Erasing Time: Backwards and Forewards
Ora-Ora is pleased to announce a new solo show by Hong Kong-based artist Sophie Cheung at its Tai Kwun gallery space. The title is “Erasing Time: Backwards and Forwards.” This is the Sophie Cheung’s second solo show with Ora-Ora; she will also be part of Ora-Ora’s forthcoming line-up at Asia NOW in Paris in October 2023.
The show marks a moment of reflection, of looking back on past episodes, travails and traumas, before moving forward with a sense of renewed purpose and optimism.
Sophie Cheung’s art practice frequently harnesses erasers and newsprint to produce abstractions. In this exhibition, she embraces the specific and the personal. This journey into her teenage years allows for an immersion in recollections and memories, as a form of embrace, a letting go, and a farewell to the past.
The title partly alludes to the words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” There is value, understanding and wisdom in looking back on where we came from, before resuming our path onwards and upwards. In between, there is time for joy and celebration. Ultimately, the exhibition is an affirmation of the power of art, not only for the viewer, but for the artist, who is able to forensically self-reflect, self-discover and bear witness in a public forum.
In the words of Ora-Ora co-founder and CEO, Henrietta Tsui-Leung: “Sophie is an artist of inventiveness, ever increasing potential and capacity for self-reflection. Her research-intensive approach is always guided by her deep
respect for intrinsic human value, vulnerability and drama.”
Sophie Cheung’s second solo show with Ora-Ora features several new works from the artist’s “Erasing News” series, which are created of newspaper ink on erasers. Within the context of this exhibition, the newspapers become divorced from the current affairs they once heralded, and evolve into markers of time, raw materials emblematic of the past. In “Emitting Air from Aerial Roots,” Sophie recollects physical sensations from adolescence: pangs of cramping and distress which would lead her to seek refuge on a park bench under the shelter of the trees. The discomfort finds a visual echo in the confused distortions of the tangled aerial roots of the banyan tree. “Crying in the Park at Night” recreates those trees in vivid purple. The white, negative spaces become the spotlights of the garden, which take on the orbed appearance of eyeballs staring in judgment. Her artworks celebrate a diversity of tone, tones which naturally occur in newsprint. Blackness offers myriad depth, and whiteness takes on new meaning. In her new work “Fault Zone,” Sophie Cheung harnesses white, negative space to suggest a rupture or chasm, resembling the fault lines of the earth’s crust. This landscape of erasers becomes a metaphor for seismic upheaval, dislocations of identity and time.
As part of the curation, a poem by Sophie Cheung titled: “Baggage Shell and Cold Strand” is included, which highlights a middle point or an in-betweenness between leaving and arriving, states of uncertainty, division and anxiety. Echoing the words of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the flow and circle of life, that “die Mitte ist überall” (“the centre is everywhere”), Sophie Cheung continues her investigation of “in-betweenness.” She reconnects with the trepidations, insecurity and physical sensations of her lived experience, a sense of being on the threshold of reality and of another world, and of melting, falling and never arriving.
The exhibition is a pause for celebration in the midst of retrospection, an underlining of the power of the human spirit to reinvent, to recover and to overcome. The ideas for which Sophie Cheung is appreciated in an artistic context, may owe some of their roots to her own journey as an individual, with the inner and outer tempests which are the necessary accompaniment of all life.
