I’ve changed a lot since I moved to Brighton. A few years ago I thought the only decent art produced in the last fifty years was the picture of a tennis girl scratching her bum. But having grown accustomed to wandering the city’s free exhibitions, I now find myself in the position of actually liking modern art. Some of it anyway. I’m still not sure about pickled sheep. But I spent Saturday afternoon at the Phoenix Gallery in Waterloo Place for the opening of their new exhibition ‘Everyday Anomalies’, which runs until March 22nd, and I have to say I loved it. It was like Tate Modern crossed with Candid Camera.
The exhibition features the work of four artists from Hong Kong, all of whom had flown in especially to meet me. Well, me and anyone else who turned up for the opening. The gallery laid on free Chinese food, but it was the complimentary wine which seemed to prove popular. Frankly it was a miracle anyone was still standing by the end.
As for the art, I liked Kwan Sheung-Chi’s sculpture of an apple core made from a used apple juice carton, while his attempt to recreate a swatted mosquito out of his own hair and blood was very amusing too. Then there was his video installation ‘Meteor Shower’, which has to be viewed by getting down on your knees and looking through a tiny hole in the floor. He said afterwards that he likes to stand in front of the hole so that people look like they’re bowing down to him.
Kam Lai Wan presented three works about stars, the most ingenious of which was ‘Sound of Stars’. She said she’d wanted to know what stars might sound like, so she’d taken numerous musical boxes and pressed the pattern of a constellation onto each cylinder, so that when you turn the handle, it plays a tune based purely on the position of the stars. I loved that idea.
But not as much as I loved the work of Luke Ching, who appeared to be trying to fill the shoes of Jeremy Beadle in a very literal sense. Luke’s art involved walking through a crowded shopping centre with fifteen-foot-long shoelaces, while a friend filmed people’s attempts to avoid tripping over them. It was accompanied by his video, ‘Moon’, in which he bought helium balloons in Toys R Us and pretended to accidentally let them go in the middle of the mall, watching them float two hundred feet up into the roof, before asking security guards if they had a long pole he could borrow. It’s work Beadle would have been proud of.
For me though, the star of the show was Pak Sheung-Chuen. If all modern art was as brilliantly and amusingly inspired as his, I’d be tempted to become the new Charles Saatchi. His film ‘Breathing House’ documented the ten days he spent inflating plastic bags and stuffing them into his apartment until the entire flat contained nothing but his own breath (which is either art or mental illness), but Pak also told us the story behind his work 'Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone’. Apparently he’d walked past a bus stop in Hong Kong which featured the four route numbers 91, 91M, 92 and 96R. So naturally he decided to go home and dial those eight digits into his telephone. The result is a 3-minute recording of some bloke saying “How did you get my number?” and “What do you mean it was on a bus stop?” in a slightly panicked voice.
My personal highlight of the exhibition, however, was Pak’s ingenious work with till receipts. In ‘Love Letter for LC’, he’d bought four books, the first word of each title being (in Chinese) ‘I’, ‘Am’, ‘Thinking of’ and ‘You’. He’d then framed the till receipt and given it to his girlfriend. If that’s not sweet, I don’t know what is. I’ll be heading straight to Waterstone’s on Thursday.
Pak’s ‘Miracle of $136.70’ took the concept one stage further. He’d managed to find eight grocery items in the local supermarket which were named such that when put through the checkout in the correct order, the second word of each item formed the Bible verse John 3:16, “Whoever believes in him shall have eternal life”. I tried to do the same at Asda the next day, but I didn’t want to buy ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ just for the sake of religious art.
Ultimately though, the most refreshing aspect of the afternoon was just how down to earth the artists were. All were friendly, likeable and completely unassuming. Asked by one of the visitors if it’s hard to get into art school in Hong Kong, Kwan Sheung-Chi replied with one word: “No”. You can’t get any more unpretentious than that.
