ARTISTS TALKING

Resembling bacteria or skeleton leaves, the swirl of the tides and the drift of the sands, Pak-Keung Wan’s drawings are exquisitely intricate webs of loops and lines that form fields of activity, giving the impression of depth and texture. In taking a step back from the larger works they appear to be three-dimensional objects floating in space. But Wan is not concerned with being an illusionist, or with mere representation; the forms his drawings take, simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic with their complexity of repetition, are but imprints of rigorous, hermetic rituals in which he uses a pencil to explore the boundaries of his intuition. Avoiding outside influence his images appear as if externalised inner process: pure, rudimentary gestures that express something enigmatically innate and organic. To explain this work feels like betrayal to Wan’s intentions; in truth, they elude any real language and just exist, inexplicably, like all things that are.

Indeed, Wan’s concerns extend to language, its limitations and riddles. Photos document the artist vocalising a seemingly random sequence of words into a glass vessel, which collects as condensation. These words are represented in the gallery as a hand-scrawled procession which leads upstairs to a wall-mounted test tube, with the history of Wan’s voice gathered as liquid. Here language is reduced to the abstract and the corporeal. In removing meaning and emphasising the evanescence of being, in both his works, Wan warns us: “Man is always in danger of confusing his measures with the world so measured.”¹

Wan’s works are intuitive, meditative rituals that embrace the unfathomable, and rely on the enigmatic processes that surround us to deconstruct mankind’s own sense of significance. He does not lecture or criticise, instead presenting us with the limitations and the inherent ethereality of the structures that constitute our existence. It is with his artistic processes that Wan interprets life, and out of these processes that he trains himself for life. He is a traveller with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child and though his work represents calmness personified, it also exudes an urgency: an urgency to absorb, to feel and to live.

¹ ‘The Way of Zen’ by Alan W. Watts