Seeping into Current Plans like fungus

— Black Canine Tooth's transparent box 2 haha

Published on artmurmuring

Installation View of You said that ..................................., 2023. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

While Vivian Wong Wing Lam’s video The Apocalypse is Your Oyster (2023) captures our numb pleasure from feasting ignorant yet catalytic to the ever-approaching apocalypse grounded itself in a decent dining setting right next to the pantry, Carmen Lau’s installation How to get rid of the lingering mold, even in the radiant sun? (2023) of moldy sliced bread hung on the sock hanger is self-rotating against the peeling walls inside, the shabby residential buildings outside, and the sunlight fiercely radiating in every corner.

Installation View of The Apocalypse is Your Oyster, 2023. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

The artworks and happenings of transparent box 2 haha (in Chinese:透明盒子 2 —哈哈) exhibited early June this year (2023) at Current Plans, the second iteration of the exhibition experiment by 黑犬齒 Black Canine Tooth, cannot be better described as fungus: fast, reactive, spontaneous, unruly, contagious, sprawling but simultaneously rooting in. Not only did they physically fill this alternative space nestled inside a tong lau in Sham Shui Po, but they also submerged into the cracks, from the visible to the invisible, emancipating themselves in the boundaries of maturity, time, and narrative.

Installation View of 《對話》〈Link〉, 2022. Photo by Wong Sin & Ma Wik. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

Passing through the arch,《對話》〈Link〉 (2022) is more than a crystal of Kenneth Choi and Vivian Wong Wing Lam’s last year performance on human entanglement. As their first re-display of the object remained from the previous performance, the work establishes itself as the artists’ active challenge on how the traces of performance can continue to sustain themselves out of the initial context, furthering the trajectory they once co-wove. As the other side of the coin named saturation, maturity was the least celebrated in this exhibition when many of the works were closer to attempt-in-progress rather than well-polished, finalized products.

Installation View of 《觀眾、祭壇》, 2023. Photo by Wong Sin & Ma Wik. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

Sullivan Chau’s trial in 《觀眾、祭壇》 (2023) to statically unravel the reproduction worship through objects and space rather than body and time as usual stimulates her sensitivity to the way of seeing. It is in the activation of audience’s body that she poses small objects of creation at a level where kneeling down is required to see, infusing the installation with a sense of theatricality that originates from sacrificing rituals. Whether is Sullivan Chau’s first step into a new medium or Aaron Lam’s continuous smudging of the fine line between everyday mundane and aesthetic through everyday objects in You said that ................................... (2023) when the two white balloons connected with unremitting tension are slightly rolling against the white flat plinth, these exhibiting works all permeate a sense of forever motility and self-spurring that rejected stagnation. Experimentality was hereby paired with nod to trial and error arising from the state of unfinished when artists were free to make adjustment even in the exhibition period.

Installation View of How to get rid of the lingering mold, even in the radiant sun? , 2023. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

The rigid attitude towards time in exhibition-making was disposed as the fuel to such a bonfire sparkling with experimentality, spontaneity, and site reactivity. Literally filling an unexpected gap in Current Plans’ initial schedule, this exhibition took over the space in less than 2-weeks’ time. Such an opportunity coincidentally anchored with Black Canine Tooth’s rationale behind ‘transparent box’ — an exhibition model adhering to a pause rather than full-stop to their artists’ making.

Screenshot of Current Plans's Instagram & floor plan for transparent box 2

Time was simultaneously liberated from both the pressure of immediate output and the obsession with slowness. Without any long-precipitated preliminary planning over both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the exhibition, the artworks still sowed themselves perfectly in this unconventional art space, seeping into the pantry, the corridor to the restroom, the steel sliding door, and even onto the window. This prompted to me what curating actually means among artworks carrying substantial self-generative echo with each other and this alternative space, when core members of Black Canine Tooth Wong Sin and Ma Wik preferred to title themselves as administrators rather than curators.

Installation View of Seeking a Dehumidifying and Detoxifying Formula, 2023. Photo by Crystal Li. Courtesy of the artist and Black Canine Tooth.

The Chinese character「哈」in the exhibition title was figuratively decomposed into「口」as space,「人」as human, and「一」as creation to render its essence as a transparent box that unrestrictedly holds the incessantly fermenting thoughts, emotions, and actions of human being. There was no pre-scripted exhibition narrative but only artworks anchoring to an array of features, characters, and markers of human, when labelled as the higher being in 竇唯Dou Wei's namesake song. Off from the usual burden of comprehending the prescribed curatorial philosophy, consciously or not, the perception of and connection with the artworks was very much charged by one’s inner thoughts and feelings. The audience was caught off guard in this transparent box, turning them naked to no one but themselves. When the Latin etymology of “exhibit” roots in the idea of presenting outward, it was in the absence of a pre-determined statement that ably layered this exhibition with the possibility of the audience showing inward to themselves their own frame of reference behind all the instinctive, visceral feelings. After all, human was the only actor under this beam of spotlight illuminating both the bright and dark sides of its setsunai nature.