All Aboard

Chinese Artist Lin Jingjing Questions the State of Contemporary Living at De Sarthe Gallery

According to French anthropologist Marc Augé, the airport is a “non-place” in the super modern world we live in, where the individual’s identity becomes insignificant in navigating the urban spaces it occupies.

Beijing-born New York-based contemporary artist Lin Jingjing has expanded on this idea to stage a new multimedia solo exhibition, ‘Take Off’, at de Sarthe Gallery at Global Trade Square at Wong Chuk Hang in Hong Kong, from 16 September to 14 October. The space will be transformed into the artist’s version of the airport, with recognisable visual signifiers such as arrival and departure boards, airport signs and passports. However, these are not as they usually appear.

For one, instead of presenting flight information, the arrival and departure boards are LED displays that show laden words such as “commitment” and “collusion” that comment on current issues in society, as well as the human emotions they engender, such as “fear” and “frustration”. The artist says, “Our emotions are in flux, just as they are on the boards as they appear, disappear and reappear and in their random sequence, they remain linked, and cross the boundary between reality and our states of mind.”

The boards, with the deluge of changing information, is ultimately a commentary about the uneasy, unpredictable state of the world we live in today, and how we struggle to make sense of what is going on. In the artist’s statement about the work, she notes: “Incredulous political speech has diminished our ability to discern between right and wrong, and the ever-escalating threat of war has undermined our trust in the possibility of peace. We have lost our cultural identities, and have become anxious and confused about the security of our respective homelands.”