Artist Statement

Expose (revisited) [kinetic sculpture, 2019]
This is a thermo-kinetic light installation. An exposed crowd of unidentified people protesting under the sun is projected on a thin metallic rod, which is heated to a very high temperature. When anonymous water from the top drops on people on the rod, it transmutes into a luminous mist, dissolving them into vapour and air, without an end. The work particularly draws upon Cheuk’s distress about the 2015 occupy movement in Hong Kong, where the still recurring pattern is separation, union, and confrontation. Cheuk translates this pattern into a mechanistic and multi-sensory language, autoethnographically augmenting a seemingly innocuous object – a bar handle that caught her attention at the site, exposing and releasing helpless feelings of constant repression. Cheuk’s concern is the fundamental meaning of an object – its mutability and its implications for individuals and society, and with her tools for investigation—electronic devices, video recording, etc.—she extracts, abstracts, and makes palpable the recurring patterns of our day-to-day existence.
Video: Expose 2014

• Chloë Cheuk (HK/CA) is a graduate of School of Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong and Master of Fine Art from Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. Working simultaneously in the mediums of installation art, interactive media, photography and video, Cheuk focuses on the “structure of feelings” between people and society by reconstructing objects through metaphors using a pared down vocabulary based in spirituality and aesthetics. Her artworks often touch upon spectators’ everyday experiences and memories, on both an individual and collective level, which lay the groundwork for an intimate conversation. Carrying various implications, the ordinary objects she chooses frequently echo the personal, social and political facets of our contemporary world. chloecheuk.com