In the mid-1990’s installation art became very popular in Hong Kong. A group of young artists was deeply attracted by an art form that did not limit art creation by imposing restrictions on medium and came up with various strategies to make rare and strange artworks. Amongst these artists, Kum Chi Keung was an active one, taking his work out of museums and onto the streets to create works in front of and for the public. He is now established on the art scene and has developed his own style and direction with typical character.
Initially Kum Chi Keung worked on different materials collected from his surroundings. Early works included objects such as ladders, motherboards, cacti and upside down trees. In 1995 Kum discovered the infinite possibilities of birdcages. In his own words, he “…found it (birdcage) to be an ever-growing cell composition that contains many possibilities in an outreaching space”. His bird cage installation “Den”, which was in the final of the 1996 Hong Kong Art Biennial and won the Hong Kong Urban Council Fine Arts Award, indicated a major directional change in his artistic career. After this piece Kum Chi Keung, successfully developed a series of works with birdcages as the major media and exhibited overseas in Europe, America and Australia. ‘Birdcage’ became his trademark.
No doubt the symbolic quality of the concentrated birdcage installations, highly suggestive of the crowded living environment in Hong Kong, is a successful element of the art piece. It is also a metaphor for the social consciousness over the limited land available in Hong Kong in which the conquest of space, vertically or horizontally, has become a common goal. The birdcages steadily express the common wish to live in a safe and happy den. This thought is present in nearly all of his artworks, like the jam packed houses in “The Compressed City”, the big pile of buildings in “ Birds” and the lofty tower in “Intrusion Space” amongst others.
In recent years Kum Chi Keung has introduced movement into his works. In “Flying Library” small solar panels cause the wings of hundreds of plaster books to rhythmically beat, throwing flickering shadows on to the walls. “Between Real & Unreal” features two Perspex birdcages transformed into aquariums with real and rubber fish. The distinction is intentionally hard to discern at first glance.
Kum Chi Keung’s works are never very colourful. Any colour used is chosen with a huge amount of care and thought. Red feathers against barbed wire in “Thorn”, white feathers against blue sky in “Flying Aliens”: colours chosen for specific reasons to evoke specific responses in the viewer. The objects that he uses, mainly birdcages and feathers, have not been further processed or polished. Neutral colours, simplicity, purity, objects used systematically and repeatedly for effect – these are the core elements of Kum Chi Keung’s work. There is nothing random about his work. Every feather, every piece of wood is hand selected by the artist, a process that involves him in every stage of the work, requiring a long investment of time and energy on his part but it is this that creates the memorable experiences for him. As he states, “…installation art is a struggle between an art piece and a space, and a personal intellectual challenge for the artist”.
Kum Chi Keung was born in Hong Kong. He first studied Chinese painting when he was in High School and then went on to study at the First Institute of Art and Design in Hong Kong. Since 1993 Kum has created site specific installations for numerous organizations and in countless locations including the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Star Ferry Pier, Cattle Depot Artists Village, Hong Kong Central Library, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the University of Hong Kong to name just a few. His work has been exhibited in Macau, Canada, Australia, the United States and Germany and he has been invited to create site specific installations for the 11th Biennale of International Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia and, most recently, to Seoul in South Korea. Kum Chi Keung’s work has been collected by private collectors worldwide and can be found in the collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.
