RIFT 隙

LIST OF ARTWORKS
一
Ink Pavilion, 2022
Chinese Mò ink, silk, powder-coated aluminium, multi-channel soundscape, incense
6400 x 6400 x 2480 mm
Sound Design: Oskar Wesley-Smith
二
Umbra, 2022
Chinese Mò ink, Gypsum plaster
64 plates, 4000 x 4000 x 80 mm total
三
Spectral Monuments, 2022
Chinese Mò ink, Gypsum plaster
8 sculptures, 160 x 160 mm x various heights
四
Shanshui (∞), 2022
Single-channel HD video
16:9, 33 mins
Director: Oliver Rose
Assistant: Oskar Wesley-Smith
五
Rift, 2022
Chinese Mò ink, Gypsum plaster
320 x 80 x 2400 mm

The dark is ripe with fantasy and fear. For some it is a wicked void of wailing ghosts. For others it is infinite and sensuous, an open door to be entered. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, author of In Praise of Shadows, writes, ‘We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates…Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’

Artist Kien Situ 司徒建 shapes shadow. Solo exhibition RIFT 隙 expands his sculptural practice into installation, textile and video works that feature Chinese Mò ink – a substance earthy, rich and night-black. Aesthetically and culturally significant, this material speaks to histories of Chinese landscape painting and calligraphy. This is reflected in the bi-lingual exhibition title. The English-language ‘rift’ conjures a rupture or breakage – be it a crack, or something seismic. The Chinese character ‘隙’ means ‘discord’ or ‘interval’, denoting a tension between forms, but also translates to
opportunity’, suggesting that change can create apertures and openings. Situ’s work honours these in-between spaces and invites alternative understandings of identity and place. It references Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘third space’, a site between cultural structures celebrated for generating new ‘hybrid’ manifestations that can displace dominant colonial narratives. Philosopher Édouard Glissant also welcomes multiplicity across and between cultures. ‘In a collective quest for identity,’ he writes in Poetics of Relation, ‘sterile extremes would exist in which man, as an individual, would risk disappearing.’ Situ draws from these theories and his Chinese-Vietnamese heritage to honour cultural convergences. In doing so, RIFT 隙 offers fertile thresholds in which new understandings of art, culture and architecture can meet, emerge and thrive.

Informed by Situ’s training in architecture, these conceptual frameworks are made manifest through material experimentation, spatial interplay, and a blend of Eastern and Western principles. The artist’s sculptures combine ink with milky Gypsum plaster, a building material used for architectural prototypes. They are vigorously mixed and moulded in a process of control and surrender – shaped through gesture and left to shape themselves. Such tensions come to the fore in Ink Pavilion. Like Situ’s other works, this deconstructed monument bisects dichotomies of East and West, fluid and fixed, light and dark. Its ink-stained silk walls adjoin a metal structure, forming a temple-like architecture that audiences can enter. Enshrouded in incense and a multi-channel soundscape by Oskar Wesley-Smith, the space reverberates with manipulated temple bell chimes and field recordings. This soundtrack refracts around the pavilion, oscillating between internal and external, static and malleable, translucent and opaque. Housed within is Umbra, a series of square ink-and-plaster sculptures that tessellate across the floor like a lunar landscape. This work references the I Ching or Book of Changes, a late 9th century BC (Zhou Dynasty) Chinese divination text. Contained within are 64 hexagrams – formations of six parallel whole or broken lines – that each have their symbolic significance articulated in accompanying verse. This system has been influential in both Eastern and Western philosophy, and some consider it a precursor to the binary code of modern computing. Situ’s sculptures each respond to a hexagram and its associated text, evoking ‘radiance’, ‘force’ and ‘thunder’ in plaster swirled, smooth and crumbling. The search for truth, however, goes deeper than these surface-level textures. Individual hexagram reliefs are cast into each piece’s underside to form an unseen knowledge network. En masse they speak to one another like computer circuits, or mycelium in an expansive terrain of ancient wisdom. In the adjacent space is Spectral Monuments, an installation of eight ink and plaster columns that stand stark, like a ruined metropolis. They reference the I Ching’s eight trigrams – Heaven, Lake, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Water, Mountain, and Earth – linear combinations that make up hexagrams. Each sculpture finds harmony between the natural and the constructed, with surfaces that are structurally precise and smooth, or gnarled, like rocks bearing the face of wizened earth. Their organic shapes are reminiscent of Chinese gongshi 供石 or ‘scholar’s rocks’ – aesthetic and philosophical objects that honour the power and wisdom of nature. In Confucianism, natural forms such as these are understood to possess moral qualities akin to human virtues. Like gongshi, Situ’s sculptures are imbued with spiritual significance and take otherworldly forms that contort, subvert and suspend gravity. Nearby is Situ’s first film Shanshui (∞), directed by Oliver Rose, that abstracts slow motion footage of ink mixing with plaster into celestial eddies. It summons a realm of elastic time and limitless possibility. Ink and plaster are shown at their most elemental, before they were reincarnated as sculptures that share the space. These shifts, like those described by Bhabha, hold transformative potential. In converging cultures, mediums and ideas, RIFT 隙 is itself a significant transition. Its new experiments with material, process and scale continue threads from earlier works but mark a formative evolution of Situ’s practice. Ultimately, RIFT 隙 is a portal to another third space where natural and built architectures converse, futuristic forms house ancient knowledge, and darkness enlightens.

Artist: Kien Situ
Curator: Johanna Bear
Graphic Designer: Zoë James
Film Director: Oliver Rose
Sound Design: Oskar Wesley-Smith