A Way to Exist, Away to Exist
In A Way to Exist, Away to Exist, Alice Kok presents a body of work whose expression is intrinsic in its subject, one that explores exchanges between spiritual practice and community using image making, objects, interviews and print.
The new works in this exhibition take a recursive and imaginative approach so as to reposition the artist’s relationship to experiences of identity, writing and landscape — both those personal to the artist and those shared with others. The results of these experiential moments as shared by Kok are personal and direct invitations, but they also invite a wider community to contemplate her activities.
The artist’s photographs of Macau and Tibet consider the production of cultural and cross-cultural identities. As we rethink these subjects in the wake of a global pandemic, Kok’s partially distorted images invite us to consider anew our relationships with movement, communication and far-off places. These broad terms—abstractions to many of us—have direct personal significance for the artist, whose own family unit is currently separated between these two places.
Through the Looking Glass (2020) invites us into a room housing a two-way-mirror and a video in which anonymous subjects recall memories of their dreams. The participants in this cycle mirror the materials that comprise the artwork, reflecting inwards and projecting outwards, allowing a new subject to emerge from the purported area of discussion. Our experience of dreams is a differently-informed version of the past; we transpose our sense of looking and not seeing, the mirror furthermore extending the ways in which this meaning can be reproduced. The dreamers filmed for this artwork were offered a tarot reading by the artist herself for their story — an exchange of memory for insight, past for present.
The works that comprise A Way to Exist, Away to Exist offer themselves as metaphors for absence, presence and surveying. The artist has hung two red and yellow banners from the Macau Art Garden building, on a busy Av. do Dr. Rodrigo Rodrigues. Embodying the name of the gallery, the text on these large artworks articulates sentiments of gratitude, motherhood, and solidarity. A connection is thus forged between the sentiment of the artist and her desire to make visible the things she values. The visual aesthetic of the banners derives from Chinese Communist Party signage, implying characteristics that are not to be overthrown or escaped, but rather to be embraced through her representation of motherhood, personal feeling and identification to others.
The Macau of Kok’s work is one in which not all things have been settled and understood in advance—one which in turn offers back a sense of possibility. The possibility of today is described by Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), the English artist and occultist, as “what you learn tomorrow is determined by what you have done – the accomplished lesson of yesterday. Never learning today what you can do tomorrow is called loss, but is theft from time, wholesomeness and rejuvenescence.” Austin Osman Spare is known for his sigilization1 based on theories of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious self. A type of pictorial signature is shown in The Picture 圖, a strongly symbolic painting placed at the entrance of the exhibition. The Picture 圖 is the visual form from which other Chinese characters displayed in the exhibition take their composition and meaning from. The work can also be related to the teaching of the legendary Buddhist mystic Padmasambhava: “Drowsiness is due to the heavy mental obscuration, hence the inability to understand anything. Awakening is to see the original natural state vividly and truthfully.”
In Wonderland 02 (2020)2 the landscape is described in terms of what is built and what is proposed. A causal image of a temporary relationship between the future and the present resonates with works such as Through the Looking Glass , in which one mode of interaction automatically provides the opportunity for a new mode to arise. The works exhibited broaden Kok’s visual and artistic range while still recalling older works informed by the Buddhist training that underpins her relationship to life.
The title A Way to Exist, Away to Exist has a dual function; ‘a way’ is a method and ‘away’ a displacement. This title allows a space and position for a shifting of perspective when viewing the artworks. In parallel, the two phrases are united by the word ‘exist’, allowing the title to also be understood collectively. These two vantage points imply that ways of existing can change – and additionally, that place can be changed through experience. Kok’s approach to the relationship between art and life, reflects that of the Indian writer and speaker J. Krishnamurti: “To see the truth in the false sets the mind free from the false. Freedom from the false does not come about through the desire to achieve it; it comes when the mind is no longer concerned with success with the attainment of an end. There must be the cessation of all search, and only then is there a possibility of the coming into being of that which is nameless.”
Arts practice is the privileged point at which other disciplines can intersect and engage with each other. What can be seen and experienced as a human, as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister and as a citizen have a fundamental impact upon Kok’s work; however her various skills and perspectives elucidate her simple forms, enhancing interest in the production and dissemination of art and the possibilities for people to be more involved in the whole chain of artistic meaning. The red and yellow banners outside the gallery bear the text ‘非筆墨所能形容’ (‘cannot describe with pen and ink’). We are left wondering what ineffable things are hinted at, what it is exactly Kok cannot describe with words.
Curator
Craig Cooper