impact the issues thrown up by the MTR project have had on her, rather than directly acknowledging the growing litany of facts and figures that has forced even the government to acknowledge that the HK$85.3 billion undertaking is an utter shambles.
The exhibition is made up of five parts. First, visitors enter the gallery by stepping on a doormat resembling the outline of a tunnel, with the middle section cut out. Like the rail project, there is emptiness where there ought to be substance.
Next, three panels show what Hong Kong has been promised – computer-generated, idealised scenes of the completed West Kowloon terminal that Ko photographed outside one of the construction sites.
Further into the tunnel-like space sit a cluster of monitors showing a reworking of her 2014 video Steady Ground. The camera captures random objects sitting at an angle on the street, and then the screen rotates, making them upright but everything else wonky.