Tianyi is always in either a second-hand shop or on second-hand sale apps where she encounters found objects, images and footage (and she never feels bored). Her love for used/ collected/ found objects originates from, instead of nostalgia, a haunted feeling experienced in the contemporary days as the past has not been shed away while our world keeps moving, or in fact it can never be...
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
2024-25
Audio-visual Total Installation, live performance, found objects, video, sound, Arduino.
Objects might be discarded or forgotten, but their existence in time is not to be denied—and they haunt beholders of what is lost in time, memory and culture. In Tianyi Zheng’s total installation, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, these ‘ghosts’ of the past regain their presence in a replica living room, copied from her previous artist residency in the Hague. The art space she stayed at was originally an antique shop, now refitted for the Hong Kong diaspora. Almost mirroring the malleability of space and the fluidity of memory, she constructs the imagined room in Hong Kong. The boundary of past and future, or that of fiction and reality, dissipates along the interactions that happen within the space, as memories of dwelling and displacement are also recalled.
Artist's Team
Performers: Cheng Lawrence Pak Lun & Jennifer Yue Yuen Yu
Text: Hau Yik Laam
Sound: Vunkwan Tam
Space: Shawn Pakhin Tang
Production
Project Manager: Wong Chun Sing
Technical Support: Ed Lee
Production Manager: Yezi Lin
Exhibition PR: Ailsa Wong
Installation Support: interval_in Studio & Production
Video Assistance: Panida Te Petchara
Press release: Karen Wong
Photo by Studio Lights On
Supported by: Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Venue supported by: Art and Culture Centre, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity
Hong Kong Arts Development Council supports freedom of artistic expression. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Council.
