Simply by just looking at the Chinese title* of “Sparkle! A Good Waste of Time” at Oi!, we can see that it connects fun and play together with youth. While the pun may refer to one’s physical condition, actions or mental state, the exhibition also gives its audience much food for thought. As you walk into the exhibition gallery, the first artwork you will see is Thomas Yuen’s Gonna Salvage You Each Time! Adopting low-tech and anti-aesthetics, it is a 2D computer game with a kind of “Droste Effect” quality with which you simply need to hit a button, taking up the roles of parents in the game to prevent their son from playing computer games. And then, Moss Ho’s The Secret of Six-pack is an installation that resembles a small playground that gives its audience both a visual and a somatosensory experience. With a felt texture and a sugar-coated appearance, the pastel tone installation actually seems a bit artificial and strange. And, together with the spatial design that was based on an origami concept by Lau Ming-hang, this is a kind of playful exhibition that would probably not make you take it too seriously, or it may even have you wonder: “Is this supposed to be art?” This is a deliberate effort to bring art from loftiness down to the ordinary world. And although, not necessarily putting the audience in an illusionary world that breaks away from reality in the same way a theme park would, this does remind me of the artworks of Wong Ping and Adrian Wong. Out of nowhere, a feeling of “YY in the eyes of XX” comes flooding into my mind. 

 

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Curated by Solomon Yu, the exhibition includes six artists: Cheuk Wing-nam, Moss Ho, Koko Ko, Lau Ming-hang, Rogerger Ng and Thomas Yuen, and it has a down-to-earth theme without much complicated or difficult-to-understand concept. Its specific curatorial framework and theme allowed the artists to develop their works with interactions and games. When you look at each individual work, you will see the different takes the artists have on games and how they elaborate further on this. For example, both Cheuk Wing-nam’s Annabelle’s Room and Rogerger Ng’s Elastic Limit, where the former is like walking into a haunted house and the latter challenges its players whether they have the guts to stretch the plastic glove to its elastic limit, hinge on the mentality of their players that the more fearful they feel, the more they want to play. The artworks of Thomas Yuen, Moss Ho and Koko Ko stem from an imaginative and instructive direction and even show a slight inclination towards returning to the basics. If you were to compare Thomas Yuen’s low-tech video game to today’s mobile games, which the audience may be more familiar with, it would seem to be something out-of-the-ordinary or almost unrecognizable as a game. It also reflects that a game and what it attempts to convey are not necessarily related to the audio-visual experience of it. Turning everyday materials into play objects, Koko Ko’s piece is like a response to her own childhood and life experiences, perhaps something that is unfamiliar to the younger generations.

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After reading the curatorial concept again, I have organized a few key points which include:

1. Interactive games are instructive;

2. In the context of contemporary art, interactivity can induce an active viewing experience amongst the audience; and

3. Can we immerse ourselves in playing at different sites and also benefit from it?

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On the day of my visit to the exhibition, even though it was only a brief one, I could surely see some “active viewing experience.” Not only was the audience enjoying themselves, they seemed to have their own ways of interacting with the artworks. Some were there just to check-in, some parents explained to their young children about games of the old days, and there were some couples who took photos of each other and enjoyed themselves with Moss Ho’s artwork. But what remains after all the fun is more important. As we keen on the Stand-up comedy of Dayo Wong, but it is worthless if the audience does not reflect on the reason for their laughs and the hidden intention behind it all. 

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On the premise of games and interactive elements as art forms, each art piece in the show has indeed expressed a strong analogy and functionality. In other words, audience can easily associate the artworks with certain situations and circumstances in their own lives, and these works will manifest in ways that fall within certain interactive and applicatory functions. The struggle and comparison between the arts and reality become more prominent in ways such as Cheuk Wing-nam’s artwork may compare with, though not as scary as, haunted houses in theme parks, while Rogerger Ng’s Elastic Limit may remind audience of the exhibits at Science Museum (although exhibits in the Science Museum are really outdated). 

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If I begin looking at this exhibition from a broader perspective and put it in the context of how the art system operates, you can easily notice that, apart from the biennale or large-scale exhibitions that prioritize compliance to a system of discursive formation, there are two trajectories that can be traced in the themes of most exhibitions. They are either about something on the verge of disappearance, or highlighting matters or phenomena that have been overlooked or belittled. Hence, does this exhibition imply the condition and mental state for fun and play have disappeared? On another note, this exhibition is indeed a good experience for the art space, curator, as well as the artists. A down-to-earth and specifically themed exhibition means that it is easy for the audience to feel engaged and to relate. A theme of fun and play indicates the meticulous intention of the curator. At the same time it poses a challenge because this kind of theme and presentation seldom appear in an art space, as if only serious topics are “cool” enough for it. However, interactive elements on the other hand present different tests to the art space and the artists. While fun and play is, to a certain extent, built on the freedom to improvise without any restraint or to even challenge existing rules, it’s hard to not notice that there is signage in the gallery asking audience not to climb, and plastic gloves become not quite inflatable by later date during the exhibition period. It is an unknown if the artworks can still operate as expected by the end. This shows that after all, exhibitions with playful themes like this one are not that straightforward and effortless to run under the management of publicly-operated art space or even an institutionalized arts operation.

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* Translator note: The Chinese title 《火花！耍樂是青年》 literally means “Sparkle! Fun and play is youth.”