Scavenger
2008
Cardboard sculpture, street trolley, DVD


A life-size cardboard replica of one of the lion sculptures, which guards the front of the iconic HSBC - Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Banking Building, sits on a street trolley in the gallery and acts as an imposing and quite recognizable symbol of Hong Kong.

Created just before the 2008 banking crash, the work highlights the unstable construction of value and the inequalities of the city’s so-called finance ‘engine’. The artwork’s material, performance and structure examine and contrast the value of the recycle workers, with the ultimate symbol of the (global) banking industry.

The original Hong Kong Bank lion is a symbol of Chinese and English colonial power and prestige. In Chinese culture two lion sculptures traditionally guard important buildings. To represent a meeting of cross cultural wealth and power, the HSBC commissioned Western style large sculptural bronze lions for the front the bank’s large building in the centre of the city, famously designed by Sir Norman Foster.

The cardboard lion artwork inverts the medium, scale and weight of the sculpture by the reticulated laser cut design. The corrugated cardboard is literally see-through, confusing the sensory perceptions of weight and scale, while creating interference patterns.

The work is about the symbolic confluence of power and waste. The lion and the scavenger both bear witness to the conflicts of the past and the present. Many elderly 'scavengers', also called ‘refuse workers’ or ‘street cart people’, collect sheets of refuse, machinery and cardboard, and make a small amount of money from the weight of the garbage/recyclable materials that they cart through the city of Hong Kong. They are the workhorses of urbanization, a link between pre and post modernization. They are a modern version of 'gleaners' and they play the role of a vehicle and an arterial physical unit of the 'body' of a city, i.e. they move the waste products in and out of a system.

The video starts with the cardboard lion being pushed by Lam Por Por, a trolley pusher working the streets for the last ten years. She passes the HSBC headquarters and the original bronze lion and winds the trolley through her usual route, going from the wealth of the central city to one of the oldest suburbs, Sheung Wan. The lion sculpture is finally wheeled to a classic weighing garage where the sculpture is weighed and where the ‘scavengers’ collect their money depending on the amount of waste collected.


 
Drummer
2008
Cardboard sculpture, street trolley, DVD
9300mm x 1880mm x height 1830mm (approx)

 
A companion artwork to 'Scavenger'. 

In the video a young Hong Kong drummer, drums in the junction between the new People's Liberation Army building and the large construction site of the new Hong Kong government buildings. Night is setting and the lights of the skyline surround a solo performance by the drummer, making a surreal backdrop.

The young man drums a replica cardboard sculpture of a drum set, marking and physically puncturing the cardboard drum with every strike of the drum stick. There are inferences in the art work between the contrast of old and new Hong Kong - the historical yet modern Westernised system transferring to a communist authority. But the work is also a paean to the romanticism of one’s individual activity within a larger organism. This improvised protest is both quiet and exhilarating.

The drummer’s free form percussion sets a physical score to the blinking lights of the buildings, and also underscores the metaphysical speed and drive of the city.

In this relatively silent performance the sound of the drum is deadened by the cardboard material.  

The cardboard drum is first wheeled into view by a trolley worker, an older man who could be the drummer's father. After the young drummer is finished the elderly trolley worker wheels the work back again out of sight into the megatropolis.

The work deals with the notion of power, position and the status of one's 'voice'. It is a performance about silence and sound, and the difference of between two generations against a radically changing urban landscape.

The final sculpture, a pierced and punctured drum made from of layers of precision cut corrugated cardboard, is echoing the abstract architecture and skyscrapers of a city also shaped and punctured by changes over time and history.