Vacuum, silence, weightlessness, gravitational pull to each other......
Since Armstrong first landed on the moon, human beings have never stopped the exploration of space. The ever-lasting space travel and the vivid vocabulary related to space odysseys made up the fallacy that we are familiar to the strange and under-investigating space. In face of the unknown space, human beings only know a tip of the iceberg. With all the unknown, uncertainties and exceptions, artist Kwong Wing-kwan tends to believe the control without matter has always existed. This invisible power guides the disciplines and regularities among stars in the space without traces and maintains the balance of entities. We normally call this power 'the destiny'.
Kwong Wing-kwan skillfully employs 'Palm' as a meaningful metaphor as the control power that never blatantly shows but always exists. The touching sensation from our fingertips is one of the most important channels for us to connect to the world since baby times. We perceived the world with every touch using our palms. When we grew older, we learnt to utilize our hands, initially started with grabbing food, later grabbing abstract but more solid power, by then 'hands' become the symbol of control. In social aspects, 'hands' allow establishing concrete connections between people, we greet new friends with shaking hands, we hold our lover's hand, we promise each others with our fingers crossed. If our hands got tied, it might even symbolizes the loss of our freedom as a whole because police cuff a suspect to easily deprive him of freedom. In Kwong's works, each appearing hand has its own embedded meaning, some hands play with the planets as if the hands own them and those hands symbolizes 'owners' or 'controllers' while some other hands move around the planet and flipping the fingers unconsciously according to the planet and they are 'the being controlled'. With the dichotomy of black-and-white-mainly works and colourful works, Kwong utilizes freely the different analogy and symbols. She boldly makes use of the contrast of B&W and dyeing colours to not only mimic the boundless and chaotic universe, and also reflect the echo of usage of colours with accordance to the concept.
Kwong's works have always filled with a sense of detachment as if she leaves her body but her soul returns to the same situation to observe. The bizarre intimacy at the same time seems to be lonesome. Using the far-away space as the background, the sense of distance is inevitable in her works. Yet she balances it with creating epitomes of the universe, on one hand reducing the distance between the works and audience, on the other hand reinforcing the likeliness of owning and playing with the universe. On top of that, artist twists the proportion of planets and hands in works like Sun at 0 Degree and The Flow of Jupiter Cloudswhich intrigue audience with the delicate details as well as the sense of conflict created by disproportion. The mysterious hands arise from the dark rotate the originally gigantic Uranus and Neptune playfully, demonstrating the powerful at ease. The artist also found during research that the black hole is not merely destructive. It destroys by engulfing meanwhile benefiting the universe by nurturing. Everything in the universe cannot be judged with its appearance. Kwong evokes magnificent dilemma via visuals and cultural symbols. The sense of conflict strongly captures audience which can be said another kind of 'control'.
When people read Kwong's works among their stable but numb life, they are often touched and subjected to reflection upon how to react in response to the unknown destiny. In comparison to the ambiguity towards this issue in the past works, Kwong, in the latest solo show Suspending World, attempts to recognize the reality of being controlled by invisible power and highlight how people counteract the control and the fate with their own power, which adds depth and readability to her oeuvres.
