Creative forces: Kitty Ko's artwork is motivated by everyday things

Like many of her contemporaries, Kitty Ko Sin-tung, who graduated in fine arts from the Chinese University in 2009, supports herself as a part-time art teacher, while sharing a studio in an industrial building in Fo Tan with two artist friends.

Fo Tan is the favoured place for artists to set up studios in Hong Kong because of its central location in the New Territories, and its high-ceilinged industrial spaces. It may not be as exotic as Paris in the 1920s, or as influential as Beijing's East Village of the 1990s, but it does offer the necessary "cultural insulation" of artistic mutual support.

Artistic creativity is encouraged and challenged by having equally ambitious and motivated practitioners nearby - somewhat similar to a sports team training together. Ko has had two solo exhibitions since graduation, and her work is often governed by the space in which she exhibits. Her art encompasses painting, drawing, installation and mixed-media construction.

At her last exhibition, in September 2012 at the short-lived Hardneck art space in Wan Chai, she set-up an elaborate video installation on flickering televisions, vaguely replicating advertising light-boxes seen in Hong Kong's luxury retail outlets. These shops leave their signage on overnight with no consideration for the light pollution they create.

Ko's work is conceptual and non-narrative. It is motivated by commonplace objects, daily situations and a fascination for the mundane.

Ko's series of small acrylic paintings, Accepted, duplicates the common "accepted" receipt printouts handed to customers at checkouts. When seen as a set of paintings, they pose the question, what is "accepted"? A faraway computer system registers a sale - or, does it register us, ourselves? These small pieces of data are possibly contributing to a larger, unknown, personal profile registry.