On the road, watching the cityscapes, both illusory and real
Lo Woon-yee says she likes all things "rugged," like this alley in Shek Tong Tsui, Hong Kong. To non-residents, it’s secluded, winding, and hard to find. It’s called Po Tak Street, and it leads to the bookstore knock knock bookstore, which is currently hosting her solo exhibition "On the Road." Her exhibition doesn't begin when you open the bookstore door; it greets visitors along the way.
Woon-yee has been traveling between Macau and Hong Kong for a while. This is her first exhibition in Hong Kong after the pandemic. I'm grateful she still remembers me, an old student, and invited me to see the exhibition. The bookstore is small and square. Woon-yee's light blue-green paintings of various sizes fill the blank walls around the books, mostly cityscapes: bamboo scaffolding seen looking up at the sky, handcarts by the road, reflections of road signs on metal gates, and people wearing masks on the street.
It was raining heavily the day I visited the exhibition, and the picture window was fogged up.
Some of the works in the exhibition are from her creations during the pandemic. Three years have passed in a blink since the last exhibition, and new memories seem to have formed, almost like a déjà vu. If you visited the "City Scape" exhibition at the Newman College of Arts and Culture in Macau in 2022, you'd recognize those familiar snapshots of people coming and going, all drawn from earlier works. Over the years, she has explored painting, writing, and installation, focusing on pencil drawings. This time, she used acrylic paints, with layers of color blocks making the delicate, clear lines hazy, like memories—they are rugged and incomplete. In terms of composition, there's no emphasis on the golden ratio, resembling fleeting images in the mind. Of course, this exhibition also features some new works, objects from the city like various patterns of mosaic tiles and old floor tiles, which focus more on specific details compared to the series mentioned above.
The bookstore displays many new acrylic paintings, interspersed with some pencil drawings.
Memories can be shifted, tampered with, and reconstructed. During the peak of the pandemic, she published the collection "One Day" (2022) to accompany an exhibition. The seemingly ordinary images, unembellished and undesigned, are so commonplace that you might feel like you're digging into someone's private diary or photo album. You might believe those perceptions are faithful, but they might not be true. Is this "one day" the same as our "one day"? We ask, so, what is memory?
Artist Lo Woon-yee has not held a solo exhibition in Hong Kong for a long time. She specifically chose this small shop because she enjoys the process of discovering the space while "on the road."
This theme is common in Woon-yee's past works. On one hand, she collects others' memories, such as in "Whispers" (2020) and "A Book of Nüshu Notes — Exploring Nüshu in Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China" (2003), which record the oral histories of women (including her mother). In the context of grand history, these individuals are marginalized, but she believes their small narratives are equally important. On the other hand, she repeatedly chews over her own memories through various media, constantly reconstructing them, such as re-creating people or objects on canvas/paper, and repairing and displaying old items. Moreover, her creative method seems to consistently use pencils as a foundation. Through this contradictory (or ambiguous) tool that can be erased yet leaves traces, applied to different materials, whether gliding across soft canvas or fragile paper, the pencil and the flat surface intertwine to form unique trajectories, which are also the physical memories of the creator... In "Traces" (2020) and "Words ‧ Paintings" (2012), one can glimpse more of her thoughts on art.
Postscript:
Upon entering knock knock bookstore, I learned the news that it would close in June. "On the Road" might be the bookstore's last exhibition. This time, besides selling A4 and A5 artworks related to the exhibition, there was also an extended event, "Anti-Forgetting — A Sharing Session on Painting and Writing." Unfortunately, I couldn't attend, but looking at the words "Anti-Forgetting," I couldn't help but feel that it was exceptionally heavy compared to the gently worded event names of the past, especially here, now, at this moment.
