{Curatorial text} 'Strait is the Gate', Goethe-Institut Hongkong (2024)
Goethe-Institut Hongkong is pleased to present Strait is the Gate, a duo exhibition by Yasmine Anlan Huang and Lean Lui at the Institut’s Goethe-Gallery and Black Box Studio. In this presentation of their recent works, Lui’s photography captures static objects and bodies treading between purity and danger, while Huang’s films and installation animate a softness in language to uncover narratives of nuanced violence which connect the personal to the worldly. Constantly tipping over the threshold, they reclaim a subversive dream space where pre-existing power structures are examined and unsettled. Their portrayal of ethereal yet emotionally complex young girls invokes vulnerability as agency, enabling outward confessions and inward pursuits of truths.
The new body of photography by Lean Lui depicts a consistent tension between purity and impurity. Bows, flowers, laces, dresses – motifs of innocence are widely employed through her hazy still-life images and portraits, and are appropriated to evoke violence paradoxically. The ribbons in her images are not silky but fleshy, whether inflicted as shapes of sensual wounds upon the skin surface in Ribbon Wound (2024), or literally made of incised meat in Peach Torture Room – Window (2024). These emblems of purity become permanently embedded upon the body, yet threaten to contaminate, eroticise and decompose.
In destructing and reinterpreting the symbols, she unveils the struggle and pain that sits beneath what appears to be delicate, which resonates with her physical experimentations of analogue imaging. The earlier work Disorder Sensing: SUI (2022) was created through the vigorous tossing of light-sensitive paper within a laundry machine, and surprises by presenting washes of pink and silver. The recent work Gelatin Silver Bow (2024) plays with the silver mirror reaction that is conventionally considered a fault induced by impurities and deterioration in the printing process, but reclaimed here as a means to produce reflective and shimmery visuals, also a resistance to photography being commercially alienated into a fast imaging tool.
Beyond abstractions, the relational aspects of rebellious girlhood are performed through a series of portraits of herself and her sister venturing across various interiors and exteriors. The act of blowing a dandelion could be perceived as wishful or naïve, yet in Dandelion Bomb (2023) the suspended pollen invades one another’s face, seeking to irritate and abrade. Set against East Asian culture, Perambulator (2023) also stages myriad contradictions. She strains herself to push a wheelless trolley, whereupon her sibling wraps herself in an infantile position, heightening the tension between stagnancy and movement, friction and enchantment.
The exhibition title references André Gide’s novella shared between the artists’ bookshelves. From intricate visual constructions, Yasmine Anlan Huang extends towards a vernacular of storytelling. Such imprint is evident in Huang’s moving image practice, as she gains authorship in projecting herself as a literary subject to be reflected upon, and borrows a melodramatic language in articulating personal and geopolitical experiences that she sees intimately interweaved.
I have been practising the loss (2023) presents her persona Yasmine, narrated through silent subtitles pressed against a vacant, meditative background. The amplified anonymity echoes with the internet space as a fictional setting, where Yasmine reads about the fetish of collecting lovers’ bodily debris. Youth subculture lends melancholic, contorted vocabularies to the poetry, as she continues to grapple with notions of loss and growth. The practice of hoarding is further explored in Bad things happen, not only in literature (2024). Collating and altering vintage, displaced objects, she assessed them as a complex site for indulgences in the self and pasts.
In her recent pair of videos, she traverses from the virtual to the real, casting actors to impersonate present and younger versions of herself. Through the body of the other, a surrogate, she attempts to dissect the traces of geography and time she embodies, and often trips upon these critical gaps. Crescendo (2024) focuses on languages, or the confusing mix of them as a result of her constant relocation and inter-translated writings. As she depicts herself stumbling through reading her own text in English in the start, she invites her American friend to voice it for her. Their interactions bouncing between instruction and imitation forms a fragmented, bilingual poetry, confronting her fraught relationship with language. While supposedly instinctive, she finds language failing her at times, leaving her tongue-tied.
dear velocity, (2024) shifts to investigating time difference, a kind of “jetlag” she gains from travelling to the past constantly, and observed from her surroundings that struggles to catch up to speed. Through the young actor, she returns to her teenage self in her hometown. She recounts from the falling of leaves in spring rather than fall in the subtropical climate, to the building of a space-themed park 20 years after the Space Race. Via the gaze of girlhood, the artist proposes a tender imagination of our puzzling entanglements with time and space, and punctures through the inherent senses of frustration and futility.